Episode 2 Live at the Apollo

This programme contains some strong language.

MUSIC: Are You Gonna Be My Girl by The Hit Crew

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome your host for tonight,

Nish Kumar!

# He's got clothes all red... #

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

# On a purple bed... #

Yes!

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Live At The Apollo.

How are you? Are you all right?

CHEERING

Great to see you!

Nice to be here. My name is Nish Kumar.

I'm about to do some comedy for you and I'm a comedian,

so that's very convenient, all right.

It's great to be at the Apollo, especially for me,

cos I'm a David Bowie fan.

David Bowie did a lot of amazing gigs in this venue,

so it's exciting for me. When I was a kid,

all I wanted to be was David Bowie.

I was obsessed with him. I really loved him so much.

And now, I'm 32 years old, and I still love Bowie's music,

but I think it was really hard to be David Bowie.

I think there was a lot of scrutiny on someone like him.

People like Bowie and Dylan and Hendrix,

all these people I grew up loving. There was a lot of pressure on them.

I don't think I want to live under that kind of pressure or scrutiny.

I've realised that the musician I want to be

is the drummer from Coldplay.

LAUGHTER

I want to be the drummer from Coldplay so badly

cos that dude is rich as shit

and no-one knows who the fuck he is.

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

No-one knows who the drummer from Coldplay is!

He could be here and no-one would know.

It could be you, it could be you, it could be you.

I'm not sure it's an Indian woman, but it could be. We don't know.

LAUGHTER

I'm obsessed with the idea that this guy has the best life in the world.

And I was telling my friend about this

and she tried to tell me something

that she was trying to portray as a bad thing.

Apparently, he loves Game Of Thrones, so he said to HBO,

"Can I be in Game Of Thrones?"

and they were like, "You're the drummer from Coldplay,

"you can do literally anything you want. We'll restart The Sopranos

"if that would make you happy."

Now, he is in Game Of Thrones.

Confession time. I don't watch Game Of Thrones,

but even I know the Red Wedding is an important episode

of Game Of Thrones. He is in the Red Wedding.

Guess what he's doing in the Red Wedding.

He is the drummer in the wedding band.

LAUGHTER

That is the extent to which this guy's anonymity is

a borderline superpower.

He is in the most famous episode

of one of the most popular television shows in the world,

doing the thing he is famous for

and no-one noticed.

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

That is Keyser Soze shit!

And my friend was telling me she read a supposedly embarrassing story

that one of the actors told. One of the actors said

that when they were shooting the Red Wedding,

he was making small talk with the extras

and he got round to the drummer from Coldplay

and said, "Are you a full-time extra?"

And the guy was like, "No, I'm a musician."

So he said, to the drummer from Coldplay,

"Have you played on anything I might have heard of?"

LAUGHTER

To which the drummer from Coldplay was presumably like,

"Er, have you heard of all music?

"Cos I'm basically the drummer on all music."

And my friend tried to tell me this like this was a sad thing.

She was like, "This guy's in Coldplay

"but no-one knows that he's in Coldplay. Isn't that sad?"

No, because the problem with being in Coldplay

is that people hate Coldplay.

People hate Coldplay so much

and the people who hate Coldplay don't say things like,

"Oh, it's not to my taste."

They say things like this - "I HATE Coldplay!"

But what you mean when you say that is, "I hate Chris Martin."

No-one is angry with the drummer from Coldplay.

No-one has ever been, like, "Grrr, the drummer from Coldplay!

"He's ruined my life!"

LAUGHTER

And I know what you're thinking.

You're thinking, "Nish, why are you so obsessed

"with the drummer from Coldplay?

"There's two other people in that band.

"We don't know anything about them either."

And you know what? You're right.

There's a guitar player and a bassist in Coldplay.

I wouldn't know them, even if they were here.

I assume it's you two, but only cos you're sat next to her

and I spoke to her already. That's all I've got to go on

at this point. They have the exact same life as the drummer

cos I did a bit of research into this.

