YouSaid · the spoken record

Ian Hislop

lines on the record: 37
first: 2023-02-03
most recent: 2023-02-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Yes, I mean, there is a trumpy and lack of shame that nowadays if you're caught, you don't resign. You just brazen it down. And if the prime minister is perceived to be too weak to sack you because by the time we'd gone through the Cameron government and the May government and the Boris government, there wasn't any talent pool left. It had all gone. You were literally left with this lot, then it's difficult to get rid of them.”
2023-02-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ian Hislop on Satire and Becoming the Most Sued Man in England · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Again, I think the old tend to get nostalgic about the marvelous quality of politicians when they were younger. These are the same people Their opinion on one subject, and therefore the caliber is about as low as anything I've ever seen.”
2023-02-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ian Hislop on Satire and Becoming the Most Sued Man in England · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Second half of the question Yes, because I think that the BBC shouldn't be bullied and shows signs of being bullied. All governments try and bully the BBC. I remember Tebit doing it. I remember Blair, Mandelson, Alistair Campbell, almost the worst of all of them doing it. So it's not merely conservative governments who do it. They all say they love the BBC until it runs something about them that they hate. And then they start saying, well, it's time the license fee was finished. It's always a direct threat. So yes, I'd be suspicious of them for doing that. The first half of the question was...”
2023-02-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ian Hislop on Satire and Becoming the Most Sued Man in England · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The virus was a bit of a challenge in terms of attempting to make it funny, but one of my favorite headlines we run was coronavirus gets Trump. And there was a long interview with the virus saying that he was really hoping to shake him off and that it had laid him low for a few weeks. And in the end, he would just have to put up with it. So, I mean, Trump gave us a lot of laughs, but the virus has itself been extraordinary in terms of people's release.”
2023-02-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ian Hislop on Satire and Becoming the Most Sued Man in England · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I always try and be optimistic. I mean, Hong Kong is bizarre for me, is to see student protesters flying the flag of the old colonialists as though this was better than the option. I mean, there was no democracy in Hong Kong when I was there. It was ruled by the governor in the hat. What transpired? And I think they're an extraordinarily brave and brilliant bunch, the Hong Kong protesters and the umbrella movement and what they have got, I think, is absolutely wonderful. And I really hope they managed to sustain their own life. I don't know whether it's worth being optimistic about that or not.”
2023-02-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ian Hislop on Satire and Becoming the Most Sued Man in England · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do think that's what Satire has always been about in Britain. It is people who are on the inside pointing out what is going wrong. If you're on the outside, you tend not to know what's going on. Therefore, it's a very useful job. But I suppose what I would like is for the best and the institutional standards and the things which I genuinely believe in and approve of in the democratic structure of Britain as we have it to be maintained rather than corrupted. You know, I'm not under any illusions that what I do would be transferable elsewhere. You know, I'd last five seconds in Beijing. You know, there aren't satirical newspapers. They don't have, have I got news for you in Tehran? It's not on. You know, it is worth remembering that I am enjoying some of the freedoms which we have. And I am trying to preserve those. Freedoms”
2023-02-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ian Hislop on Satire and Becoming the Most Sued Man in England · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I mean, you know, I knew one of the cartoonists, Kabu, who used to work on Le Canchene. And when I was very young, I did an exchange. And I'd met Caboo a couple of times. And then he went to work for Charlie Hebdo. And, you know, the gunman walked into the building and said, who's the one on the telly? And then they shot him. So, yeah, I mean, it was a very sort of frightening time for everybody. And it was an extraordinary incidence of basically people dying for the right to laugh. It was very sobering”
2023-02-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ian Hislop on Satire and Becoming the Most Sued Man in England · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thing with you know someone like Paul Daker and whatever they do believe in the freedom of the press i mean you may not like the version of the press they do but what they want to do is be allowed to investigate report and find things out which is the basic journalistic impulse and I'm very pro that so i i know people think well you seem to have some quite sensible views and then we come to the freedom of the press and you're ghastly you're like a tabloid what's wrong with lovely hugh grant why can't you just join up with hanked off and really sort things out and i mean i i know the free press is as often say it's not very pretty but it is free and i'm old enough to you know been to lots of places where it isn't free and it's really really grim i mean if you want to look at turkey right now you can have a look at how quickly the freedom of the press can disappear”
2023-02-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ian Hislop on Satire and Becoming the Most Sued Man in England · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, not at all Think the main accusation is well, you shouldn't have these people on. So the idea that you would invite everybody else on or only people who the Guardian approve of or only people who are considered absolutely acceptable should be invited on a show, even if you're going to be rude to them. So I think that's sort of untenable and also slightly dangerous. And also there is a problem, and this is the same problem as giving people the vote, I'm afraid, that if you allow people airtime, which they probably are allowed, people might like them. I just don't think these arguments hold.”
