Nish kumar

Sunday

Damian Reilly

Nish Kumar’s podcast is actually not bad

Nish Kumar’s grandiosely titled podcast Pod Save the UK isn’t anything like as annoying as you’d expect. Yes, his speaking voice – a high-pitched nasal gurgle – can grate a little, especially when punctuated, as it is often and loudly, with a laugh that is very obviously insincere. But I listened to the full hour without experiencing a single violent urge. This wasn’t the reaction I’d expected. Not at all. When he was on the telly, as he was improbably for four long years fronting the BBC’s truly godawful The Mash Report, like much of the rest of the nation I found I could manage about ninety seconds of him

Friday

Steerpike

The Mash Report 2017-2021, greatest hits

So, farewell then, The Mash Report. This morning the Sun reports that the newly appointed BBC director general Tim Davie has ordered the axing of the notoriously unfunny BBC Two show after four series. The show’s creators were told at the time of the appointment to find a better balance of targets than ‘digs at the Tories’. Not that this seems to have been taken on board by the show’s hosts.  Sources close to the Beeb’s top man report reportedly thought it disproportionately critical of Brexit — perhaps unsurprising given its main star Nish Kumar declared to the Guardian in 2019 that he had ‘still not got over it’. With the programme canned to ‘make

Tom Slater Tom Slater

No, Nish Kumar’s Mash Report hasn’t been ‘cancelled’

It’s not been a good year for any of us. But it certainly hasn’t been a good year for Nish Kumar, alleged comedian and voice of perma-smug Britain. Last year, sensing a gap in the market for anti-Trump material, Kumar tried to break America with a topical Daily Show-style show hosted on some weird new streaming service called Quibi, only for it to shut down six months later. Now The Mash Report, the primetime BBC Two Daily Show-style topical show he fronted four four series, has been axed. Even among the politically monochrome BBC comedy stable, The Mash Report broke new ground for liberal sanctimony and woke hectoring. It was

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

Nish Kumar turns on ‘right-wing commentators’ who ‘can’t take a joke’

Nish Kumar was the star turn on Friday at a ‘Brexit and Comedy’ panel discussion in central London. The event was staged by ‘The UK in a Changing Europe’ which describes itself as ‘an independent organisation created to make the findings of academic research easily available.’ Essentially it’s a left-leaning think-tank which behaves like a bereavement circle for distraught Remainers. The host, Professor Anand Menon, asked the three panellists to suggest a joke for Boris. ‘I’d just write him a joke that wasn’t racist. A non-racist knock-knock joke,’ replied Kumar The comic Andy Zaltzman, also on the panel, started to improvise. ‘Knock-knock’. Kumar: Who’s there? Zaltzman: The immigration authorities. Marina

Monday

Brendan O’Neill

Spare us Nish Kumar and the BBC’s anti-Brexit sneering

Friday was Brexit day. The day that the largest act of democracy in the history of this country was finally enacted. The day when the wishes of 17.4m people finally became a reality. And how did the BBC, the national broadcaster, mark this extraordinary democratic day? With a sneer, of course. A smug, aloof, bitter sneer at the entire country. Not only did BBC reporters huff and moan at the mass pro-Brexit gathering in Parliament Square, coming off like anthropologists who had happened upon some bizarre, exotic tribe. It also chose that day to push out anti-Brexit nonsense via its kids’ wing, CBBC. Yes, even children must now be subjected