Coldplay are one of those bands where they split royalties equally,

so they have the exact same life as the drummer, apart from one detail.

They have the exact same life as the drummer,

they have the same level of wealth, access, and anonymity.

But, crucially, the drummer is sat down.

LAUGHTER

And that is the dream.

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

It's really great to be here cos it's an amazing venue.

It's also very close to my house. Oh, my God.

I live... I'm from West London. I live in Shepherd's Bush.

I've not lived there for very long and I really like it.

It's really nice. When I first moved there,

the estate agent that I rent my flat from said,

"Hey, this is a great time for you to be moving to Shepherd's Bush."

I said, "Why?"

And he said, "Well, the area has been recently gentrified."

Now, listen, fair play. I did not know what that meant.

So I looked it up.

It turns out what it means is it's now safe for white people.

LAUGHTER

So, come on down to Shepherd's Bush, whities,

we'll have a great old time!

We've got all the stuff you like - tea...

Yeah, all the stuff.

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

Of course that's not what gentrification means.

I know what it means. I'm a very clever boy.

Gentrification is when people are priced out of an area

by rising cost of living, so they move to an adjacent area

but, in doing so, raise the cost of living

for people who were already living there.

In the last few years,

this has occasionally been referred to as "white flight",

cos the people moving tend to be white

and the areas they're moving into tend to be non-white.

And, as such, it's a double-edged sword for your friend Nish Kumar,

cos my parents are Indian and middle-class.

So, gentrification is essentially the replacement

of people I'm related to by people I went to university with.

So, it's like, "Goodbye, uncle and auntie, but hello, Jeffrey!

"See you down the pub for some craft beer.

"We've got a lot of Indian pale ales,

"just no Indians."

Gentrification is a subject that arouses

very strong serious emotions all over the world.

There have been massive anti-gentrification protests

over the last couple of years.

A couple of years ago, there was one in East London,

in Bethnal Green, conducted by a group called Class War.

A lot of the focus turned out to be a shop

called the Cereal Killer Cafe,

which is a cafe where people sell bowls of cereal in milk

for £6 to morons.

Presumably, it's exclusively moron clientele.

Now, a lot of these protests claim to be protesting

against something that they either call the gentrification

or the hipsterification of certain cities.

Hipsterification is used as a synonym for gentrification

and hipsters get the blame for gentrification.

Now, I don't think that's fair and, ultimately,

I think it's counter-productive. Firstly, what is a hipster?

It's just the collective noun we've given

to people who conform to what's currently trendy.

Every generation has them. In the '60s, they were hippies,

in the '70s, they were punks, in the '80s, they were New Romantics.

Hipsters are just our version of that thing.

And we all know what I mean when I say "what's currently trendy".

It's restaurants where the menu's on a board

and there's no currency printed, so you have to be, like,

"I'll have poached eggs for eight...money, I guess."

It's also the trend for men to have very ornately crafted facial hair.

Have you seen these guys with the twirly moustaches?

-Have you seen them? Audience:

-Yes.

Yeah, fine, as long as they're not white men.

Because those moustaches make white men look

like Victorian English men, which is not ideal.

I cannot tell you the number of times I've had to order a coffee

from a man whose facial hair looks like it colonised my ancestors.

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

The guy's like, "Do you want something with your coffee?"

And I'm like, "A piece of banana bread and something else.

"What is it? Oh, I know. An apology for the Amritsar massacre.

"Thank you!"

LAUGHTER

Now, taken in isolation, it is fine to think

that all of these things are ridiculous, cos clearly they are.

But what I would say about hipster culture

is that it's silly, but it's not malicious.

I would say that what was trendy

when I was growing up was much more inherently malicious.

Cos I grew up in England in the 1990s and what was trendy then

was lads, lads, lads, lads, lads. That's right

I mean, we went to Eton and Oxford

but we were a bunch of absolute lads.

Now, lad culture was everywhere in the '90s -

in our books, our movies, our music, and a lot of it was harmless.