2023-02-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ian Hislop on Satire and Becoming the Most Sued Man in England · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Government, you know, I don't know how naive you think you are. And you'll say, not being naive, but just saying this actually stinks. And the whole establishment of an independent and focused civil service. It's another of these British institutions I'm quite interested in, which was meritocratic and open and focused on integrity. That was the point of the civil service. The idea that oh, didn't we mention it? This civil servant's working for another company. Do we not mention that? No, you bloody well didn't mention that. How on earth is that legal? I mean, it is pretty disgraceful that we've managed to go back a hundred years in terms of public morality.”
2023-02-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ian Hislop on Satire and Becoming the Most Sued Man in England · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's interesting that the lobbying scandal has blown up, partly because Boris can then say, this is my predecessor, look, look, isn't this appalling and then shift the emphasis away from him? But it is the same story. It's essentially about people in government not acting in the public interest. I mean, I've sat in front of this committee that he's meant to decide on what we call the revolving door principle, that you are not allowed just to breeze into government and then breeze straight out again into these firms. And I sat there and there were a lot of sort of, I think, attentive MPs. And I just said, I don't see that this is a really difficult one to understand. If you're the military person in charge of buying the missiles, then when you retire from the military, you shouldn't probably join the company that sells the missiles because then we start thinking something's a bit odd. And people going, well, you've got to have experience.”
2023-02-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ian Hislop on Satire and Becoming the Most Sued Man in England · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Minister, you may have to meet various undesirable people running other countries. I know we can't have lovely people running the whole world. But you're out of office. You don't have to do this. I mean, it's just revolting.”
2023-02-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ian Hislop on Satire and Becoming the Most Sued Man in England · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I do seem to get stroppy. People always say, you know, you seem to be very bad tempered. I mean, some of the time. And yes, I think it is just a feeling of one said, you're not very tribal, you're not actually political in any real sense. You just seem to be furious that things aren't done better. And maybe that's it. You know, if I see the news that David Cameron has been camping in a tent with Muhammad bin Salman, I'm genuinely appalled. You know, whatever you thought of him, you know, fresh faced prime minister whistling away, messing it all up as he went along. That's one thing. Sitting in the tent a year later with a man who the entire world has just murdered a journalist, what are you doing for a lobbying job? I mean, okay, the queen has to meet various heads of state. If you're prime minister”
2023-02-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ian Hislop on Satire and Becoming the Most Sued Man in England · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sort of obviously vain and self-centered, or I wouldn't be in this business. At least I can feel I didn't screw that one up.”
2023-02-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ian Hislop on Satire and Becoming the Most Sued Man in England · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On Sunday, yes, sorry, critic, we're due. And the final settlement, which was agreed after the jury had come to their verdict, was huge but not record. And it was a very strange case. I mean, he was a policeman. There were no other police who gave evidence. At all points, there was something very wrong with this story. But we didn't make the case. unsurprisingly boys who come from a sort of really tough ballstype home don't turn into ideal witnesses as young men. And the other side ripped them apart. I always thought I'm particularly an intervening years. Should we have done this? What on earth were we doing pursuing this case? So in terms of my own career, I'm hugely relieved that in the end, a measure of justice was done. And because I, you know,”
2023-02-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ian Hislop on Satire and Becoming the Most Sued Man in England · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was very angry at the time, but I couldn't be angry myself because we'd, I mean, this is, you know, I say private eyes fun. I mean, this was the least fun story I ever covered and was utterly grim. And we persuaded a number of young men to give testimonies and one of them killed himself afterwards because he'd never been believed. So there was never at any point where I felt angry for myself. I felt this was a shocking and really tragic story. And many years later, it turned out that what we'd alleged, and it wasn't just us, it was the observer and HDV and there were four parties in.”
