Erratum: Yesterday's post was obviously inspired by the image above, top row, second from the left, which had been doing the rounds over the weekend, and which I only found out today is not, as rumoured, a government initiative to specifically discourage people from becoming live artists in response to theatre closures, but actually one of a series of adverts from 2019. Oliver Dowden, the Minister for whatever it's currently called, issued a tweet slightly correcting the story, but neglecting to say that the campaign was from last year. Almost as if - well - maybe the misapprehension wasn't entirely inconvenient. I know. That sounds crazy.
Similarly, a few weeks ago ITV News had to retract a story that the Chancellor of the Exchequer had singled out careers in the live arts as now "unviable", when in fact he was talking about, well anything. And yet the word "unviable" is still cropping up in the feed of creatives feeling wretched, and the same thing will probably happen to "Fatima". It's hard, probably impossible, to find the origin of these false alarms, but miserable to see them spread, especially if they do turn out to be the work of some sockless, civil-service-dodging, gaslighting, grudge-drunk, anarcho-fascist game theorist who probably can't so much as spell "Psy Ops". Easier to source is the fake story that might have initiated this pattern, published in the Daily Telegraph a month ago and immediately debunked by Stweart Lee, that the new Director General of the BBC would be setting his sights on "left-wing comedy". It was a lie, but that didn't stop the anger, or the enervating processing of a manufactured attack when that lie spread, and the jokes are still being posted today satirising the non-existent, harshing - in a word - the vibe, simply because it's more fun to riff on a story than to check if it's true. Well actually, no. As Tony Way has proved above, both can be fun. We can do both.
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