EP.260 - NATALIE ROBERTS

I added one more podcast to the giant podcast bin.

Now you have plucked that podcast out and started listening.

I took my microphone and found some human folk.

Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke.

My name is Adam Buxton, I'm a man.

I want you to enjoy this, that's the plan.

Hey,

how are you doing, podcasts?

It's Adam Buxton here.

I'm reporting to you from a crunchy Norfolk farm track

under grey skies that are actually...

Oh no, look, over towards the west,

the cloud is clearing and the sun is out.

We've got some blue skies over there.

That's good, isn't it, dog legs?

I'm here with Rosie.

She's my best dog friend.

And her enthusiasm levels today I would put at around five.

I'm wearing shorts.

That's how not too bad the weather is out here today

on the very last day of September 2025 as I speak.

I'll talk a little bit about what I've been up to at the end of the podcast, but right now, let me tell you about the main conversation.

today's episode, which is with Natalie Roberts.

She is the UK Executive Director of the International humanitarian organization Médecins Sans Frontières or Doctors Without Borders, aka MSF.

Regular listeners will know how much I admire the work that MSF does and how much they rely on donations from the public.

So when people say, as they sometimes do, Buckles, oh, please tell me how I can show my appreciation for the podcast.

My reply is, that's very nice of you.

Please support MSF and donate what you can by following the link in the description of today's episode.

And they say, oh, okay, I was thinking of like a hug or a homemade badge.

Oh, I say, that's awkward.

Well, those sound nice, but if you were able to make a donation to MSF, I guess that would be my preference.

So anyway, I was going to tell you about the actual conversation with Natalie, which inevitably, considering the work that MSF does, touches on not just the war in Gaza, but the conversations around it.

And incidentally, as I'm speaking on on the day after Donald Trump announced a new peace plan for Gaza, regardless of the effect that plan ends up having for the region, MSF will still try to be there providing humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian people and whoever else they are able to help out there.

Okay, here's some Natalie facts for you.

Natalie Roberts was born in 1979 and grew up in Wrexham, North Wales.

When she became a doctor, Natalie specialized in surgery before moving into emergency medicine.

In 2011, after having worked in the NHS for eight years, Natalie attended the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, where she got her diploma in tropical medicine and hygiene, which was a compulsory part of her joining MSF.

And just to remind you, what MSF does, I quote from their website: since 1971, we have been treating people caught in complex crises and chronic health care emergencies around the world.

From our pediatric nurses to our off-road drivers, we are experts at working in fast-moving and highly insecure environments.

So whether it's launching a rapid response or delivering community care, we go wherever we are needed most.

It was during Natalie's first placement with MSF in January 2012, responding to an emergency following a typhoon in the Philippines, that she found her calling.

And for the next four years, Natalie served as an emergency doctor and coordinator, responding to crises in Syria, Yemen, East Ukraine, Ethiopia, Central African Republic, Pakistan and the Philippines.

After her extensive field work, Natalie worked for MSF in Paris as head of emergency programs, where she managed emergency teams responding to crises worldwide.

In October 2022, Natalie moved to London to take on the role that she currently holds of executive director for MSF's office in the UK.

My conversation with Natalie was recorded face to face in London at the beginning of this month, September 2025, and as well as describing some of the experiences she's had working in conflict zones out in Yemen and Syria, she told me about the conversations at MSF that led to their decision to start talking explicitly about Israel's attacks on the Palestinian people as a genocide, as MSF have been doing since December 2024.

We also spoke about why it is that a no less serious ongoing humanitarian emergency in Sudan gets so much less attention than it should.

And more lightheartedly, Natalie told me about providing medical assistance at Glastonbury for over-emotional Lana Del Rey fans and pregnant women determined to give birth at the mother of all festivals.

But we began by talking about Wrexham and the TV reality show in which American stars Rosie

don't bark at the deer.

That is

unfriendly to the deer.

Anyway, what are you going to do about it?

Even if I let you off the leash, you are not going to be chasing after those guys.

No disrespect.

Some taken.

What was I saying?

Oh, yes, the TV reality show.

Welcome to Wrexham, of course, in which American stars Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds take over the running of the Wrexham football team.

More waffle at the end, but right now with Natalie Roberts of MSF, here we go.

How often do you go back to Wrexham?

I go back quite often now.

It's one of the reasons I moved back to the UK because I go back to watch the football.

Right.

I've got a season ticket.

Did you watch that show?

Welcome to Wrexham.

Yeah, it's quite weird because there's people on there that I've known my whole life.

It's quite strange.

My brother's girlfriend's uncle is in one of the episodes and stuff.

It is a bit weird.

We were a bit worried, actually, because Wrexham's, you know, it's not sleepy.

It's an interesting place.

It's quite a poor place.

You know,

it's had rough times.

And we thought they'd maybe make us look a bit stupid.

But

my whole family's from Wrexham.

But actually, in the end, we were like, no, it's okay.

Ryan Reynolds wouldn't make you look stupid.

I don't know.

That kind of whole, you know, Hollywood movie stars come to save a town.

Sure, I know.

Yeah, no, it had patronising written all over it.

It did.

It's not as bad as all that.

But no, I think they were fairly sensitive, weren't they?

And they certainly seemed to have that concern in mind

as they were making it.

But now Wrexham is smashing it.

Am I right?

It is, yeah.

We're in the championship for the first time since, well, the second, you know, the second tier since...

First time since the late 70s, I think.

Right.

I started to watch that show.

And then my total indifference to sport got the better of me and I was unable to it also gets a bit samey to be honest it's a bit like oh look you know tell someone story and it's good for me because I know the place so you grew up in Wrexham

I did what did your parents do are they still around your folks yeah they are so my dad was a social worker and remained a social worker for his sort of whole life social services and My mum actually, I'm one of five, so she didn't work, they got married really young, so she actually stopped her education and they had five kids and then she went back to university later studied at manchester did you know a degree got a top first

you know started a phd right yeah brain box family well maybe did your dad talk about his work as a social worker he didn't talk about it when i was younger so much um we used to bump into people in the supermarket and he'd talk to them and then I'd ask him who they were and he'd say, oh, just somebody I know.

But it became more apparent when I went to secondary school because then a lot of the kids he worked in children's social services so quite a few of the kids knew who my dad was then when I was deciding I wanted to go and be a doctor he did start talking about it a bit more just I think to try and put me off a little bit yeah how old were you when you started thinking about that I was really quite young I think I was like 12 or 13 and I don't quite know where it came from because no one's medical in my family I think I just got this idea in my head and then my dad started kind of you know introducing me to pediatricians and people he'd met through work and then telling me stories about, yeah, a case, not details, but just, you know, being a doctor isn't a case of just going and saving people's lives, it's about being engaged in their lives, and you have to understand that people's lives are quite complicated.

Didn't really work, it didn't put me off, but you know, what were you imagining?

Do you remember what the thing was that attracted you?

