Simon Amstell: Do Nothing Page #5

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religious conflict or anything, you know...

It's a nightmare. It's a nightmare.

You can't imagine.

You can't imagine, Dublin.

That's their belief.

And, you know, we mustn't judge them

because they live in Essex,

where there's not much to do,

and so there's a lot more time for racism.

I live in London now.

God, if I had the time, but...

Every day, I'm walking through Oxford Street,

I see people from ethnic minorities

and think, "I should do something,"

but I'm so busy, you know.

And I... You know, it's unfair of me

to just be on this stage attacking them.

They have their perspective.

They were just trying

to protect their children.

They saw it... From their perspective,

it was a bad example to their children

'cause they could end up marrying gentiles,

then their children's children

wouldn't be Jewish,

then they wouldn't be able to go

to a Jewish school,

and then where would they learn paranoia?

So...

And nobody's ever caused a drama

about this in the family.

We just sort of try to keep the peace

and we try not to say anything about it,

because it's genuinely believed in this

family that when my mum got divorced,

which was quite a drama, it was the direct

reason for my grandpa becoming diabetic.

So no one's allowed to say anything,

so they say these sort of

awful, offensive things,

and I'm sat there going, "My God, if this

was being televised, people would boo you."

And then, near the end of the dinner,

because I've been on a few courses

to try and make my life happier,

I say to these members of my family, in as

sort of sweet and polite a way as possible,

"Isn't it a shame that my brother

couldn't bring his girlfriend tonight?

"It's sort of a shame.

Isn't it sort of a shame?"

And they get quite defensive, of course,

and say, "Well, why isn't she here?

"We thought she would be here.

Why isn't she here?"

And I say, "Oh, isn't it... I don't know.

"Isn't it because of that time

that you said, 'She can't be here'?"

I say... I ask, "Just explain to me

why is the belief more important

"than the feelings of a human being?"

And it's so sad, 'cause she's a brunette.

She could pass.

And then my brother comes over

and just starts swearing at them,

and it becomes a bit intense, and I say,

"Oh, no, it's all right. Calm down.

"I've been on a course, and..."

And my grandpa... This is just the point

where the cake is supposed to come.

We should be singing happy birthday,

and now my grandpa is crying,

partly because of the drama that I've created,

but partly 'cause he can't eat the cake.

And, uh... Yeah, it's a tricky business.

The whole thing's a tricky business.

It is then suggested that we all go back

to my mum's house and resolve this.

And I feel very awkward

about the whole thing

because we don't have drama in this family,

and now I've created one,

and I've got to resolve it.

We've got to have this whole debate

about who's right and who's wrong.

And I used to... As a child, I was quite into

debate and opinions,

and now I just feel like debate and politics

is the opposite of truth,

the opposite of beauty, the opposite of joy.

When I was younger I went to see

the Vanessa Feltz talk show being filmed.

There's nothing we can do.

It happened. It happened.

The subject up for debate that day was,

"Should I murder my husband?"

At the beginning of the show,

the floor manager told us

that the best opinion of today

will win a bottle of champagne.

So there's everything to play for.

Should she or shouldn't she

murder her husband?

Twenty minutes go by and people say

some very interesting things,

and I, at about 14 years old,

stand up and say,

"I think you shouldn't murder your husband

'cause you could go to prison."

And I won a bottle of champagne.

And whether it's a lowbrow,

stupid, daytime-TV-show debate like that,

or a highbrow Question Time

political debate,

it's the same inane, nonsensical,

cyclical, boring topics,

and we go round and round in circles

debating the same things

over and over again.

Somehow we take out logic and

prior knowledge from our collective minds.

And I think it's quite similar

to what happened to me

when I did magic mushrooms

a few years ago.

Somehow, I was able to say to my friend,

on mushrooms -

and I think it's this sort of conversation

that we're all constantly having

that stops us from progressing at the speed

that we perhaps could -

isn't it odd how, when you say to someone,

"Oh, do you want to meet up

for some dinner next Thursday?",

the dinner is a lie.

What you're really saying is,

"It'd be nice to meet up with you.

I haven't seen you for a while."

Why do we have to have this dinner cover?

How do you know how hungry

you're going to be on Thursday?

Why can't we just say,

"It'd be nice to meet up with you"?

And there should be a place

where you could just meet,

the meeting place, an indoor place,

where you walk in and you sit down,

there's nothing, just chairs,

and you sit down and you look at each other

and you meet, and it's truthful,

it's authentic, it's beautiful.

And then I thought,

after about half an hour there

you could get a bit hungry.

And I invented the restaurant.

So I didn't want to have this debate

with my family,

who was right and who was wrong.

Very difficult thing.

We have to continue to debate things

because there is no truth,

there's only perspective.

And their perspective was

that it was a terrible misunderstanding,

and the one time they did meet her,

she hadn't said hello to them.

And I had to explain that she was

the shy, new guest coming into this family.

We are hosting her.

We have to say hello first.

That's how it works.

I don't know if I only know that

from presenting TV shows

where you start with,

"Hello, and welcome to the show."

You don't stare at the audience.

I had to explain it to them

like they were children.

I said, "Why can't we learn from Lumiere,

"the candlestick holder

from Beauty and the Beast?"

"Who sang Be Our Guest, Be Our Guest,

not Is She a Jew?"

But this is unfair, because I realised

in everything that I was saying

what was underneath my words

was essentially,

"Why can't you just be less judgemental,

and more like me?"

Which is judgemental.

And arrogant, to try and change

somebody else's perspective

just so that the world

can seem better for you.

It's important that we have

these contrasts in life.

Nothing ever got created

from things being the same.

It's from the contrasts in life

that anything happens.

I realised in the end that all I could do,

I couldn't change them,

all I could was change

my perspective on them,

and then move on with my life.

All you can really do in your life

is change yourself, and that's hard enough.

I really wanted to change myself

a lot last year,

because I felt I wasn't getting enough sex.

And that's a fun thing to do,

it's a shame not to have more of it.

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