-I'm very, very happy you're here.
I want to talk about the show.
But I want to start by talk-- World Cup time.
England plays tomorrow.
They're already through to the next round.
Will you watch that game, though?
Is that very important to you?
-Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes. -Okay.
-And I will watch it, touchingly,
with the same eight friends I've been watching the World Cup with
since 1982.
-Oh, fantastic.
Does that mean you have to get to a plane to go see them?
Or are they coming here?
-No, no, they come to my house. -Okay.
-And we watch it on the TV.
And we -- nothing changes.
We're now in our mid to late 50s.
And some of my friends are now judges and heads of banks
and things like that.
But we still, if England score,
we still have what we call a bundle.
Do you have bundles?
-I -- I don't know.
-Well, it just means you all --
you all jump on top of each other.
-Oh, like a pig pile we would call it.
-A pig pile, yeah. Yeah. -Yeah.
Of course, your name makes it classier.
-Yeah. [ Laughter ]
But we have to do it quite slowly now
because we've all got bad backs.
-Oh, right. -Yeah.
[ Laughter ]
-So, there's a little bit --
and I'm sure there's someone who has certain medical reasons.
They can't be at the bottom of bundle anymore.
-Well, no.
There's always one who is at the bottom,
because we sort of hate him.
-Okay, gotcha. [ Laughter ]
So, now -- I feel like there wasn't a ton of optimism about
the English team going into the World Cup,
but they've won the first two matches.
Are you -- Are you falling for it again?
-We have beaten the footballing giants of Tunisia and Panama.
[ Laughter ]
And the English press is now saying
this is our year for the World Cup.
-Yeah. -Yeah.
-You are a bit -- It is, like, it's recidivism.
That every -- You just keep falling for the team
every year and hope.
And it is -- I mean, it's been since '82.
Obviously, not -- not much has gone right.
-Uh, no. Nothing at all.
-Yeah. -Nothing at all.
Except, almost every time,
we lose to the Germans, and we can't this year.
-Yeah, there you go. [ Cheers and applause ]
That's something to look forward to.
-I know.
I'm so sorry for the Germans.
-You do. You look -- There's a sadness in this coming through.
-Yes, it's breaking my heart.
-When you were young, you actually worked at
the Fulham Football Club, which is a London club.
-Yes, yes.
I used to wash the seats there.
Disgusting job, really.
And dangerous too, because for some reason,
my work mate was a psychopath.
[ Laughter ]
And I said to our boss,
"I don't think this guy's very well, you know, mentally."
And he said, "Nonsense, nonsense. He's fine."
And after three weeks, he stabbed me.
-No. -Yes.
[ Audience ohs ]
I have to say I resigned.
[ Laughter ]
-They let him stay on? -Oh, yeah. He stayed on.
[ Laughter ]
-Yeah. -But that's English football.
-You're right, exactly there.
He's got a go-getter attitude you don't have.
Like, he brought the knife.
-Yeah, quite. [ Laughter ]
He was the real deal, I was --
-I've been a fan of yours for a long time.
People have told me that we look alike.
-I know. -Yeah.
There's a little similarity, and I --
-Like droopy eyes.
-Yeah. We got that nice droopy eye.
And I really -- I will be honest.
In the mid-'90s, I really leaned into the fact
that we looked alike. [ Laughter ]
You had a hairstyle that I thought --
I was like, "That looks great on Hugh Grant's face.
I'm close enough. I'm gonna give it a shot."
[ Laughter and applause ]
And that's, like, that's, like, pretty...
[ Cheers and applause ]
I'm very ashamed of this one because this one,
you looked great and I did another terrible thing
that you avoided in the '90s,
which is I grew a terrible thing on my chin.
But that -- [ Laughter ]
That's the one I feel ashamed for.
-That's awful. We look like two telephones.
[ Laughter ]
-So, this is based on a true story.
-Yes. -The show.
-Yeah, yeah.
-And tell us a little bit about Jeremy Thorpe.
-Well, it was this massive scandal in Britain in the '70s.
I remember it 'cause I, you know, I was in my teens then.
And it was just the biggest political scandal
you've ever had.
And it resulted in this massive trial,
the trial of the century.
And it was this guy who was the head of
one of our three big parties -- political parties.
Absolute member of the establishment.
He went to Eaton, you know, where the royal family go.
Went to Oxford.
Beautifully dressed. Very smooth.
Had a family. Had a wife.
It turned out he put a hit on his ex-gay lover
who was stalking him and threatening to reveal him.
And it was a really crap hit.
It was -- That was the very English bit.
It was so kind of hopeless and amateurish.
You know, the hit man was an out-of-work airline pilot
who got it all wrong and used the wrong gun
and shot the dog instead of the man.
[ Laughter ]
So it was very scandalous.
And it -- So the series is quite dark, but also funny
because it was just so absurd.
-Well, I will say the -- when I heard the description of it,
well, you know, there's a murder trial
and it's a closeted politician.
And, I think, in this fraught political time we live in,
I just assumed it would be so much darker.
It is -- It's a weird thing to say.
It is a lot of fun as well,
which is a nice thing to watch about politics right now.
[ Laughter ]
-Yeah, that's right. That's right.
But they are freaks. I mean, I --
[ Laughter ]
I've spent the last six years of my life, very unlike me,
getting heavily involved in politics in Britain.
This campaign I've been doing about evil newspapers.
So I'm up close with politicians all the time,
and it's unquestionably true that they are weirdos.
[ Laughter ]
Who would go into that job? -Yeah.
-You're not paid very much.
And, really, with that whole thing, it's true.
It is show business for the ugly.
[ Laughter ]
Narcissistic, egomaniacal. -Yeah.
-Sociopathic.
And with absolutely -- and very, very rarely
any interest in the country or its welfare, I find.
-I mean, you -- so, I mean, one of the things,
I know you've been advocating for is trying to stop --
it was the hacking scandal with newspapers.
-Yeah, yeah.
-And do you at least find that
when you talk to politicians about that,
that they are listening to you and hearing?
Or do you feel like it's going in one ear and out the other?
-No, they listen and they are on our side.
Completely on our side, actually.
I don't think I've ever met one
who is really philosophically opposed.
But that's not how politics works.
It's one of the things that's made me so cynical.
Because these big newspapers are so powerful,
they make or break our politicians.
They choose our prime minister effectively.
So when it comes to these big votes on --
well, let's have a new system of regulation where, actually,
newspapers do have to, kind of,
print the truth instead of a lie.
At the last moment, the government will always back out,
because they have to please these big tax-dodging bastards
who run the newspaper.
-It's very terrifying.
And I'm glad we don't have any problems like that over here.
[ Laughter and applause ]
-Well, you don't have those problems.
-Yeah, we don't have those. It's true.
-No, your press is rather nice.