I mean, my dad would insist it was about the same time as ER came on TV.

I was going to say.

And my dad would insist that.

Mid-90s.

Yeah, sort of mid-90s, early mid-90s.

And my dad would insist that it was because I liked George Cooney

I'm not sure and now I would say no of course it wasn't but maybe maybe he has a point I don't know I think you don't really understand the reality of it when you're a teenager you just think it's gonna be good I'm gonna be helping people and you know it's gonna be really cool and and everyone's gonna really thank me for for everything I'm doing for them yeah and and yeah that that doesn't happen but you do live a very intense life that's one thing that is true isn't it I suppose it's it's more banal in some ways than an episode of ER, but it is lived at a fairly intense pitch, I would suppose.

It is.

Especially emergency medicine.

Yeah, I mean, I actually initially went and trained as a surgeon after medical school, so I was doing surgical training.

And actually, the reason I switched to emergency medicine was because

surgery is a little bit

not to be too flippant, a bit like being a car mechanic or a plumber or something.

You essentially, your aim is to do the same thing

every time.

So it's like quite procedural being in the operating theater.

And I kind of wanted that bit more liveliness where you're kind of constantly trying to diagnose someone.

You're constantly being a bit of a detective and trying to work out what's going on with someone and what you need to do about it.

And that's what you get more in emergency medicine.

You're kind of constantly making those,

you don't even realize you're making those choices, but you're making choices about, well, what do I think is going on with this person?

And therefore, what should I do next?

And then how do they respond to what I've done?

And then more kind of detective work yeah and it's not just in terms of the procedure you don't just gonna go oh I think this person's having a heart attack so I'm gonna give them these drugs a lot of it is very social and that's another thing with surgery is you're not your patients asleep on the table half the time whereas in the emergency department you talk to someone and they might come there saying I've got a headache but actually underneath the problem is something else it's not that they've got a physical problem it might be a mental problem it might be a psychological problem

it might be a social problem and you have to kind of have all of that in your mind.

And there's huge parallels between that actually and humanitarian work in that you, the same thing really, is you kind of see what you can do at that time

and you can't address the root causes necessarily.

That's not your job and that's not your role.

And it can be quite frustrating, but you have to just kind of go, well, I can do something right now about this.

And that's...

in some ways you have the luxury of saying, well, my job is to do something right now and not have to think about the bigger picture, which is in some ways, yeah, quite a privilege, I guess.

Yes.

I wanted to ask you about being in Yemen.

So 2015 you were there, is that right?

Yes, and then I was there again actually in 2016.

Yeah, I went to the north and I went to the south.

Yeah.

And so that's an ongoing humanitarian crisis.

It is.

It's slightly changed.

It evolves.

I mean, even between 2015 and 2016, I was in two different places.

So when I was in the north, it was really a situation where

at the time, a sort of Saudi-led coalition was sort of bombing all over the place.

Attacking the Houthis.

Yeah, they were attacking the Houthis who'd kind of started a rebellion and were controlling most of the northern and central territory.

Because they didn't like the president at that point.

Yeah, there was a president in Sana'a, the capital, and the Houthis had driven the president out, and then the president had fled to Saudi Arabia.

And the Saudis had started then attacking the Houthis on his behalf.

But there's a whole lot of geopolitics going on behind that.

The Houthis are by Iran the Houthis are backed by Iran and some others and the president that was outgoing was backed by Saudi and some others and there's a lot of sort of other issues going on in the region I think it is important to understand you don't need to understand a big geopolitical situation I think it's almost better to go in with and talk to people you know and talk to people around you and try and understand a bit what's going on and of course bearing in mind that no one's objective right i mean they're living in that situation but you try and piece up a little picture of who is who what's going on who actually really controls the yeah the power here and how do you find that out though have you got a team at MSF who say okay you're going out next week here's what you need to know about how things work out there you're going to be in an area that's controlled by Houthis here's how to deal with them

Yeah,

to a big extent, yes, particularly in places, there's some places like Yemen we've been working for a very long time, you know, Palestine, Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria.

We've been there for decades.

MSF is only 50 years old, and

we sort of almost started in Nigeria, and we've kind of almost been there ever since in different ways.

So there's always people who will brief you.

And it was part of my job at one point of time to brief people.

I was head of emergency, so I would be explaining to people who were going out there what was going on, what we were doing out there, who some of our contacts were.

You know, it wasn't just a here's your job description, go out.

and you try and get people to have an understanding of what's going on.

Also, because essentially, often we're working in very dangerous places and you don't want to send people, it's almost a duty of care to not send someone somewhere if they don't feel informed of what risks they're taking when they go out there.

It can be a little bit more complicated when you're maybe the first person going somewhere and particularly where it's somewhere we haven't worked before.

So I was one of the sort of early groups of people going into northern Syria Syria and MSF hadn't been working in Syria before and I ended up being sort of one of two people going into an area where we'd never been before.

When was that?

That was 2012.

So actually very, very early on in my MSF career.

Yeah.

We didn't have any contacts on the ground.

We had a few kind of names maybe, but otherwise we didn't really know what was going on there.

And then you have to be a bit more cautious and take your time.

Can you remember, like, I'm interested to know how do you fly, where do do you go to, who transports you, where do you stay, what do you eat, like what's the routine like?

We didn't have permission from the Syrian government to enter the territory of Syria.

So what we were doing was flying into Turkey and then flying down, so changing planes in Istanbul and flying down to the border, a town near the border with Syria.

And then we had two different ways of getting in.

So the first time I crossed,

it was kind of an unofficial border crossing into northern Syria.

You know, that part of Syria was no longer the territory had been taken by the rebels, what they called the Free Syrian Army at the time.

And there was just a gate in a field.

So you used to go at like, you didn't go during the day, hardly visible.

You just kind of took a little local taxi down to the gate in the field with a rucksack.

And then you kind of crossed through this gate into Syria and then, you know, walked a little bit through a field and then got picked up by another car at the other side and then driven to at that point that we just started operating like a little mini hospital in a house actually so it was unmarked and we had the the operating theater in the dining room and we had the emergency department sort of on the patio outside and it was all very rough and ready and it just started I didn't spend that long there.

I then got asked to go and open a new project somewhere else in Syria nearer Aleppo, the city, the other side of Aleppo.

So it crossed back out through this gate into Turkey and yeah, drove along, got a taxi to drive us along the border.

Just a regular taxi?

Just a regular, yeah, regular taxi company, basically.

I mean, we had people in Turkey facilitating some of that, but we weren't, because we weren't working in Turkey, you know, we just had a sort of support team in Turkey.

Yeah, drove along in this sort of regular car to the next border crossing, which actually had been, until the week before, I think, or two weeks before White Crossed, had been an official governmental border crossing.

So that was more of your kind of classic, you know, border crossing from the movies into a war zone, I guess.

Guys with machine guns slung across.