2023-02-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ian Hislop on Satire and Becoming the Most Sued Man in England · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The truth is, we sold a lot of copies. And that was always the bottom line. You know, the damages were hugely reduced on appeal from 600 down to 60. And the libel laws were hugely revised and reformed and changed at that period, partly due to those settlements. Because I think the site of private eye turning up in the high court and having to pay a million pounds to the wife of a serial killer, it threatened everybody's idea of natural justice. You know, you've got a couple of thousand pounds if you lost your leg. If someone said, well, you took money for your story, you got 600,000. Extraordinary.”
2023-02-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ian Hislop on Satire and Becoming the Most Sued Man in England · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Those days, the proprietor was Peter Cook. He was the great lake comedian, and he was the majority shareholder. And Peter's view was if I said we should go for it, we should go for it. I mean, he was the ideal proprietor. And we have the most fabulous readers. So when I thought, white, I've messed it up. I've entirely ruined this magazine I've been given. We'll start up a fund, see what happens. We started up a fund. They put in a vast amount of money, the readers. And so successful was that fund that we distributed all of that money to the victims of the Ripper rather than pay our own costs.”
2023-02-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ian Hislop on Satire and Becoming the Most Sued Man in England · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have the receipts and they turned up. It was an absolutely extraordinary case and it ended with this possibility of the Yorkshire Ripper's wife being totally bankrupted and then having to sell the house where she'd lived with the murderer in order to pay off her debts. And the thought of inheriting a share of the assets of the Psycho House was not really for me. I thought we would just, you know, let the matter lie.”
2023-02-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ian Hislop on Satire and Becoming the Most Sued Man in England · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Find it difficult to believe. I do remember very, very clearly, not only was there 600,000 pounds in damages, which was staggering, but there was about £700,000 in legal costs, which made I'd lost something like £1.3 million that afternoon of a magazine I'd very recently just been taken over and entrusted on the grounds that I wasn't going to mess it up. And I had sort of embarrassing me, made a number of quite pompous speeches about how my predecessor had really let Libel get out of hand. And I was going to very much crack down on it and reduce these bills. And I more or less bankrupt the magazine. And that was an extraordinary case because it turned out years later that what we had alleged was exactly what had happened. She had taken money for her story exactly as we'd said.”
2023-02-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ian Hislop on Satire and Becoming the Most Sued Man in England · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, why do you think I'm still there? People say, why don't you go? You've been there for ages, you know, just give up, give it to someone else. And I go, yeah, but why? It's good fun.”
2023-02-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ian Hislop on Satire and Becoming the Most Sued Man in England · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think it's a bit simplistic to say this is public school as though the rest of the country had never changed or that the 70s weren't entirely full of television programs called Love Line Neighbour. So I accept that it is a certain type of public school humor, but I would say that includes quite a lot of British humour and quite a lot of very good British humour, both cartooning and prose and written material. And I hope we've got the best of that tradition. If not the worst.”
2023-02-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ian Hislop on Satire and Becoming the Most Sued Man in England · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I didn't like what they did on the magazine. I felt the magazine had become very Fleet Street and very obsessed with a very small bit of the world. And the bits I really liked about Private Eye, which were the investigative journalism, which was essentially a big 60s phenomena that had slightly died off in the 70s and the jokes, which were absolutely fabulous. And I thought, well, this is amazing. But can I get rid of it?”