But, by its very nature,

lad culture celebrated the male over the female,

so it came with an inherent portion of misogyny.

Now, some of that misogyny was ironic,

but we all know what ironic misogyny is.

It's just misogyny and then,

at the end, someone goes, "Hmm?", like that.

It's just bourgeois misogyny, right?

Now, the caveat I always have to put on this piece of material

is that the 1990s has passed and, as such,

we've had a decade and a half to make a considered value judgment

over the events of the 1990s and think about what was good and bad.

Maybe in 15 or 16 years' time,

it will turn out that hipster culture was really awful

and was responsible for gentrification.

We don't have that kind of perspective.

That's the caveat I have to put on it.

Cos there's lots of stuff that happened in the '90s

that we now have a completely different opinion on.

The North American Free Trade Agreement -

that turned out to be a geopolitical disaster.

Tracksuits - very flammable.

LAUGHTER

And we now know that the Spice Girls were

an incredibly malicious influence on our culture,

did a huge amount of damage to the way that we see...

AUDIENCE QUIETLY BOO Whoa.

That's turned the atmosphere.

The Spice Girls were awful.

CHEERING AND BOOING What?

Did you have different Spice Girls?

"Zig-a-zig-ah". The Spice Girls.

The Spice... CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Are you kidding me?

They had one black member and she was called Scary!

And then they used to dress her in leopard-print robes,

like Kunta Kinte,

and make her stand next to Geri Halliwell

in a Union flag minidress,

like an English Defence League wet dream.

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

Then they used to make her do raps,

even though she had no talent at rapping whatsoever.

They just assumed she could do it. That's like someone coming up to me

and assuming I can prescribe penicillin.

Someone came up to me, after one of these shows and said,

"As an intersectionalist feminist of African descent,

"I have very mixed feelings about your Spice Girls joke."

And you know what that means? It means I've found my audience.

There are not many of them

but the ones that are turning out are high value indeed.

And here's what I feel.

I feel if you blame hipsters for gentrification,

you're letting the real culprits off the hook.

Cos, look, gentrification is a really serious social problem.

It's changing the nature of our cities

and driving people out of homes they've lived in for 35, 40 years.

But it's the result of decades of bad housing policy.

So, why not be angry with the people responsible for that policy?

Don't be angry with the hipsters. Be angry with property developers

that fail to meet their targets for affordable housing,

be angry with politicians that fail to hold them to account,

be angry with the local authority,

less than two miles away from where we are right now,

who ignored repeated warnings

about fire safety in their tower blocks until it was too late.

Be angry with those people,

not the concept of smashed avocado

or some arsehole riding a Penny Farthing

as a substitute for having a personality.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

I'm very clever.

Ladies and gentlemen, are you ready for my first guest of this evening?

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

I know two things about him. One, I absolutely love him.

And, number two, he is one of the greatest comedians in the world.

Ladies and gentlemen, please raise the roof of the Hammersmith Apollo

and welcome to the stage David O'Doherty!

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

# Sail away, sail away, sail away

# Sail away, sail away, sail away

# Sail away, sail away sail away... #

All right! Thank you, Enya.

Let's do this shit.

My name's David. Some of you will know me for my comedy.

You'll all know my graffiti. You'll know my tag.

I do two parallel yellow lines beside the path.

And the great thing is that motorists really respect my work.

OK, we're in!

A shout out to my sponsors this evening for this gig.

My sponsors are lasagne.

Or as I call it, meat Viennetta.

LAUGHTER

And the French soft drink Orangina,

Which would sell a lot less

if it was pronounced orange-ai-na.

# It would sell virtually none. #

LAUGHTER

Big gig! You guys are big.

I've made a supreme commitment to this gig.

Check it out. Fresh batteries!

CHEERING

Argos.

I went to Argos and if you don't go to Argos very often, you forget.

Mwah!

Argos is sort of like a shop,

but much more like a bookie's.

That must have been the original plan.

You go in and you study the form

and you're like, "I'm going to take a punt on that."