Yeah, except it had only to recently be taken by the rebels.

So everything there was all left behind by the government of Syria.

They'd put up a sort of quick sign that said welcome to free Syria.

I've still got it somewhere in English.

There's some spelling mistakes and stuff.

It was quite quite fun, sort of over on top of the welcome to the Syrian Arab Republic.

There was a sort of new sign.

But otherwise, they looked at my passport.

I mean, the rebels actually didn't really speak any English and I didn't speak Arabic and we didn't have a translator with us there so couldn't really ask me too many questions.

Sort of showed them, you know, a few had a letter in in Arabic explaining what I was doing there.

Right.

Showed them that.

And they stamped my passport with the official Syrian governmental stamp.

So

that they were still using.

And then you have to walk and there was a then next to it was a duty free shop, which was no longer functioning.

So I thought, oh, that's interesting.

And then you walk another few hundred meters to the other side.

And we had a contact of a person who knew we were coming and he came and picked us up and we sort of started from there really and and worked our way along.

And then where do you stay?

Where were you based?

So that time we were based a little village near the border initially where we were looking at opening a hospital and so they gave us sort of the Free Syrian army and the people the civil society I guess so the sort of local

local groups, local community groups who started running their own services to some extent had welcomed us with opened arms and said, You can open a hospital in this kind of this area where there's some, I don't know what it was before it was a hospital, but there were some buildings.

They said, Oh, you can use those to convert into a hospital.

So, yeah, you've got a little gang of fixers and allies,

and they say, Okay, look, I think I know I can find a place for you guys to stay.

And so, they're sorting out all those logistics.

Yeah, they help you basically, and they become part of your team.

And at the beginning, you start working with that small team, and then as time goes on, you develop what's your action plan, what are we trying to do, and then you recruit the people either locally or you bring it more international staff in and you build up your team and then you with your team you have to build up your processes and things become a little bit more institutional I guess but those first early days in a new place particularly where you don't know anybody they're probably quite dangerous but they're also some of the most fun I think because you getting to know the personalities and yeah and are they people are they the equivalents of people like you?

Are they doing it for the same sorts of reasons?

It's difficult to know motivations and I i always think it's a bit difficult to judge motivations and actually we have to be quite careful in the humanitarian sector to not assume that people are coming to work for us because they want to do good for the world i mean that's a nice ideal right everyone wants to work as a humanitarian because they really committed to the ideals of humanitarianism but we have to recognize that we've seen you know anywhere where you have access to vulnerable populations people's motivations might be something very different

so we have to always keep an eye on that you know the people with nefarious intent You know, we've seen it in the Church of England, you see it in youth groups, and you could see it just as easily anywhere we work.

People who take advantage, basically.

People take advantage.

And then, to be honest, the majority of people locally that we work with, particularly in the most extreme settings, they're doing it initially because it's a job.

You know, they might over time start to ascribe to the principles of humanitarianism.

And a lot of people who started MSF as a job locally, you know, 20, 30 years ago, are now in very senior positions in MSF.

But they might just be doing it to earn some money.

You know, I think our driver at the beginning he just wanted some cash, and there's no jobs in a war zone.

So, you know, there's different motivations for working together.

Yeah.

And then, how do you handle interacting with people who are directly involved with some of the conflicts that you're dealing with the results of?

Like, if you're, you know, the obvious example now is Hamas in Gaza, but also the Houthis in Yemen and whoever it might be.

And you're having to interact with these people who are in control of those territories, and yet you're aware that they are to varying degrees responsible for the crisis.

I mean, you do have to interact with people because, first and foremost, you have to negotiate your own safety, your own security, and your own access.

And so, you can't do that without engaging with people.

And that might be, you know, the My My Armed Groups in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, or that might be the local council.

And it's important to engage in all levels, the same way we also have to engage with the government.

I mean, even in Syria, we try to engage with the government of Syria.

They didn't want to talk to us,

but most times we will sort of say, we want to talk to you.

And it's not a judgment.

It's not a judgment of...

we support your ambitions.

You know, we're apolitical in some ways, but we have to be political with a small P because we have to understand what's going on around us.

So we engage with people.

But you're not pursuing a larger political

agenda.

We're apolitical in that we don't have a political agenda, but we have to engage in politics.

Right.

Because otherwise we wouldn't be there.

So it's one of those things where it's difficult to teach people how to do that somehow.

I mean, I don't know if I was ever really taught.

I accompanied other people who are more used to doing that and over time

got a bit of a sense of how to talk to somebody when you're, you know, when they're really quite scary and and you're going to a meeting somewhere and you're thinking God This is a really scary character But you do have to talk to them and the way you talk to them is really about sort of explaining what you're doing there and Rather than kind of saying and this is good for you because you assume they're not stupid You know you assume they can see the interest in you being there and if they clearly state that they have no interest in you being there, then you have to think again about whether you are there or not.

But what you can't really do is say, well, I'm refusing to speak to that one because I don't support his, you know, his political project because

it's not about supporting or not supporting his political project.

It's about you negotiating your own presence on the ground and the fact that you want to assist people.

And that can be some of the most complicated conversations is when you're meeting somebody and telling them that you want to assist a population that they're actively attacking.

And those can be some of the most complex conversations you have because, you you know, right now it's extremely difficult to engage with the Israeli authorities because they don't particularly want us assisting Palestinians in Gaza.

At the same time, they can't say that, you know,

they can't say, oh, we don't want you to go and assist Palestinians in Gaza.

Well, the narrative from a lot of pro-Israelis is that you're actively assisting Hamas and that you are enabling them to stockpile aid, etc.

And that's the reason that...

Yeah, and we're confident that we're not.

And so we can say quite clearly because we're on the ground, we are not assisting Hamas, we're assisting, you know, the population of Gaza and the Palestinians in Gaza.

And you can't equate every Palestinian in Gaza with Hamas.

And that would be extremely problematic for many reasons.

And that essentially is genocidal language.

So if we're going, when we do have to negotiate with the authorities in Israel, we have to work from the basis of they can't say you're not allowed to assist Palestinians in Gaza because they're all Hamas.

And we have to make it clear why we are confident that we're not assisting Hamas and come to that shared agreement of there are people in Gaza who need assistance.

But if fundamentally the actor is not acting in good faith, then you don't have trust in that conversation necessarily.

And that can be more or less complex depending almost on the level.

There's international politics, there's local politics.

It can be a bit more complicated.

You know, if you're working in a village

in Yemen and you're trying to explain, okay, well, actually, we're going to go and help this group of people that are kind of pretty much outcasts.

And people go, but they're outcasts.

I don't want you helping them.

I want you helping me.

You have to really convince why you're prioritising that group of people and not helping, you know, the group of people that he might want you to help.

Right.

So you're just trying to assess it on the basis of who needs care most urgently.

Yeah, pretty much.

You know, you have to sort of prioritize.

