David Baddiel: I’ve been cancelled – for real

‘Cancelled’ is quite a buzzword of our times, isn’t it? Up until about ten days ago, it referred mainly to cancel culture, that ability of Twitter mobs to rule on whether or not a celebrity misdemeanour means the end of celebrity for that celebrity. But recently someone tweeted me the words: ‘Nature: “I’ll show you cancel culture.”’ It’s true. Suddenly, the idea of the world ending — or at least, theatres, art galleries and musicals shut down for the foreseeable future — has lessened the trepidation felt by the targets of cancel culture. Which means the apocalypse may be accompanied by an outbreak of famous people with terrible views saying long bottled-up racist, sexist and transphobic things in a kind of ‘it doesn’t matter now — we’re all going down anyway’ rush.

I have one particular ‘cancellation’ issue: my own tour has been cancelled. I was performing, in theatres all over the country, a one-man show about social media, Trolls: Not the Dolls. But since Boris Johnson announced a series of draconian measures to combat the spread of Covid-19, my tour has been put on hold — with half the dates left to play. Part of me is relieved: stand-up comedy, even if you’ve been doing it professionally in various forms for 35 years, is an all-consuming, nerve-racking thing to do. So there’s always some element of ‘thank Christ for that’ to hearing that a gig’s gone down. But once you’re past that, a deeper realisation kicks in. In this particular case, a realisation that this is a show that I’ve been working on for a year and a half, that was storming it round the country, that I was actually enjoying performing and that, um, I’d like to think I might make some money on at some point. Not to mention the money that various others — tour managers, agents, promoters, venues, lighting and sound crews — were hoping to make on it.