Zidiot Joy Showland

Originally published on Goblins Under the Apple Tree substack.

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California has Disneyland
And Blackpool has Funland
And Flanders had no man’s land
This place idiot show bands

-The Fall, Idiot Joy Showland

We got comedy, tragedy
Everything from A to B

-Randy Newman, My Country

The importance of celebrities to the propaganda system cannot be overstated.

We live in an age that is atomised. As Mark Steyn once noted, we live in not so much a global village as a global tower block in which no-one really knows what anyone else is watching or listening to. But TV is ubiquitous and so the programmed content is of vital importance.

Furthermore, propaganda is most effective when it comes across surreptitiously i.e. when people are relaxed and off guard. Light entertainment programmes are best.

And this is where the celebs come in. In the cold echoing expanse of this atomised realm these celebs are your friends, the ones you have loved, the ones you warm to, the ones whose opinions you want to hear.

In terms of “getting the message across”, celebs are far more effective than politicians. It is no exaggeration to say that celebs are the main focus of the propaganda system.

This by no means implies that celebs are explicitly forced to submit to the current requirements of the programme. They don’t need to be. In this labyrinthine techno world of ours, the media is what celebs move through. Celebs can be talented, determined, brave, hard-working and thoroughly deserving of fame. But they all know that expressing the “wrong” opinion can see their entire career instantaneously vanish like a mirage. They can veer from “The Peoples’ Favourite” and “National Treasure” to “Most Hated” in a second. And, in a short space of time they can have their entire careers memory-holed as effectively as was rumoured to be the case in Stalinist Russia.

The Script

As Mr Newman sang above, The Script is “Everything from A to B”. That is, the theatre presented is a tiny little space in which Mickey Mouse alternatives are presented. The subject matter is a totally misrepresented view of the world and – increasingly since covid – a totally manufactured construct. I am going to present, as examples, two from the latter category.

First Example: Trans Formation

I don’t want to get bogged down yet again in all the mad labyrinthine folds of the bizarre phantasmagorical nonsense that is “transgenderism”. (If you’re interested, see here: Everything you ever wanted to know about sex)

What I want to focus on here is the way this pseudo-topic is presented in Celeb Land. The terms are phrased in such a way that those opposing it all are forced into a tight little corner in which they have already shot themselves in the foot.

And so instead of saying “What a load of shit!” they have to declare themselves “gender critical”. Now if anyone is “gender critical” you would think it was the trans ideologists. But that would mean taking the concept of gender in its traditional sense i.e. denoting physical sexuality. But there has been an Orwellian process at work here by which “gender” no longer means physical gender but gender identity. Thus, we focus not on what you are but what you feel yourself to be.

And you can already feel the ground dissolve under you.

This is why those like J K Rowling and Graham Linehan can only object to this nonsense in the feeblest way … and yet still get treated like the spawn of Satan!

Second example: Covid. What else?

Covid was the reductio ad absurdum of the Celeb Land Theatre: an invented issue that was applied via a totally monomaniacal squeeze – in Newman’s terms, from A to A. The deadly plague was all and there was only one permissible opinion: to “pull together”. And the celebs behaved themselves splendidly for the most part, merging together in an uplifting moral army.

For this show, there was only covid. Admittedly, since the media cannot operate with any conviction without some kind of controversy and dispute, there was movement towards depicting disagreement: the lockdowns and vax programmes were being hindered by irresponsible Tory bastards etc.

But covid was all. And it will be forever an embarrassment to recall all those celebs “doing their bit” to “save us”. Dolly Parton recast her song “Jolene” as “Vaccine”. Neil Diamond turned on “Sweet Caroline” with the line “Hands/ Touching hands” transformed into “Hands/ Not touching hands”. Vomiting yet?

The whole episode has to be the single most ferocious demonstration of The Celeb Moral Army at work. There were some honourable exceptions – most prominently Van Morrison whose treatment by the media was most interesting in a deadly dull predictable kind of way i.e. he was branded “Evil selfish reactionary Right Wing” yackety schmackety. But such a treatment only served to highlight the nature of this Rock ‘n Roll Rebel Industry with its phony low down funky thumb-it-to-the-man ‘tude.