And that's where I think the parallels are with working in an emergency department.

you know you you're constantly triaging and and it's triaging on the basis of need it's also triaging what is the definition of triaging triage is like a concept it's a what it's actually a concept from war zones i think it came from from war zones originally but we use it all the time in a and e in britain so i i was really familiar with it before i joined msf um is it a french word it is i think it is a french word probably we use a lot of french words in there yeah in a weird way um there's another one taim moignage which msf loves which essentially means to bear witness.

But it turns out that even in French, it's not the right word, really, but we use it anyway.

But yeah, triage is that, you know, the way it's applied in British emergency departments is that nurse, you know, you go into a reception and you say, this is my problem.

And then you'll see a nurse and the nurse will categorise you and will sort of say, well, your top priority and your lowest priority.

The way it's applied in MSF is a little bit different because, you know, if you're looking at a situation, you can't say, well, we're going to do everything here.

So you have have to kind of go, Well, let's try and get a sort of understanding of where the priorities lie, match that up with what we can provide, because we can't always meet different needs.

So, we can do this, this is what they need, how can we match those up?

And that can be really difficult if, for example, you've opened a hospital, it's a maternity hospital, and then somebody comes in with a gunshot wound and you say, Well, we just don't have the capacity to deal with you.

So,

it's an ongoing process, and it's again a little bit, I guess at times can be traumatizing, but you just have to kind of live with your choices and be ready to kind of review your choices.

You make choices and then you have to go, well, actually, was I right?

Sure.

I mean, this is,

I guess, mistakes must be made all the time.

And your enemies will kind of focus on what they see as your worst mistakes and hold those up as typical of

your shortcomings.

And if you have an individual case where, you know,

what can be really problematic for your safety and your team's safety is if

somebody comes in with links to the group that's controlling your territory, either

a combatant from the group or more likely just a family member or something.

You might have a woman who arrives too late in childbirth and then the woman dies or the baby dies.

That can be really, really problematic for your own security and your own presence on the ground, whether or not you could have done anything about it, because they will hold you responsible for that because that person died in your hospital.

And that's something that you, yeah, you just have to assume that that can happen at any time.

You can't mitigate for everything.

You can't negotiate everything in advance.

Are you able to talk about the conversation at MSF leading up to MSF calling the situation in Gaza a genocide?

I can actually, yeah, I mean,

it was a long conversation.

I think there were some people in MSF.

It was a difficult conversation conversation because we're a big organization these days.

You know, we have something like 27 or more, actually 30 odd offices around the world.

We have 60,000 staff who come from a huge number of nationalities,

different backgrounds.

We have a huge range of political opinions and thoughts.

We have, you know, a lot of people who are Palestinian as staff.

We have a lot of Jewish colleagues and they've been very emotional discussions.

I think everyone's been having those same kind of emotional charged discussions about what is going on in Gaza and how do we put aside our own kind of feelings and look at the situation at hand.

And I, you know, particularly about calling it a genocide, it's a big thing.

You know,

it's,

you know, arguably maybe not our role as a humanitarian organisation to call out a genocide.

We've done it a few times.

We did it in Rwanda.

But we don't do it very often because we're not really, in some ways, the experts to judge.

And that's why some of our colleagues felt we were too slow.

Because some of our colleagues believed it's been a genocide for, you know, since 1947, and

people were bringing in other elements into the conversation that ended up being debated, you know, that weren't kind of objective elements.

The reason we decided to call it a genocide was really based on our objective evidence.

The fact that we have been working on the ground in Palestine since a very, very long time now, for decades.

We have about a thousand Palestinian staff in Gaza, we have 40 international staff in Gaza, and you know, we were witnessing daily

things happening, and actually, our staff were experiencing things happening that we just said in the end that you can't say it's not a genocide, essentially.

Rather than taking that approach that maybe the UK government is taking of, well, we don't have enough evidence to say it is a genocide.

It's like, well, you don't have enough evidence to say it's not a genocide.

I mean, the idea is that it's notoriously hard to prove genocide because it's all about the intent to eradicate a certain group

of people, and that's so hard to prove.

Did you ever read that book, East West Street?

Oh, I haven't read that one, though.

You know, it's Philippe Sands, who's a humanitarian lawyer, and it's all about how those terms were developed by a couple of men after the Second World War and how they were used in the trials at Nuremberg

and the kind of relative merits of

the idea of genocide versus crimes against humanity

and the potential problem that genocide has of creating a kind of hierarchy of suffering

that ignores the horror of crimes against individuals or crimes that you know are not necessarily perpetrated against groups of people.

So it ends up being this kind of political tool.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Genocide is one of those words, like famine.

Famine's another one.

Right.

And actually, one of part of our thinking about it and part of my thinking about it was in conversation with people like there's a scholar called Alex Duval who writes a lot about famine actually.

And we invited him to come and speak at one of our conferences.

And he explained, he cut down to some of the simplistic concepts of kind of saying, well, technically to prove a famine, you need to have the data that proves mortality from malnutrition.

So it's not just, oh, we're seeing a lot of starving people.

Look at this picture of starving people, you know, but you need to have all this scientific proof.

And it can take, in some of the places where famine is happening, you'll never get that evidence, essentially.

And he started saying, and probably the same thing with genocide.

It's a debated term, it's a contested term, you know, how do you prove intent?

And is it kind of, he was sort of actually challenged us back.

Is it your job to prove that intent?

Or is it your job to go back to some of the basics?

He did challenge as well a little bit on what's the point of calling it a genocide.

And I think that was one of the conversations as well that was quite difficult to have of what would be the point of MSF calling this a genocide.

Yeah, because then you sort of step into a political arena.

There's no way that you can pretend that you haven't done that because you are implying that there is intent on behalf of the Israelis to eradicate a lot of things.

And speaking from the perspective of MSF UK,

you can express your moral outrage in many different ways.

You don't have to call it a genocide to express your moral outrage about the fact that 12 of our colleagues have been killed now and every single one of our colleagues has been forcibly displaced, and you know, all the horrible things that even our own colleagues are experiencing, never mind the rest of the Palestinians.

And there are plenty of ways expressing moral outrage.

Speaking on behalf of MSF UK, one of the reasons we really supported calling it a genocide was because

there is international law around this.

There is that international commitment and that's been signed up to by the UK government along with others to act to prevent genocide.

And

what we can see from the UK is they are kind of they're now focusing more on that, well, there's not enough evidence to prove intent, so therefore we can't judge it a genocide and we'll have to wait for the legalistic definition to be proven, which might take two, three, four years,

in which case, you know, it's too late for them to meet their commitments to prevent it.

So we are entering a political arena with that.

But it's a political arena because we think, well, actually,

there's nothing else we can do here.

You know, we still have teams on the ground, but their capacity to actually have any form of impact on this is so limited.

So it becomes a case of when you're thinking about triage and when you're thinking about what the most urgent course of action is, it is inevitably political to some degree.