2023-02-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ian Hislop on Satire and Becoming the Most Sued Man in England · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's just an exaggerated version of me, I suppose. And when it went on, I think no one quite knew what it would look like or turn out like. But I mean, Paul said, you know, basically most British comedy is about class anyway. So let's get this sorted straight away. Then it became fairly clear what our roles were in terms of defining Britain. And oddly, I mean, it was like that old sketch with the three people looking down on each other. And Angus was resolutely in those days sort of middle class and aspirational and loved football and invited the whole manu team to the green room and new celebrities and was spotted out with people who'd been on the telly.”
2023-02-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ian Hislop on Satire and Becoming the Most Sued Man in England · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Remember going to see Alexi Sale and right at the beginning of that amazing comedy store. And it was a sort of, it's a flow of consciousness and it's a bubble and it's a very particular skill stand up. And I'd done a lot of review when I was a student, you know, which is essentially performing sketches. It's a very different game, it's characters and it's gaining a voice. And I think that's why in something like Private Eye, it's sort of very silly columns and in which you adopt voices and which you essentially aren't doing your own voice that becomes really funny. And I think most of those characters and those narrators in the eye come from an idea of let's pretend to be something else. The top pledge on the top. We will invade Iraq against the wish.”
2023-02-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ian Hislop on Satire and Becoming the Most Sued Man in England · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. And that again, Tim was based on nearly everybody, Nick and I were at school with. Because the 80s, we were sick of seeing all our contemporaries portrayed as brilliant, sharp go-getting Thatcherites winners in the city who were bestriding the world and shouting greedy is good. Because most of the ones we knew were just perfectly nice and quite dim. And Harry Enfield said to us, do you have any characters who don't shout and aren't working class? And we said, yeah, I think we can do that because his were there was a fairly broad range of Harry loads of monies and equivalents. So we wrote Tim Nice but Dim and his basic line. I mean, I'm very fond of Tim, which is just that everybody was a bloody nice bloke. And the fact is that he just, he never really understood what was going on.”
2023-02-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ian Hislop on Satire and Becoming the Most Sued Man in England · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Poll tax was absolutely marvelous. It was just the very simple matter of the conservatives saying, this is called the community charge. We'd like it to be known as the community charge because it's a community charge. You mustn't call it the poll tax, at which point you just go, oh, it's the poll tax, we mustn't call it the poll tax. It's that sort of thing that you can do. And then it starts disappearing. I have a feeling we're going to get this with the vaccine passport. And they're going to say, no, no, it's a COVID status certificate. And everyone's going to say it's a passport though, isn't it? It is, though.”
2023-02-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ian Hislop on Satire and Becoming the Most Sued Man in England · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I often disagree with Jonathan about Saturday. I think he hopes it will do too much. I think I probably read an awful lot of it and I realize that you do the best you can. And in the end, Satire is always partly a release of pressure. That's the point of it. It allows people to blow off without blowing up. And that's pretty good. You have to be careful. And as a satirist, you know, I've been in the game a long time. And I think Firstly, you console yourself with if I hadn't done this, would it have been worse? And thirdly, you take small victories. The point of satire, after all, as I think I've now believe, is to crystallize an opinion. It is to make a point comically. It is to focus what people were saying. And you make that, and that is worth doing. People say, well, you haven't toppled the government recently. I say, well, you know.”
2023-02-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ian Hislop on Satire and Becoming the Most Sued Man in England · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Roger Law said, You're the one who's educated Ian. You can write a letter to the telegraph. So I wrote a letter to the telegraph saying that Jonathan Swift had done this joke years before we had. And he suggested that the Irish eat their children in a modest proposal and that the telegraph usually was a big fan of Swift and told us that we should become sort of better read and more literate. So it ended up being my job as a sort of snotty early 20 year old to start lecturing the telegraph about their own editorials, which you can imagine I enjoyed hugely.”
2023-02-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ian Hislop on Satire and Becoming the Most Sued Man in England · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I can't believe it. I mean, because there were so few channels, you know, we had 15 million people watching on a Sunday night. And we were doing jokes about the cabinet. It was fantastically rude. And we got away with it. The papers were constantly outraged. I mean, they were extremely Thatcherite, more or less across the board. So any criticism was taken very, very badly. And Norman Tebbitt was a very then considered a very thuggish right-hand man and Mrs. Thatcher. And we did a sketch about him saying that the unemployed should basically just eat themselves. And because you could do anything with a rubber puppets, we had him putting his arm in a liquidizer. And it just turned to this amazing. And there was complete outrage, you know, this disgusting sketch.”
