Damian Reilly

‘I look at my father and it’s like he’s been lobotomized, but maybe he’s figured something out,’ 36-year-old comedian Tim Dillon tells me. ‘I may find out it’s the only way to survive.’ Dillon is increasingly recognized as the heir apparent to countercultural comedy greats such as Bill Hicks and George Carlin. It wasn’t so long ago he was selling subprime mortgages and photocopiers, and working as a New York tour bus guide. A recovering addict (11 years clean), his life changed in 2019 when podcast king Joe Rogan spotted his defense of canceled comedian Louis CK on Facebook and invited him to be a guest on The Joe Rogan Experience, a podcast whose global audience is measured in the hundreds of millions.

Nothing duller for those of us not in therapy than listening to people who are in therapy talking about it, something they seem to like to do incessantly, at every opportunity. For this reason, my heart sank during the Oprah interview — which I’d been looking forward to tremendously — when early into his appearance, Prince Harry made an unsmiling reference to the ‘many years’ he had spent ‘doing the work — and doing my own learning’. Here we go, I thought. Sure enough, not long later he was telling the ludicrously softball interviewer of his family, his father, particularly: ‘they only know what they know. I’ve tried to educate them, through the process that I’ve been educated.’ Difficult to imagine how much the Windsors must have enjoyed that.

Why is there not a single trans voice featured in Harry and Meghan’s first podcast? It’s a question that needs answering. The half-hour recording – the couple’s first since signing a $25 million deal with Spotify – sets out to explore the psychological impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on, as the Duchess herself puts it, ‘people from all walks of life’. Given this description, excluding the trans community from participating seems, at best, problematic – perhaps even sinister. Why leave trans people out in this most public of discourses? This editorial decision – a slap in the face for an already marginalised community – seems all the more surprising because of who has made it.

I sometimes wonder if I’m the last person left in Britain who loves the BBC and thinks it represents brilliant value for money. Yes, there is much with which to be infuriated - like most Leavers, for example, I find watching Gary Lineker present Match of the Day about as enjoyable as I imagine Remainers would watching Nigel Farage do the same job. And yes, the Today programme segment earlier this week on the latest developments in telephone hold music was idiotic. But does the BBC really deserve, once again, to be threatened with licence fee reform? The argument against the BBC licence fee is that it is effectively a tax. It isn’t – you can opt-out – but even if it were it would be a good thing.

What’s worse to lose – your keys or your wallet? That’s the question more than 100,000 angry investors who used the QuadrigaCX exchange to purchase cryptocurrency now contemplate. The apparent sudden death in December of Canadian Gerald Cotten, the exchange’s 30-year-old founder, has without warning left them in a $250 million-shaped hole. Mr Cotten, who had Crohn’s disease, is said to have died while on honeymoon in India after his bowel became perforated during what is reported to have looked at first like a bad case of Delhi belly. With him, we are led to believe, went the only crypto key to the place in which QuadrigaCX investor money is stored – repositories known as offline ‘wallets’.

If reports are true, Jeff Bezos’s penis is on the verge of going viral — waltzing off alone into the great unknown of cyberspace and there, under the glare of a billion eyeballs, having its power as an agent of chaos and shame amplified immeasurably. As you read this, you can be sure battalions of Bezos lawyers are working around the clock to keep the Bezos penis where it has hitherto always been: billeted, shrouded, presumably, in the comfortable privacy of mankind’s finest breathable linens. Good luck to them, for they will have their work cut out.