Yes, that's where we got to.

Whereas the only way this needs to stop, that was our conclusion.

This needs to stop now.

And we've tried to pull all the other levers we've got to try and make this stop, and it's not stopping.

So where are the levers where we haven't pulled yet and the lever we hadn't pulled yet was political.

It doesn't mean it will work necessarily, but it really was, you know, on behalf of our Palestinian colleagues, we are going to pull that big lever that we don't do very often, but we did feel it was

that time.

And I know a lot of people were happy that you did, as well as there being people who were going to be critical of you.

And I suppose some of the things those people would say is that you're then compromised going forward and you'll never really be able to claim that you are an apolitical organisation going forward.

Do you worry about that?

I don't worry too much about that.

I've heard it from people.

I also think we have been supported in our stance by so many people, and not just it's not about whether you're left-wing or right-wing on this one.

You know, when we did come out and sort of state it very clearly, not just that it's a genocide, but in the UK, we said we think the UK government is complicit.

We were a bit worried about that.

We weren't worried about the risk, so we were worried about how the general public would perceive that and whether people would feel somehow that we were letting them down.

We got a few complaints.

We got a few people who said, well, yeah, we think you're entering a political arena.

It shouldn't be your arena to enter.

We got a lot more support.

And conveniently, or,

you know, I'm not sure if it was convenient, but

it coincided with Alistair Campbell and the rest is politics, you know, kind of essentially saying the same thing, having that conversation on this, you know, huge podcast with a massive audience, sort of saying, well, actually looking at their argumentation I agree with it really and it doesn't mean we should all believe what Alistair Campbell says either but it just helped people to think through the steps of how we got there and so we had some people saying I don't fully support it but I understand why you've said it we had a few people said actually before you said it I didn't think it was a genocide but now when you put it like that, yeah, I do.

And it was really interesting to see those coming from even friends friends of mine who aren't political or who are not necessarily sort of left-wing or whatever or activists at all kind of saying, well, actually,

I think it was right, you know, and I think what we've seen overwhelmingly is support for us doing that.

Doesn't mean that we won't make some people unhappy, but I think we've had seen more support from people who said, well, actually, thank you for doing that because somebody has to start saying it now.

And it needs to not be seen as a controversial, extreme opinion.

So you can't please everybody all of the time, but I think we on looking back, I think we, at the moment, I think we've made the right choice, and I think we stick by that.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I think that is how I felt.

Yeah, and I do wonder whether

some of my colleagues were right that actually we were a bit late, a bit slow.

I mean, we've been writing to the UK government for a long time without calling it a genocide, calling out things like, you know, breaches of international humanitarian law and asking the government to explain to us exactly how they were involved in this and what support they were providing to this.

And

it didn't get much attention, it didn't get much traction.

And almost like was we had to use that big word to get attention and traction.

We still haven't managed to have that engagement from the government, but it seems to be kind of

we needed to use that big word to kind of get the traction, I guess.

There's a really good episode of a podcast I like: Ezra Klein,

New York Times journalist,

and he talks to the guy that wrote that book I mentioned, Philippe Sands.

And

I would really recommend it to anyone who's

thinking about all this stuff and

the idea of genocide and the really complicated history of it and the way that it is being used now and all the head-scrambling factors that are at play, especially around Gaza and Israel.

There was a conversation I had the other day with, when you have legal advisors, obviously, and even this kind of concept of international humanitarian law and what does that mean, it's so ambiguous in some ways, technically.

The basic principles that contain within there are completely valid, but there's always a way of debating the ambiguities around it.

And in some ways, you know, I know an academic called Niamh Gordon, he teaches nearby, and he was just saying, well, in some ways, international humanitarian law can be weaponized to kind of excuse why you did something.

You're not allowed to to bomb a hospital except if you believe the hospital is being used for military purposes.

But the burden of proof for that falls currently in Gaza on the people working in the hospital and the people, you know, and the patients and the Palestinians and the people trying to assist the Palestinians.

The burden of proof is not falling on Israel to prove that they had a strong belief that the hospital was being used for military purposes and they had evidence of that.

They don't have to, currently today they don't seem to have to have any evidence of that.

And you know, looking back through history, hospitals have been bombed.

We had our hospital in Kundutz in Afghanistan was bombed and we had, when I worked in Yemen, a lot of the hospitals were being bombed.

And you can kind of see that the way international humanitarian law is being interpreted in a very technical way, it gives that space to warring parties to say, well, I assumed it was being used for military purposes, so I bombed it.

And they don't have to then provide any form of evidence of that.

And that's where we need to have those bigger conversations about how do we get back to the basic principles of what this looks like, you know, how society can kind of work together in a global sort of sense.

Within MSF then, are you able to have these kinds of conversations and disagreements with your colleagues in a way that doesn't just explode?

Are people able to keep it together in a way that

to me it doesn't seem they are on social media, for example?

I think, I mean, we're used to having debates about topics.

We have this culture of debate in MSF, and I worked in the, you know, in the Paris office for six years, and even though MSF is an international humanitarian organisation, it started in France, right?

So you have this kind of almost French culture of debate and discussion and putting things on the table and being able to disagree with each other and then being able to go to the bar afterwards and, you know, have a gourwas.

Have a gourwas and exactly.

And it hasn't changed that much in France.

So yeah, pretty much that.

I don't, but they do um but yeah that kind of having those big conversations and challenging each other and I when I first moved to Paris I found it a bit intimidating at first you know

but what you realize is you have this debate you have this discussion you go round and round and round in circles by having that then you get the kind of buy-in I guess from everybody I do feel though that Gaza has been something exceptional even in the way we talk about it in the way that people really struggle to engage in that debate debate with some modicum of respect for the other person's opinion.

And that's including within MSF.

And we've had some really,

it's not just about people getting upset and emotional.

We've had, you know, really some

people gone beyond the limit of accusing each other of complicity and whatever.

And if you don't use the right words, you're somehow complicit.

Or if you don't believe it's a genocide, somehow you're

responsible.

And I think that's, if even in MSF with our culture of debate, we're there, then I think it must be so much worse maybe in other organisations.

And we've had to, in my role, I've had to kind of try and take a bit of time away with the people who feel really

disillusioned by all of this.

And I think we will lose people through this debate.

And we will lose people who feel that they weren't respected and listened to.

And it's kind of sad that we didn't manage when we really had to, to

control that debate within your organization.

Right, when ultimately you're presumably focused on the same thing, which is trying to help people.

That's what I feel is that at times you start losing that good faith, that everybody's engaging in it because

they recognise the dilemma and

they want us to take the right choices.

But at times, it can feel that people are engaging in bad faith.

They're not engaging because that's their objective, they're engaging for another reason.

And I think that's where we need to kind of rebuild sort of trust that everybody's voice can be heard, but not everybody can be in charge of making the decisions.

And like anything else, in some ways we have to trust each other, to listen to each other and then take actions in good faith.

