Jamie McDonald - What the Heck Would I Know?

 

 

Okay. Thank you very much. Good evening. All right. So, [chuckles] October 2022, I was invited to be a guest on the long running satirical panel show, Have I Got News for You. [audience cheers]

 

If you're not familiar with the show, it features two teams each with a guest, captained by comedy legends Paul Merton and Ian Hislop. And together, we answer questions humorously on that week's news. The show's an institution. It's been running for over 30 years. Its panels are who's who comedy greats, right? So, to be invited on, it was a massive highlight in my stand-up career. Only slight concern. The show is riddled with loads of video and picture rights, [audience laughter] which is a unique challenge for a blind comedian. [audience laughter] But I wasn't worried, because in this case, my concerns are more about how do I get to stage without killing myself or somebody else. [audience laughter] So, a few pictures, I wasn't bothered. I was just excited. 

 

The day of the recording arrived and I was collected from St. Pancras station in this like air-conditioned Mercedes Benz, like a superstar, [audience laughter] was driven through London up to the studio where I was greeted by a runner and I was whisked down to hair and makeup. Then it was up to this audience packed studio where amidst this light flashing din, I met the captains, Paul and Ian, who are two comedy heroes of mine. And were applauded into our seats, and from nowhere I was given a bottle of water and a layer of anti-shine powder. [audience laughter] There was some shouting. The cameras started rolling. The theme tune blasted out. With this kind of bowel melting surge of adrenaline, [audience laughter] we were off. 

 

Now, prior to the show, the producers and I, we had a chat about the video and picture rounds. We all just thought it would be funny [audience laughter] that whenever a picture or a clip come up for comment, I just have a guess [audience laughter] at what it might be. [audience laughter] So, a Ford Fiesta popped up. I guessed it was Vladimir Putin. [audience laughter] More unseen images popped up. I kept guessing it was Vladimir Putin. [audience laughter] It turns out it was a very effective answer. It went down well with the audience, the recording was good fun, the producers were happy. I thought I've done a good job. [chuckles] 

 

The morning after the show aired, my wife and I, were driving to Bristol. I opened Twitter just to see if there'd been any buzz around the show. And boom, I was hit with this Force 10 Twitter Storm. If you don't know what a Twitter storm is, it's where a ton of Twitter trolls decide to suddenly get incandescent with rage at a person or an issue that has absolutely nothing to do with them. [audience laughter] They lampoon, they attack, they go nuts. In this case on my behalf, until something else as equally as nothing to do with them happens and they bugger off to shout at that for a while. [audience laughter] These are some of the tweets from this storm. I've changed the names, the handles just to protect identities. [audience laughter] @i'mapatronizingbellend [audience laughter] wrote, “Shame on you. Have I got news? You invite a blind person onto your show and you make absolutely no adaptation to the format, so he can take part.” Okay. 

 

And then, @don'tworrydisabledpeople,I'llstandupforyou [audience laughter] wrote, [chuckles] “Am I missing something here? What's wrong with giving the poor guy-- a porro guy prick. [audience laughter] What's wrong with giving the poor guy an earpiece for audio description?” [audience laughter] Because that would be about as entertaining as a seat heavy game of musical chairs. [audience laughter] So, I thought, hang on a second here. I'm going to have to set the record straight. So, we pulled into this rundown motorway service station where I tweeted, “Last night was a career highlight. I absolutely loved being on @haveigotnews. I really appreciate everybody's concern on my behalf, but at no point did I feel excluded in any way.” Job done. I nipped that in the bud. [audience laughter] 

 

We bought ourselves a triumphantly horrible service station picnic, [audience laughter] and we get back in the roads. But even before, like the heartburn from a rank motorway pie could kick in, [audience laughter] I got this reply, @shoosh. Now disabled Shoosh. [audience laughter] Wrote, “Thank you, Jimmy. But the concern wasn't simply personal. [audience laughter] It was lazy and showed poor production values. You should have been facilitated to provide your very best contribution.” I thought I know, right? [audience laughter] “Blind people need to be shown to be provided with full inclusion.” Oh. Oh, do we now? 

 

I know sometimes people do the wrong things for the right reasons. But man, I was fuming, because I have spent a long time trying to figure out how to own my disability. So, to have these keyboard warriors wrestle it from me with a patronizing pat on the head and, “It's okay, Jamie. We'll take it from here.” [audience laughter] It really boiled my blood because I started seriously losing my sight in my mid-teens. Actually, to this day, people still say, “Oh, that must have been a very tough stage of life to start losing your sight,” which implies it was a good time. [audience laughter] Lucky you, going blind in your 40s. [audience laughter] It wasn't a good time. 