I aim here to give a specific single example of a celeb phenomenon. But first a little catch up on the changing face of The Theatre.

The Good Old Days

Back in the 60s and 70s, The West, seemed “happier” – due to more security and affluence for the masses. We had Morecambe and Wise in the UK and Rowan and Martin in the US. The connection is that both comedy duos managed to secure an impressive roster of current celeb favourites eager to appear and send themselves up as “good sports”. Your TV was a comforting little window onto a world where you were reassured that we were indeed “all in it together” and “one big happy family”.

This is a model that the two nations – and probably every other – strive hard to perpetuate.

Golden Days! Left: Morecambe and Wise, Right: Rowan and Martin. Both heading one big happy family!

Winter Approaches

But in the coming decades the oozing assault of neoliberalism presented increasing problems in maintaining this avuncular vision. Never mind. The TV programmes attempted to heal the widening divide by adopting a trendy “cutting edge”. It was the birth of “alternative comedy” which, in hindsight, looks like a cynical move to “keep up with the kids” – though, to be sure, this keeping up is what the propaganda system tries to do generally. Co-optation is the name of the game.

This is a fascinating topic in itself i.e. the constant drive for the rulers to try and capture the “spirit of the times”. Whereas those aforementioned 60s and 70s seemed to be decked out in a kind of family fun time vibe, the 80s announced this new “sassy” division.

This knowing mode was perfectly encapsulated by UK topical comedy quiz show Have I Got News For You (HIGNFY). This was (and as far as I know, still is) a piece of liberal fluff posing as “controversial” on BBC2 and featuring an impressive rota of celebs: comedians, script writers, musicians, politicians, and so forth. It was hosted by one Angus Deaton whose catch phrase was, “So no change there then”. Until one day Angus did something naughty that was not congruent with that upstanding BBC morality and got fired. So no change there then.

After that, the host changed every week. Once it was Boris Johnson. No kidding. But Tory ministers would frequently show up trying to score point with “the kids”. The best laugh from the Tory contestants was MP Teddy Taylor who tried to “get down with the young ‘uns” by declaring that Bob Marley chap to be frightfully splendid!

But, like so many other “beloved institutions” during covid, it all collapsed when an appearance of furious containment of “the deadly plague” had to be maintained and this news show was forced to abandon its studio filming before a live audience. It reduced itself to a zoom meeting featuring only the host and contestants, all separate and speaking from home. Deprived of audience laughter and social setting, the effect was utterly gruesome. Driving themselves to laugh at their own jokes with a flat echoless sound, the participants seemed to disappear behind tumbleweeds hallucinated by the viewer in the painful embarrassment of it all. And that brought about the realisation that the studio setting was a major part of the illusion.

Some HIGNFY guests including (top right) future UK prime minister Boris Johnson, (bottom right) former BBC news presenter Angela Rippon (who previously showed off her legs in a dance number on Morecambe and Wise) …and (bottom left) team leader Ian Hislop with the UK’s very own Epstein, Jimmy Savile. And yes, (top left) that really is Captain Kirk!

All of which introductory nonsense brings me to the central figure of this article: one whose remarkable career demonstrates, as no other, the true role of The Celeb.

The Rogue Celeb

The one we are concerned with is Graham Linehan, the creator of massively successful comedy series such as Father Ted, Black Books and the The IT Crowd. In any sane world, Linehan would now be settling into a well-deserved role of national treasure. He had appeared on HIGNFY no less than four times and was therefore one of the favourites of what we might call the smart set.

But he stumbled into one of the most frankly preposterous strains of societal management i.e. the transgender phenomenon. After which, he was cast into a tale of two halves, a fall and rise.

First Half – The Fall: Banishment from Happy Celeb Land

Before his first appearance on HIGNFY, Linehan created a transgender character in an IT Crowd episode called “The Speech”. He treated the character with a surreal irreverence that was considered harmless enough to offend no-one back in 2008.

But by 2013, the great tectonic plates of public moral instruction had shifted and the IT Crowd episode “was publicly reexamined and widely criticised as transphobic and sexist” – this from Wikipedia and demonstrating that magisterial passive voice which turns out to issue from something called Transgender Studies Quarterly, “a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal covering transgender studies” and therefore part of the new trans theological order.

And when Linehan entered the fray of this ludicrous theatre, he was naturally – and with supreme irony – already immersed in the cramped “A to B” mentioned above. As he says in his memoir, Tough Crowd: How I Made and Lost a Career in Comedy, “I had not quite nailed my colours to the gender-critical mast.”.

And so Linehan was already steeped in the self-defeating position of someone who critiques transgenderism and yet accepts the new Orwellian reversal of language. Which acceptance at least permitted him a position in the media drama about to unfold. (Without that acceptance, i.e. if Linehan had rejected the permitted lingo, he would have been immediately consigned to Spooky Mulder’s basement.)

And in this media drama, his protest against the trans necromancy – feeble though it was – turned out to be “too much” for the trans acolytes who got to play the expected dying-swan routine. And the massively funded pseudo-gender waffle generators nailed him. The new Holy See which granted psychotic males access into female spaces and encouraged children to deviate onto a path towards “life affirming” genital mutilation scented blasphemy and went for Graham.

He was in deep shit. Cancelled to the max. Cast as the absolute demonic Other, the Great Satan. Finished! Toast! All this pronounced by a majestically sanctimonious self-appointed jury with endless reserves of moral outrage. And they’re still at it.

And so, midway through plans to produce a musical version of Father Ted (with co-writer Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy – more on whom shortly), Linehan may as well have been assassinated JFK style. (More on that too!) His career gone, his marriage ruined whilst the misogynist hordes of fanatical genital amputators denounced him endlessly.

This was when Graham realised The Truth of The Celeb Class. Let’s hear his words on the mandatory behaviour of The Celebs (emphasis added):

… they’re pandering to a student audience. They’re terrified of losing the student audience. And at the moment the student audience they perceive to be trans goofy. So … they will happily just throw others under the bus just to maintain what they think is a relationship that they have with these kids.

And in fact, you know, it’s a terrible thing to say, but they’re right. If they say something like, well, maybe women deserve fair sports or … maybe my wife and child should have a place they can go where they can be without any men. No, the instant they say that they’ve lost that audience. … Stewart Lee is desperate to be cool. I mean he always was that way: the anti-mainstream comedian who’s on the BBC all the time.

“You know when you’re a big hit on the BBC, you’re probably not as alternative as you might think you are”, is what I would say to leftwing Stewart Lee.… I call them regime comedians … like there’s a regime in power. If you cross them …they’ll do to you what they did to me. …They will harass you and your family (and) try and get you fired from jobs and so on and so forth.

Linehan was now irretrievably sundered from his former colleagues such as “lovable” non-committal Bill Bailey (“Oh Graham, why couldn’t you have left it alone?”), the colossally smug and equally non-committal Stewart Lee (who, as Linehan pointed out above, likes to air his “bold comic deconstructions” from within the very centre of the UK media i.e. the BBC) and the aforementioned Neil Hannon whose magisterial non-commitment is boldly stated on his website: he “is NOT on social media and never will be”. Though Neil may have partly emerged from his serene eyrie with the following lyric:

Mr. Bitter slowly slipped away

We lost a little more of him each day

First his feet then his legs

Then his heart, then his head

Until just one hand survived

To wave his friends and family, bye bye

Bye bye

-Neil Hannon, Down the Rabbit Hole (gosh, wonder what that’s about?)

(Note the casual viciousness.)

Linehan, Bailey, Hannon, and Lee. Not a beat combo!

And I fully admit that when looking over this part of Linehan’s odyssey, I am mostly sympathetic. So far so good for him. But then…

Second Half – The Rise: Grateful Return to Happy Celeb Land

The pathway to redemption was signalled by an unlikely but shrewd manoeuvre by the Trans Rights Activists. In the murky wake of the October 7 attack on Israel, the TRAs announced their support for the Palestinians.

And there it was! The Escape from Celeb Purgatory appeared! Within the media’s severely constrained channels, objecting to the trans operation assigned you the role of irredeemable “hate filled transphobic” …unless that position could be “sweetened” by assignment to another media approved position such as … Zionism!

To be sure, Linehan was still a “hate filled transphobe” but shilling for Israel at least granted permission back to a “genuine media position”. The media had already supplied the venue: Israel coming under attack from demonic hate-filled terrorists!

And when the TRAs went all pro-Palestine, I daresay Graham experienced the same epiphany as Christopher Hitchens felt in the wake of 9/11 when he realised that he no longer had to accept the strain of being the “bad boy” Leftie since those Islamofascists “allowed us to unite against our common enemy”. Chris could become a “good boy” Leftie now!

But, to return to the Linehan prostration before the Zionists, this is where a certain pattern emerges. The sly linking of transgender rights with pro-Palestinianism created a non-sequitur which implied that the fight against transgenderism was linked to support for Israel. The (very) loose linkage here is that trans is misogynistic and so is Islam. And with suspicious uniformity the entire anti-trans movement somersaulted into the “War on Terror” rhetoric thus fitting in seamlessly with that old pseudo-dissident identity politics verbiage that moves to “liberate” women in the East by annihilating their countries.

Indeed, this lockstep switch was so prevalent that it was hard to avoid the suspicion that one reason for the entire absurd trans farrago was to drum up support for Israel.

Thus, anti-trans warriors J K Rowling, Sharron Davies, and Kellie Jay Keen AKA “The Posie Parker” all transferred their objection to the trans scam to the embrace of a dreary contrived Islamophobia along with the customary hypocritical bleating about women’s rights in Muslim countries which “regrettably necessitated” bombing them.

JK, Sharron and KJK. Won’t someone think of the women?

That Linehan fails to see that the very pro-trans racket supported by the likes of Lee and Hannon is now being mirrored, as it were in reverse, on the other side by Zionist stooges like himself is grimly humorous. Such stooges – the “Zidiots” – are now legion and take up their positions in the permitted theatre that is Celeb Land.

Linehan gladly took the bait knowing that this was a weapon he could use very openly against the trans movement with the full blessing of the media. He seems to be presently based in Arizona and is fair flexing his Zionist muscles with rehearsing all that nomenclature about “Jew hate”. I wouldn’t be surprised if he practices the requisite invective before his bathroom mirror every morning. Meanwhile he reposts every species of Zionist hackery he can find with a ceaseless fury that suggests repressed awareness of his ironic trajectory: defiance of one lunacy only to fall into another.

And his latest development is curious. He has just reposted a tweet from Gerald Posner, shiller for the JFK/Oswald lone gunman show, who was performing his little side show for Zionist glove puppet Ben Shapiro.

Conclusion

And there you have it. A sad tale of a ruthless mafia clamp down on a celeb who unwisely departed from the script at one point, had his life and career wrecked, and could only manage to claw his way back to some slight measure of “respectability” by desperately stating his allegiance to another page of the script.

But just imagine if, say, J K Rowling who seems to be in the most enviable position i.e. perched atop what must be a staggering fortune, were to turn around and say “Well fuck this Zionist shit too!” Can you imagine it? To fall foul of both mafias: the Trans and the Zionist goon squads!

But let’s face it. In truth there are no separate mafias. All heads converge into the foul central trunk of that Lovecraftian entity briefly revealed by the covid extravaganza. The actual rulers are not “Jews” or “Christians” or any of the other Pavlovian titles. They don’t give a shit about “The Big Issues” constantly being raked up by the media: antisemitism, the left/right political divide, gay rights, pronouns or whatever. They are happy to stir us all up over this drivel and, whilst doing so, they can wear any mask they want and, more to the point, juggle the masks to divide and rule.

To return to our thought experiment, Rowling knows she has a limited number of perches that she can occupy and still retain that media sanctioned respectability. Should she denounce the Zionist swill, she would indeed find herself ejected from all the “proper” posts and ensconced in the tin foil basement. Everyone who “is anyone” in the media would mercilessly denounce her and the entire Harry Potter franchise would be sunk. Cancel culture with a vengeance.

Perhaps. But perhaps some things really are too big? Perhaps public support could actually achieve something?

But to those who think Miss Rowling is about to engage in the experiment, I say it would be more likely to find Platform 9 ¾ to Hogwarts.