And I think it's going to be a bit problematic to rebuild some of the relationships after Gaza.

I hope we can.

I think most people recognise that it was just such a really complex discussion to have, but I think

there's a risk that some people might

still feel disillusioned and and kind of feel they don't want to be part of of MSF anymore and and that's a real shame and presumably you didn't have similar conversations around aid in Sudan no and that's what's also quite sad and a lot of because that's a

crisis that it's horrible in numbers terms sort of dwarfs everything else yeah and it's only you can't think of equivalents and and you know

Gaza is tiny and it's a really small area of land with a couple of million people and Sudan is huge with millions and millions and millions of people.

But what's happening in Sudan is a travesty.

And

what's happening in Sudan is not getting enough attention.

And that becomes part of the debate as well internally, but it also becomes part of the challenge: how do you get the same level of attention on Sudan as you do on something like Gaza?

And what is the situation in Sudan currently?

So in Sudan, essentially, I mean, it's described as a sort of a civil war, but again, there's a massive amount of geopolitics going on.

So you have a group called the RSF, who in the old days would be called the Janjaweed, who control parts of Darfur.

And then you have the Sudanese armed forces, so the government of Sudan, which was extremely instable anyway, running up to all of this, who are essentially fighting with the RSF.

And that's the sort of simplistic picture.

In reality, what we see today is there are parts of Darfur where there is famine, famine has been declared, where humanitarian actors can't access safely, where there are massacres of the population happening, huge levels of violence.

Some of that violence is ethnic violence, so there are groups of the population who are being massacred because of their ethnicity, and tens of millions of people are living in extreme crisis.

And those warring parties are being supported by big states around the world from one side or the other.

What is kind of a travesty with Sudan is that so people know, oh, there's a problem in Sudan, but they don't really understand the scale of the problem.

And again, they're not really engaging with, well, how can we support Sudan, you know?

And it was a debate and a discussion that we wanted to have more publicly, but people just weren't interested in engaging in that debate publicly.

People were going, oh, it's bad over there in Sudan.

There is something different about somewhere in Africa where people, oh, these people over there in Africa, not really thinking that Sudan has a highly intelligent cohort, the population has huge academic institutions.

It's not some kind of people's vision of what Africa is.

And I do wonder whether sometimes

people's vision of Ethiopia in the 80s.

And even that wasn't quite the real vision anyway.

But

I think that's part of the problem is people do, and it's normal, people do struggle a little bit sometimes to empathize.

with people.

With something so foreign with a culture they can't relate to, etc.

And also the media, I mean,

you know, it is more difficult for for the and I'm not blaming the media here but it's difficult for the media to get into those parts of Sudan and in the same way it's difficult for us to get into those parts of Sudan.

Hey, it's me again on the walk with Rosie just reminding you that if you are able to make a donation to MSF to help support them in the work they're doing in Sudan, in Gaza, in so many other areas of conflict around the world.

There is a link in the description of today's podcast.

Thank you.

I appreciate it.

Right now, back to my conversation with Natalie.

What are the times that you remember as being some of the hardest and some of the most rewarding?

Like, what were the days that were hardest for you?

I mean, I think that the

The toughest ones were probably the places with the sort of the most extreme levels of violence.

So, you know, I've talked about Syria and the north of Yemen and

somewhere like Central African Republic where I worked in 2014, I think it was.

Yeah, when it was in the midst of like an extremely violent civil war.

And you're working, you know, you're despondent because you're working alongside local colleagues who are experiencing this.

It's not just that they're, you know, like me, I can get in and I can usually get out.

It's not always so simple as that, but I'm there because I've chosen to be there and they haven't chosen to be there.

And so, you know, like in Syria when we were going to support Aleppo, we were living in a sort of house that didn't have electricity and didn't have running water.

We didn't have any mobile phone networks and we were under the sort of missiles

and we were sort of essentially sheltering in a kitchen because that didn't at least have windows and you're there with your Syrian colleagues who are sort of sheltering with you kind of and they don't know what's going on.

And they have things like, you know, maybe one of their family members has been arrested and detained or maybe someone's been killed and you're sort of there going what are we doing here I mean what are we trying to achieve by doing this and it can it just makes you feel a bit helpless and a bit hopeless and you think oh you know the worst thing that could happen here is that I get killed and then probably MSF would think again about whether we can safely work here and then any form of assistance we're trying to provide would be pointless.

It's almost a bit futile to put yourself in that in that situation.

What keeps you going then in those moments when you're having those feelings?

Because they're sometimes the most funny, ridiculous moments as well.

So again, thinking about that kitchen in Syria, we had quite,

it becomes just so kind of crazy.

Little things become hilarious.

So you become a bit hysterical, you become a bit like, whatever.

You know, there's that kind of mash kind of comedy that goes on, which is, you know, all a bit sort of tongue-in-cheek and a bit cynical and whatever, but it...

it kind of keeps you going somehow.

You're sort of there crouching in this kitchen and you're going, this is stupid.

Why is the kitchen safer than any any other room or in yemen when planes would fly around in the sky the staff in the hospital that i was working at they weren't msf staff they were local staff for the well the ministry of health that wasn't functioning anymore and they would every time they saw a plane they would run out into the into the grounds of the hospital and there was a waste pit that we dug there where they put all the kind of hospital waste old dressings and things like that and it was covered by a mattress you know we did fix it but when we first arrived there it was just a pit in the ground covered by an old mattress.

And they would run out and jump into this pit and put the mattress over their heads.

And I would, it was somehow like comic.

It was just ridiculous.

And afterwards, we'd have to have that kind of frank conversation about, well, you know, the hospital has a staircase and there's therefore sort of three levels of concrete above you and the stairs and everything.

So isn't that a bit safer than sheltering under a mattress?

In a medical waste pit.

Exactly.

But it becomes a bit comedic.

Or, you know, in the kitchen in Syria, we'd start, we'd light up a shisha and and end up sort of sitting around going well if we're gonna die we may as well you know be smoking a sheisha and doing all the things that I wouldn't normally do but you just think well it may as well so that kind of bonds you build with those people in the most in the most difficult circumstances kind of keep you going I guess and what else do you do like do you get a day off in those circumstances and then what do you do with a day off you try to I mean it's those are the most extreme ones and a lot of places we work are not that extreme so I don't want to paint a picture of all doing that those are the kind of the worst and the best times a lot of times you actually

running a humanitarian project is a bit like running any other kind of thing activity and particularly if you become like the project manager you have to deal with a lot of bureaucracy and a lot of frustration and tiredness is just from kind of filling in forms and sending emails and responding to emails and all the usual stuff and so you make people have days off and There's never a moment when you should say, oh, you can't have a day off.

You need to keep working.