 

I was embarrassed by my failing eyes to the point I spent my late teens and a good whack of my 20s in denial. I pretending I could still see. [chuckles] But sight is surprisingly tricky to fake. [audience laughter] I was nailing myself off street furniture, stumbling into main roads, constantly smashing into strangers who just thought I was aggressive and rude. [audience laughter] I had to stop misrepresenting myself as this bollard bashing yob before I get run over or punched. 

 

I need to accept the inescapable fact that I was. I was losing my sight, which I did at the age of 25. My transition from able to disabled came when I started using this white stick, which, to my amazement, wasn't just an excellent mobility aid, but it was also instantly explaining why I was accidentally in various dodgy situations. It was transformational, because before it'd be, “Oh, quick, there's a big Scottish pervert creeping around the ladies.” [audience laughter] But now with the stickers, “Ah, that was a big blind sweetheart lost in the lose.” [audience laughter] It was brilliant. Strong human traits are often characterized through metals. Steely eyed, iron willed. My white stick was giving me a brass neck. 

 

Now, a brass neck is a very High tolerance to excruciatingly awkward or embarrassing situations. It's very popular amongst politicians. [audience laughter] It was lucky, because I'd been running out of options, you know, what was I going to do? Was I going to spend the rest of my life being embarrassed by my eyes? Sod that. Ironically, I was starting to see the humor in them. The first sight situation I remember finding funny, I was in a supermarket and I reached out for an apple. Just as I was about to grasp the [unintelligible [00:28:37] [audience laughter] I glimpsed another hand going for the same piece of fruit. So, I whipped my hand back and I said, “Sorry,” just to realize that the apples were next to a mirror. [audience laughter] I just apologized to my own hand. [audience laughter] I chuckled away. [audience laughter] 

 

No, my brass neck was allowing me to own my disability and that was incredibly liberating. Constantly finding my life funny naturally led me into standup comedy. And now, my comedy and my blindness are inextricably linked. So, to be invited onto a show like Have I Got News for You, wonderful, chatting over ideas with producers, brilliant. But now, I had all these faux outraged trolls deciding I hadn't been in on the joke. I'd been exploited. Not only were these people hijacking my disability, but they were using it to go after a show I'd love been on. And no joke, the Twitter storm, it made the papers. The Sun, the Metro, the Times, all attacked the BBC and Have I Got News for You on my behalf. Not one of them asked me for comment. 

 

And tweeting my enjoyment of the show hadn't worked. I was very reluctant to engage any further in case this was taken as some kind of vindication or recognition. God knows how much the storm would rage if they felt they had agency. Yeah, I was absolutely powerless in the face of it. So, I did what you do in any storm. I battened down the hatches, hope it blew itself out before it wrecked my career. [chuckles] Producers don't love it when you turn up to their show, complete with your very own angry Twitter mob. [audience laughter] And part of me starts thinking, have I got this wrong here? Do I have the right to full ownership of my eyes, or do others have a stake in them if I'm using them for entertainment? 

It wasn't so much an existential crisis. It was more a question of, do I, as a blind person on a high profile show, have a duty to entertain or to uphold best accessible practices at all costs? [audience laughter] 

 

At the recording, if a voiceover had come on and saying, “Jamie, you're looking at A picture of a Ford Fiesta.” Brilliant. [audience laughter] Yeah, that's accessible. But as a comedian, what am I going to do with that? I'd probably say something like, “Huh, just another car I can't drive.” [audience laughter] The trolls would go, “Nuts. Insensitive monsters. How dare you tell a blind person he's looking at a picture of a car?” [audience laughter] You can't win. 

 

I think one of the problems is that some people, they see disability as one thing. It's not. Blindness is infinite combinations of psychological and physical impacts on people. You could have relatively good sight, be miserable, vice versa. Everything in between. Blind people, we're all different. We're like snowflakes, not two of us the same. And if a lot of us fall, people panic. [audience laughter] I was reflected. I was reflected in all this when I opened Twitter to see how the storm was doing. It was finally fading. But one tweet did catch my attention. Finally, somebody with some skin in the game wrote, “I watched this as a newly acquired sight loss woman, and I found Jamie the cup of tea with no sympathy I'd been needing. Being Glaswegian, I got both his personality and his patter.” 

 

That decided it for me. These trolls, they may have given themselves the right to attack anything and everything they please, but I have been given the privilege to use my eyes to make myself and other people laugh. Thank you.