2023-02-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ian Hislop on Satire and Becoming the Most Sued Man in England · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, absolutely not. I was terrible. What I wanted to do was essentially write sketches and write print. I didn't want to tell people what was in my head on a monologue. And it was 83 spitting image turned up, which was absolutely terrific because it was the perfect vehicle. My friend Nick Newman was a cartoonist. I'd written photobubles. The whole format was geared towards the sorts of things I could do or I thought I could do. And it was incredibly exciting time.”
2023-02-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ian Hislop on Satire and Becoming the Most Sued Man in England · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The initial plan was the brilliant thing about running a student magazine is you could get to interview all your heroes, which I more or less did. Secondly, you can print all your own jokes without anyone saying, no, I don't think so, because you're the editor. And the third thing was by the end, I thought, I wonder if I can do this for a living. I mean, it seemed too much fun to believe that I could get away with this. And the joy of being 2021 is it's possible.”
2023-02-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ian Hislop on Satire and Becoming the Most Sued Man in England · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And say, oh, by the way, mum, I've changed all my A levels. I've chosen all the wrong things. Do you mind? And she goes, No, darling, that's absolutely marvelous. Or I've changed subject at university. Do you mind? She goes, no, no, that sounds terrific. And it was a good lesson that essentially you should trust your children.”
2023-02-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ian Hislop on Satire and Becoming the Most Sued Man in England · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What changed is that I was sitting in the body reading Lipsy's Guide to Basic Economics about a month before I was meant to start my course. And I thought, I really don't want to do this. I don't think I can do this. And I mean, you did mention to my father earlier, I made a, because he died young and he was a civil engineer whose work and who obviously I greatly admired. And I just kept making decisions. You know, I chose all science A-levels. I got into Oxford reading maths. I just kept choosing subjects that I thought were a bit like him and that I should be a bit like him. And I think I suddenly realized I don't want to do this. And I could be me. So I read English, which was absolutely marvelous. And my mother, who was, I should always give credit to, I mean, repeatedly, I mean, this is whenever I used to turn out.”
2023-02-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ian Hislop on Satire and Becoming the Most Sued Man in England · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I got my place at 16 and then I had to sort of waste some time because I think don't think anybody thought it would be a good idea to go up literally at that age. I mean, this was the period where Ruth Lawrence was studying maths at 14. And so I went off traveling for a year and I was on a kibbutz. I went and worked, which was, you know, more communal life, but of a rather left-wing rather than a right-wing variety. So that was a good change.”
2023-02-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ian Hislop on Satire and Becoming the Most Sued Man in England · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Quite a lot, I think. It's partly why I enjoyed school so much because I sort of threw myself into another world that wasn't the domestic world, you know, my mother was in the 40s. I mean, you know, she was incredibly bereaved by it. And I found an alternative place where, you know, I could make very strong friendships. And that was clearly what I did. I have a feeling that when you've lost a parent very young, you develop quite a thick skin quite early. And I think you do get a feeling that, well, what else has life got? And sometimes some of the things that other people find more worrying or more stressful, you think. So, you know, these were fairly sort of tough and resolute places. And having lost my father, I became a bit dougher.”
2023-02-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ian Hislop on Satire and Becoming the Most Sued Man in England · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do you know, thinking seriously is probably pushing it? I remembered we used to do a review, we started doing it, and then we did it sort of whenever we were allowed to. And we did a career sketch once in which the basic joke was I said I'd like to be terribly, terribly rich. And then my friend playing the careers master said, well, you should become a bursar at a private school and just take all the money. And we thought this was hysterically funny, but we didn't realize that, you know, the bursa was in the audience. And thank God, the headmaster, who was rather marvelous, thought this was the funniest sketch that had literally ever been written. So we were not punished.”
2023-02-03 · Intelligence Squared · Ian Hislop on Satire and Becoming the Most Sued Man in England · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT