Monday, June 17, 2019

WTF happened over the weekend Kate?!

Ok I'll tell you.

So on Friday afternoon I went on Sky News to discuss whether Jo Brand should be allowed to make a joke about throwing battery acid on a hateful politician. Let's not get into that.

During the interview I mistakenly attributed nasty rape "jokes" to The Brexit Party when in fact they had come from a UKIP candidate, subsequently defended by party leadership. The Brexit Party hates rape jokes and much prefers making and defending homophobic remarks...or something.

Because of the mistake it is unlikely Sky News will release the clip. Which is fair enough. They have to correct stuff when they can.

Well people on Twitter were pretty angry and adamant that I should apologise. So I did.

You will notice my apology has 2200 retweets and 11000 likes. I also have 1500 new followers.

Then of course a bunch of people were angry that I should use the word "Nazi"...not a word I chose flippantly, a word I chose quite deliberately because the rise of the "mainstream" far right in this country and across the world has terrifying parallels to the rise of, well, the Nazis. And I think it's really important we challenge these things out as soon as we can see what is happening.

But also I'm a comedian so...

And then there's the reaction online... Way too much to share in detail. For the last 48hrs my twitter mentions and reactions have been scrolling in faster than I can actually read them so sorry if you said something wonderful and I missed it, but lets have a look at a few samples... (advance warning - it's going to get very very ugly).

(Wrong sort of "your". Every time.)

(Actually if anyone has the snap-chat "gender-swap" feature, I look like a "feminised" version of Christopher Eccleston, this is widely known and I'm very happy to resemble that very dashing man.)

(This within an hour of me sharing the picture above - with a much better joke, now obscured...Also if your dick looks like my nose mate - see a doctor.)

(They do. Often.)

(Why? Because I want to. How? Very well indeed.)

(They really seem to think being transgender, or looking androgynous, is a bad thing. Attention: it's not.)

(It's funny because...oh hang on...)

So that's, erm, gross. On the other hand loads of nice tweets (mostly from people who were immediately barraged with hate, sorry about that). And I'm in the top things discussed on Twitter in the UK over the weekend...

And then. And then there is this account... @kt_and_nick

Accuses me, twice, of child sex abuse. Wow.

And of course when you look at the full account it does not get better.

Makes a direct threat.

Is horrifically bigoted to a person with a disability.

And aggressively racist.

Who can track down who this guy actually is? I'd like to report him to the police but they openly admit they don't have the skills or resources to trace people (shocking, I know, another conversation). If someone knows who he is I will take legal action.

I'm totally fine though, it's not the first time I've had this sort of thing has happened. I'm totally blasé about it these days. Rather than sitting in a damp basement being a dickhead on the internet, I spent the weekend getting laid and going to the fair. Here's a picture of the latter...