And you fill in the little docket with the tiny pencil,

go up to the counter and go, "Can I have a tenner on that, please?"

And he's like, "Best of luck. Go over to the big screen."

And you're like, "Come on, 362!

"Take it home to Papa!"

HE PLAYS KEYBOARD

If Findus, the frozen food brand, have a Facebook page...

# They can legitimately say, "Findus on Facebook."

# Serena Williams' nickname should be Tennessee Williams. #

That's the best joke I've ever come up with. # It's fine. #

How do you contact dead single ladies?

# You have a Seyonce. #

OK, look, all I want from this,

I just want to be a one-name entertainer.

I want you to be able to say, "Oh, we saw David last night,"

and everyone will know who you're talking about, you know?

There's no doubt with Beyonce.

Your mother's never like, "Who, Beyonce O'Loughlan?"

The problem is all the other Davids are more famous than me.

There's billions of them.

So, I'm dedicating the next six months of my life.

# I'm going to murder all of the Davids

# Who are more famous than me. #

Name a David who's more famous than me,

I will tell you how I'm going to murder them. OK, go.

-AUDIENCE MEMBERS SHOUT OUT

-What are you saying?

David Attenborough. David Att...

# You absolute prick! #

Murder David Att...

That is the worst shit anyone's ever said.

-LAUGHTER

-Twisted mind.

It would be quite easy... # Cos he's about 300. #

I think, with him, I'd just make it look like a lion did it,

so people would be like, "Oh, he died as he would have wanted...

# "Murdered by a lion." #

Craig David is the trickiest. Still technically a David.

With him, it's a medium-term plan.

With Craig David, I think I'd meet him for a drink,

just early in the week.

And then we'd be making love for several days...

# And then kill him on Sunday. #

OK, let's go. Thank you.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Look at that!

I look incredible, thank you.

It's difficult for me to stay in shape

because my favourite food is...

I like gluten with trans fats on it

and I like to eat it like I'm angrily throwing laundry

down a flight of stairs. Aaaah.

It's about small achievable health goals.

This year, I did No Lilt February. Thank you!

I know. It sounds impossible, but you take it one day at a time.

Did I have any today? No. You're a legend!

It gets hard round the middle of the month. You get the cravings.

It's called "Lilt guilt".

You're like, "Oh, I'd bloody love some Lilt."

There's the night where you go to the shop at midnight,

kick the doors in. Where's the Lilt?

And they're like, "We don't stock it any more." Argh!

So, you try and make your own hooch Lilt,

where you get a pineapple and a grapefruit

and you add in batteries and a horse's head,

and you're like, "It's good, but it's not totally tropical."

I did that joke in America recently.

Turns out they don't have Lilt there. So...

I know there is some money in the room this evening

so, before I go on, I'll just pitch you a few app ideas,

if anyone's got a couple of spare mill.

App idea one - Creme Brulapp.

That is the world's first creme brulee-themed app.

It doesn't do anything

except, when you touch the screen of your phone, it goes...

-HE MAKES A CRACK SOUND

-OK, so that's app idea one.

-LAUGHTER

-App idea two - Yodeller.

Now, that is similar to Grindr,

but it tells you about Swiss people in the vicinity.

Fartzam is the big one.

Fartzam is similar to Shazam, the app that can identify

whatever song is playing. It's the same principle with Fartzam.

You walk into a room

and there's an unclaimed fart cloud within the room.

You thrust Fartzam into the mist. That person's face comes up on it.

Now, that technology may not exist yet,

but that's for the nerds to work out.

I'm the ideas guy. Thank you!

I like music a lot.

I like all music, except for one genre,

and that is the worst music of all,

which is the whistling and twinkly bells music

in 80% of all TV and radio ads at the moment,

which is this music here.

HE PLAYS KEYBOARD AND WHISTLES JAUNTILY

LAUGHTER

The more sinister the product, the more adorable the music.

Go out tonight, have a burger.

Ha-ha-ha!

Cos we know you don't like to think about where your food comes from.

You couldn't give a shit.