I've had times that's happened to me where people have kind of gone oh you're getting a bit frazzled you need a day off what you can do on your day off is a bit can sometimes be a bit limited it depends where you are you might be lucky and working in you know in Addis Abba Bar and you can go and eat in some restaurants and go and see some music or you might be working in like the bush in Central African Republic like I was where somebody said you need a day off here's my laptop here's my hard drive it was full of like all the classic movies and I sat there and watched you know the godfather one two and three back to back just because it was something to do really.

But you do have to force people to take that time out.

And if you're staying long-term in a place, we make sure that people leave and go somewhere else and go and,

you know, go and sit on the beach somewhere or go and do something different.

Yeah, go to the gym, not feel guilty about it, really.

Right.

And is it possible to engage with things that are totally removed from where you are?

Like to listen to stupid podcasts or whatever it might be?

I always do.

I mean, when I first joined MSF, you you know, there wasn't streaming so much, and I didn't always have the internet, but my iPod was like

my biggest thing, and I would go and like download particularly music.

I'm big into music and stuff like that.

And the one rule I had when I joined MSF was

I used to work as a medic at Glastonbury Festival.

And when I joined MSF, I was still doing that.

And I worked as a medic on the stages, actually.

Oh, yeah.

So, yeah, it was amazing.

I mean, I used to work in the medical tent, and then over time, got that slot of being the doctor for the pyramid stage and the other stage.

And you would work like a couple of six hour shifts which meant you got to watch the bands and then otherwise you were free to go to the festival so when I joined MSF they said oh sometimes people are a bit like oh they need Christmas off or they need certain times off and I was like I need Glastonbury off yeah

and it became a bit legendary because you know, I would be somewhere and they would go, oh yeah, so, and I was in what was called the emergency team, so you have to respond, you know, you sign a year-long contract and they can send you wherever they want.

But I had it sort of written almost into my contract that

I would be coming out for Glastonbury.

And sometimes there are places where it's quite difficult to get out.

The second time I went to Yemen, we got there by boat from Djibouti, you know.

And the boat only runs twice a week.

And I was like, nope, I need to be on that boat because I need to get back and I need to go to Glastonbury.

Emily Evers comes and picks you up in her chopper.

It's weird because I actually haven't been to Glastonbury for years and years now.

I go to Green Man instead, but

I'm older now.

Yeah, Green Man's nice.

Also, End of the Road.

Have you been there?

I have.

Love End of the Road.

It's great.

That's a good one.

Who are some of the people that you remember seeing from the side of the stage at Glastonbury that you were thrilled to?

I saw the Rolling Stones.

Oh, right.

Yeah, that was pretty incredible.

I think Arcade Fire was one of the things.

And did you have to administer emergency assistance for any of the Rolling Stones?

I mean, the stage medics, to be honest, I also used to work at Reading Festival, and mainly your role for the stage medic, I mean, you have to be ready and it's covering those first few roads of the crowd.

Yeah.

particularly because

while you've got sort of first aid tents and stuff back there, if you're trapped in those first few rows, you can't get out.

And what happens, the worst memory of being side of stage was Lana Del Rey.

I mean, I quite like Lana Delray's music, but live, not such a huge fan, but it was quite a long time ago.

She was on in the daytime, she wasn't headlining, it was quite hot, and a lot of teenage girls had been like waiting to see Lana Del Rey, and they were all on the front rows.

And I think they got the impression if you come over the barrier somehow, you get lifted over the barrier, then somehow you get run off backstage.

And so we had all these teenage girls sort of fainting.

And I'm not sure if they were really fainting because they were seeing Lana Del Rey or they were false fainting.

It was a little bit unclear.

But they were all kind of getting hauled over the barriers by the security guards.

And then they get run to the side to get assessed.

Usually not by, there's a kind of a lot of nurses and first aiders.

And there's only really one doctor.

So I didn't have to assess them so much.

But yeah, they're getting assessed and then they kind of, you know, they really want to stay there.

They're really like, oh, no, no.

And so they're kind of still kind of going, oh, no, no, can I just go?

I don't feel very well.

Can I lie down backstage?

And you're like,

even if you go backstage at Glastonbury, you're not going to meet Lana Del Rey.

She's in her like truck somewhere.

She isn't.

But so most of the work you end up doing is really if there's something, a crush at the front, or if someone actually comes over and is sick.

So most of the time, you're not doing very much at all.

You're just watching the bands.

Right, right.

Yeah, it's great.

It was the best job.

Yeah.

And then if someone is listening to this and they're thinking, I want to work for MSF,

what kind of attributes do you think they need to have?

What do you screen for when you're talking to people who want to join?

It's a really good question.

I mean, first of all, we're not all doctors.

I am a doctor, but that's actually relatively unusual in the job I'm doing now, which is more sort of, you know, executive management or whatever.

But we're not all doctors.

We do medical things, so we have a lot of doctors and nurses, but we also have all those other support people.

So

we do need people to be expert somehow, mostly, and experienced.

We're not taking in the medical side people out of medical schools.

We're not taking people in their first few years of medical school.

I worked for the NHS for sort of eight or nine years before I joined MSF and I wonder now if I would have been recruited because they might have had someone more experience than me.

So there's the kind of technical side of things of you know demonstrating how you're going to be useful if you work for MSF.

And then I think there's

the recruitment is quite interesting because because it's not a sort of test, it's more a kind of discussion.

And they start talking to you about, you know, what is your experience of working in difficult environments, of living maybe in rough conditions, things like that.

And they're quietly judging you about how much do we think you're going to be able to cope if you actually go out there.

Have you been to Glastonbury?

Well, I did use it.

Yeah.

I use Glastonbury and the medical tent, particularly the medical tent.

The stage is a bit different, but the medical tent at Glastonbury, I mean, it is a bit like working in a war zone, you know.

If you can work under a tent, I mean, the luxury of Glastonbury is you have a helicopter on standby, but you're still having to make those judgment calls in the field of people who are maybe taken a few things or drunk a few things.

Glastonbury was weird.

You'd have people who wanted to give birth at Glastonbury.

It was one year I had three pregnant women in labour come to the medical tent and say, oh no, I want to have my baby here.

And you're showing them this like dirty medical tent with people with, you know, gastroenteritis, you know, lying on the floor.

And And then no, no, I want to have my baby at Glastonbury because they feel it somehow spiritual and mystic and whatever.

So I told that story and they were like, oh, if you can do that, you can probably survive South Sudan or somewhere.

Fair enough.

What kind of perception do you think people have of the work that you do?

I mean, I suppose

people like to bandy around the word heroes when you're working in those kinds of situations.

Is that how you see it?

I really hate the concept of humanitarian heroes.

They really, I just kind of detest it.

There's a whole thing about it.

And I get why humanitarian organisations do it to try and convince people to support their work, but I really don't like it.

For me, I went to go and work for a humanitarian organisation to go and see something a bit different and go somewhere a bit different.

And there's a need for people to do that, but there's also a need for people to carry on staying, working in the NHS and doing the job I did before.

there's no better or no worse.