We could have docked homeless dogs

and cut their dicks off and sold them to you as homeless dogs' dicks,

and you'd just be like, "Oh, pound-saver menu."

LAUGHTER

At Kalashnikov, we're about sorting out localised tribal conflicts.

At your bank, we're more like your mate than your bank.

Ha-ha-ha-ha.

Sure, we don't really have interest rates any more

and the charges, the stealth charges are ridiculous, in recent years,

and yeah, we did cause the last collapse of the economy, yeah.

Ha-ha-ha-ha.

And the credit card bill. Have you seen the bonuses we give our bosses?

You idiots! You keep coming back!

You absolute dickheads!

HE WHISTLES JAUNTILY

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

Thank you very much.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

David O'Doherty!

Ladies and gentlemen, are you ready for our final guest tonight?

CHEERING

It is an absolute privilege to be bringing this lady to you.

She and I actually started together and she is, without question,

one of the most unique and distinctive voices

working in comedy right now.

So, ladies and gentlemen, please join me

in welcoming to the stage the incredible Luisa Omielan!

MUSIC: Feel The Love by Rudimental ft John Newman

# I can feel it, ah, ah

# I can feel it, ah, ah... #

Whoa!

Hello! I think it's about time to kill that party spirit, don't you?

Let's talk about mental health, yes, sir!

Brace yourself, bitches, we are about to talk about depression.

It's going to get sexy. Cronk, cronk.

I remember a time where I felt really low,

really bad about myself. And there was no particular reason,

because nobody had died, everything was going well.

Seemingly, on paper, things were good.

Like my local Chinese buffet started serving crispy aromatic duck

before 6pm. Things were going all right.

But, for some reason, I couldn't shift this feeling

of isolation and sadness

and I thought, "I need to tackle this head on."

I was living with my mother. My mum was amazing.

My mum's Polish. She's not a cleaner, don't be such a racist.

Why would you say that? That's so racist.

She should be, she's a very good one. My mum is amazing, right.

My mum came over to England 35 years ago.

We were here first. Don't blame ME for the influx.

LAUGHTER

She came over a long time ago and, actually, I was born here

and my mum tries to be like, "Oh, you know you're Polish too."

And I was like, "I was born here. I'm British! I'm British!

"Get out of our country!" It's adorable. And, um...

LAUGHTER

And my mum has this beautiful accent.

People expect my mum to talk like this.

-POLISH ACCENT:

-Hello, I like to clean. Nice to meet you.

But she talks like this.

-POSH ACCENT:

-Because when she first came over,

she tried to really immerse herself into the community,

into the British culture. She was like...

-POLISH ACCENT:

-"Marks and Spencer's, the land of dreams."

She was really excited.

So she used to listen to a lot of BBC radio news.

This was in the day when they had those boring same old accents.

They didn't have all the beautiful dialects you have now.

My mum learnt to speak English so, instead of speaking like this...

-POLISH ACCENT:

-Hello. ..she talks like this...

-POSH ACCENT:

-..but she always gets her English wrong,

so you can still tell she's a massive immigrant.

But I had to do something, right. Cos I was crying constantly.

I couldn't stop crying.

I'd masturbate and I'd cry.

LAUGHTER

Who does that?

You don't get guys having a wank, do you, being like...

SHE WAILS

LAUGHTER

SHE SOBS

-SOBBING:

-I don't know what to do any more.

I can't stand it any more.

What do I do with myself?

SHE SOBS

LAUGHTER

I can't even come!

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

It's, er... It's not nice when you do it in the face like that, is it?

So, I started taking the antidepressants, right.

And the weirdest thing happened. I stop crying.

I was like, "Mum!

"Mum! I'm not crying!

"John Lewis advert is on and I'm not crying!"

Nothing. Nothing!

I was like, "Oh, these drugs are good!"

LAUGHTER

It didn't last long. I just went on Rightmove

and looked at property prices in the 1990s and it was...argh!

It's a bit of a weird gig for me. I'll tell you why.

I want to talk to you about my mum. My mum's amazing, a legend.

I told you she's Polish. And I lost my mother recently.

I didn't leave her in Waitrose.

"Could the bloody immigrant in aisle four come to the service desk?" No.

She went, and she got stage four stomach and bowel cancer,

by the time they found out, right.

And they said, "It's inoperable, we can't do anything,

"but you can't do anything until you see an oncologist

"and that's going to take four to five weeks to see somebody,

"by the time you get all your tests."

And they sent her home with Calpol,

because she's clearly four years old and has flu, right.

So, they sent her home with Calpol.

My mum was in so much pain, I was like, "What do I do?"

They said, "If you need anything, call 111."

"111? That's who you call when you're drunk

"and want a free lift home. What the fuck? How do I help my mum?"

And so, I had to source alternative pain relief for my mum

and I read loads of things online about cannabis,

about how cannabis has got medicinal properties.

I don't do drugs, I've never done drugs.

I drink two Smirnoff Ice and I'm like, "Whoa!"

I've never really figured it out. I started looking at cannabis oil,

but it's not the easiest thing to locate, cos you can't really -

I learnt - post on Facebook, "Does anybody know how to get hold

"of some cannabis oil so I can help heal my mum's stage four cancer?

"Smiley face." Nobody really answers, guys.

I actually ended up getting hold of cannabis oil

and here's the thing about cannabis oil.

You only need a tiny bit but, if you put it in your mouth,

you get really high. My mum was like, "I don't want to be Rocky."

I was like, "Mum, stoned - very different."

LAUGHTER

So, I started making suppositories for her,

where you have to use a tiny amount of cannabis oil

and mix it with something that will blend with it.

I was using coconut oil. I'm mixing cannabis oil with coconut oil

and putting it in the freezer,

and I'm there with billions of suppositories in my kitchen

and I feel very like Breaking Bad, but I don't know what I'm doing

and you can't Google it and I tried to call 111, but they're useless

and they're giving me Calpol, so I don't know what to do.

So, I'm there, going, "My mum's got cancer.

"I'm going to save her and make these suppositories."

But the problem with coconut oil, is it gets all over your fingers.

So, you've lost half the goodness, it's just waste of time.

Do not use coconut oil. What you need is cacao butter.

Yes, this is very middle-class.

You need cacao butter to mix with cannabis oil and you freeze it

and I gave it to my mum.

It obviously didn't cure her but it eased her pain.

And when we went to the doctors, I was like, "Let's tell them,

"but let's break it in gently that I've got you

"on this class A illegal substance, so let's just...

"..wean our way in."

Hopefully, they'll be surprised you've been managing so well

with stage four cancer only on Calpol but, you never know.

LAUGHTER

We got into the room and she's sat with the oncologist,

and my mum farted.

LAUGHTER

And I was like, "Oh, my days. You're joking."

I was like, "What I do?"

"Pretend to be high, pretend to be, like,

"I do it. it's not her, it's me. Oh, look at those rabbits. Oh."

We came out and I was like, "Mum, why did you do that?

"It's so annoying." She was like, "I'm sorry, I couldn't help it."

I was like, "You just shat out £65 worth of cannabis oil, you idiot!"

So, you know, I got the e-mail to do this gig

a few weeks before my mum died and I said I don't want to do it.

I'd been waiting for years to do the Apollo.

I don't want to do it.

And she said, "Luisa, promise me you'll do it.

"Promise me you'll do Live At The Apollo, whatever happens."

I said, "No, because I'll be with you. You'll have cannabis oil,

"it's going to be amazing, you'll be fine."

And she was like, "Whatever happens, promise me you do that gig."

And so, that's why I came out today to do the gig.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

So, thank you for having me. I'm Luisa Omielan. Big love.

Thank you.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Luisa Omielan!

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much

for watching Live At The Apollo.

Please give a massive round of applause to my guests,

Luisa Omielan and David O'Doherty. My name is Nish Kumar.

Thank you very much. Good night.