I think sometimes it's almost a privilege to be able to go and do that though, with the world being in such a, feels like it's such a giant burning mess right now, that I'm lucky enough to be able to think, oh, I'm somehow directly helping people.

I mean,

I'm on the front line or less directly helping people now, but still working for an organization that is helping those people.

And it can sometimes feel like for everybody else, oh, God, they're better than I am because they're doing that.

And I think there are different ways for everybody to kind of express their solidarity with people living in crisis and to do something about the situation that's going on in the world.

And of course, you know, my job is to say that people can always support MSF and that helps, you know, and we're very reliant on people, you know, particularly financially supporting us.

But that's not the only way they can act, I guess.

And you can act by engaging in something really simple, like your local community or whatever.

And, you know, the concept of humanitarianism doesn't need to be these kind of international aid workers.

Humanitarianism is essentially about humanity and just kind of putting that principle of humanity first.

And I think that's why I hate the whole humanitarian heroes kind of slogan because I think it really demeans all those other people who are doing such amazing work elsewhere.

I won't use it anymore then.

Please don't.

No, I get it.

I think that's a worthwhile thing to say.

I'm very worthwhile.

I'm very worthy.

You're my hero.

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Continue.

Hey, welcome back, podcasts.

That was Natalie Roberts talking to me there,

UK Executive Director of Medcin Saint-Frontière.

I'm very grateful to her for making the time to come and talk to me.

Final reminder, please don't forget, there's a link in the description if you are able to make a donation to MSF to support their work.

Thanks also.

If you came along to the Mannington Book Bash

at beautiful Mannington Hall in North Norfolk, last weekend, I was there waffling with the owner of my local independent bookshop in Norwich, the Bookhive.

Henry, he was talking to me about I Love You Buy.

And yeah, we had a good chat.

I played Pizza Time on my guitar with a backing beat.

I don't know, it was fine, but it was a bit like seeing one of your very young children doing a recital at a school performance.

Anyway, it was nice to meet some of you afterwards and sign some books.

And it was great to meet Nigel Planer,

actor, comedian,

writer, and of course star of the Young Ones.

He played Neil the hippie and I was interviewing him about his book that he's just written, a memoir called Young Once, in which he talks all about his career with particular focus on his time with the comic strip gang, Peter Richardson, Alexei Sale,

Adrian Edmondson, Rick Male, Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders,

amazingly talented group of people, so many of whom featured in the Young ones,

which was a really important show for me and a lot of people of my generation.

We were just exactly the right age, I think.

It came out in 1982, so I was 13.

And I think I was initially a little bit scared by it, or maybe just put off because my dad hated it so much.

He thought it was...

I don't know what he thought.

He just thought it was frightening because it was a narcotic.

And they used to say

before the show would go out, now time for anarchic comedy on BBC Two or wherever it was, I think it was BBC Two, with the young ones.

And my dad would stand

over in the corner of the room and go, anarchic,

and then shuffle out.

So much of that show is now ingrained in my consciousness on quite a deep level, many lines.

And at one point in my conversation with Nigel, we were talking about the fact that there was a certain amount of snootiness in the alternative comedy scene when it came to American performers and just the tone of American showbiz in general, the kind of glitzy, slightly insincere sheen

of performers like

you know, the rat pack and Dean Martin and that kind of thing.

Which, along with the kind of prevailing entertainment culture of blokes in suits telling mother-in-law jokes that there was in the UK, they were

in opposition to, I suppose.

Anyway, I said, like, was it you that was in that sketch in the young ones, Nigel, where it's these two cheesy entertainers and they're playing golf or something, maybe, and they start singing this weird song.

I'm tying my dog to the railroad track.

Choo-choo train's gonna break his back

they used to call him spot but now he's called splat it's a fairly dark song sorry rosie doesn't sound very funny it's a satire rosie not funny anyway but nigel said oh i wrote that bit and for a few seconds we started singing it together

and afterwards i was remembering that charlie brooker really liked that bit as well.

I think when Charlie was on my podcast, I think we also sang that together.

Anyway, it was a kind of surreal moment.

It was good fun.

I really liked meeting Nigel and I recommend his book.

If you're a comedy fan, definitely worth picking up.

And then I was on Radio 2 talking to Sarah Cox, who's filling in for Scott Mills.

She was asking me about the book, and

she played Doing It Wrong.

So that's cool that Doing It Wrong's been on Radio 2.

I guess we'll be playing Doing It Wrong as well as many other great tracks and perhaps a couple of covers, maybe even a new number or two

on the 13th and 14th of October at the Norwich Arts Centre, where I'll be performing with the Adam Buxton Band, who are Joe Mount of Metronomy, my producer on the album, plus Gabriel Stebbing and Michael Lovett, former and current members respectively of Metronomy.

I think the 13th is sold out, but there may, as I speak, still be a few tickets left for the 14th.

Hope to see you there.

But before that, there's the Wimbledon Literature Festival.

I think there's still a few tickets left for that.

Me and Samira Ahmed on stage talking about I Love You Bai

and other bits and pieces followed by signing.

That's at the end of next week, as I speak, 10th of October at 8 p.m.

at the new Wimbledon Theatre.

And if you can't make that, or even if you can, I'll try and keep it varied and dig out some other stuff for my appearance at the Royal Festival Hall at the London Literary Festival on the 26th of October at 7.30.

That'll be a show made up of two halves in the first half myself and a moderator.

I'm not sure exactly who it'll be yet.

But hopefully someone nice, a friend of the podcast, chatting to me about I Love You Bai and TV in the 90s, that kind of thing.

More clips.

And in the second half, I think I'm going to play a song or two with Michael from the Adam Buxton band on stage, as well as taking questions from the audience and then signing books afterwards.

So I hope you can make it along to one of those.

Links in the description for tickets.

Oh, it's quite hot now, isn't it, Doug?

Okay, that's pretty much it for this episode.

Thank you very much once again to Natalie Roberts and all at MSF.

Thank you to Seamus Murphy Mitchell for additional conversation editing and general production support.

Thanks to everyone who works very hard at ACAST, liaising with my sponsors.

Thanks particularly to Joe Copeman who is leaving ACAST after being there over a decade.

And Joe is one of the people who welcomed me to ACAST originally all all the way back in 2015

and has been one of the people who's really looked after me since.

Thank you so much, Joe.

Wishing you all the best for whatever you do going forward.

But thanks especially, of course, to you.

Thank you for coming back.

Thank you for listening to this episode as well as all the other episodes and listening right to the end.

You are a special friend.

I think we both know that you're a cut above the average listener.

I appreciate all of them who dip in,

but it's different, isn't it, to the hardcore

who go right to the end

and listen to this stuff.

I appreciate it.

Come here, let's have a creepy hug.

Good to see you.

You're the best.

And until next time, we share the same owl space.

Please go carefully

and for what it's worth.

I love you.

Bye.

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