On 19 September, Saturday Night Live UK’s ‘weekend update’ segment turned to Ed Sheeran, who had just dropped Macklemore from his tour after the rapper said ‘Free Palestine’ on stage. Ania Magliano told viewers that Macklemore had been thrown off ‘at the insistence of pro-Israel billionaire Robert Kraft’. Paddy Young called Kraft a ‘wealthy corpse-maxxer’.

The following week, guest host Amelia Dimoldenberg stood on the same stage and called Sheeran ‘a world-famous, red-headed puppet with a hand up his arse telling him what to say’.

And whose arm is it controlling Ed Sheeran’s every move? The same one it’s been for the best part of 900 years. In 1144, a boy called William was found dead in a wood outside Norwich, and the monks decided the Jews had killed him for his blood. When England’s coinage was being clipped in the 1270s, it was mostly Christians doing it, and it was mostly Jews who were hanged for it. When the Black Death came, the Jews had poisoned the wells, and on Valentine’s Day 1349, the Jews of Strasbourg were burned alive for it. When Germany lost the First World War, it hadn’t really lost. It had been stabbed in the back by the Jews at home. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian forgery from 1903, laid out their secret plan for world domination, and Henry Ford’s newspaper pushed it across America. In January 1939, Hitler stood up in the Reichstag and warned that if ‘international finance Jewry’ dragged the world into another war, the Jews of Europe would be annihilated. Then he started the war himself and did what he’d promised. After 9/11, the story went round that 4,000 Jews had stayed home from the Twin Towers that morning. In 2020, they’d cooked up Covid. All of this continues right up to the current day, with people in my replies on X telling me that they’re now responsible for the trans movement.

Plagues, wars, stock markets, pop tours, transvestites. If there’s devilment afoot, you can be sure a Jew is behind it. You’d think a hatred from the time doctors worked with leeches would have exhausted itself by now, but no. It seems as if humans come with anti-Semitism software pre-installed, like McAfee LiveSafe.

Dimoldenberg is herself Jewish, just like Alexei Sayle, Miriam Margolyes, Michael Rosen and various other Jewish celebs who were unmoved by what happened to the Bibas family during and after Hamas’s pogrom three years ago, but weep fat left-wing tears when Israel does anything other than lie down and accept its fate. Dimoldenberg made a name for herself with Chicken Shop Date, a web series in which she interviews celebs in fried-chicken shops. Sheeran himself took part in 2021 and gave her one of her best-known episodes.

The same night, Young put up a photo of Netanyahu at the UN holding up one finger and explained that it was the number of genocides he’s currently involved in. Then, literally the next item, Magliano turned her attention to the anti-migrant activist Daniel Thomas, better known as Danny Tommo, who had been arrested on suspicion of slashing a dinghy in the Channel. Since there was no footage, they staged a reconstruction with two Action Man dolls on a beach, one of them playing Tommo. One drops his knife, the other picks it up for him. ‘Oh my God, your arms feel amazing.’ ‘Do you work out?’ The dolls start kissing. ‘Wow, I didn’t know men could scissor.’ The audience laughed as if it were the most ingenious thing they’d ever seen.

This is where UK comedy has ended up. You can use ‘gay’ as a punchline, as long as it’s aimed at a ‘Nazi’, while you yourself are engaged in spreading blood libels against Jews. The puppet joke about Sheeran is almost identical in form. Sheeran’s humiliation is that another man is inside him, working him, and that the man is a Jewish billionaire. So the show reaches for homosexuality, twice, as the worst thing it can say about a man. Is it for gay people or against them? Is it against National Socialism or for it? I don’t think the people who wrote it could tell you. But the image of Sheeran on a Jewish billionaire’s hand suggests they would have prospered as German political cartoonists in 1936.

Applause is the cheapest thing an audience can give you. People do it in restaurants when a waiter breaks a plate. Comedy comes when you rub against consensus and strike a spark. My experience of applause is that it is often the embarrassed noise people make when the spark doesn’t catch.

The people in that studio are what I call NPCs. They go along with whatever the mood is without ever examining it. ‘Trans women are women.’ ‘From the river to the sea.’ ‘Genocide.’ NPCs don’t form opinions; they memorise them. And SNL UK is written for people who clap when they hear one read back to them.

The most honest moment came at the end of Dimoldenberg’s monologue when she started talking about her own rise to fame. Over swelling music, she told the awkward girls of Britain to be themselves. There’s no shame in ‘just being yourself’, she said, just huge profit. Then came the list: the red carpets, the rom-com, the sketches. The sign-off was that, like the chickens she loves to eat, you don’t have to have range.

It was meant as self-mockery, but as so often happens with these things, it reads more as a confession. Yeah, we know it’s all for money and fame. We just saw you stab Ed Sheeran in the back for it.

Because that’s what stays with me about these people. They think of themselves as good. Yet they’ll turn on their friends, on the people who helped make them famous, and in the end on a whole people, as long as the room is going the same way. I know how easy it is for them, because I watched most of an industry do it to me. Hardly any of them thought they were being cruel. They thought they were on the right side, and one or two probably thought they were being brave. The career benefits were a coincidence.

Back on 19 September, Young closed the Sheeran item with this: ‘Say what you want about Ed, but he’s always been a passionate advocate of causes that are allowed.’

You have to admire the hypocrisy. The show will do Netanyahu, Tommo, Zuckerberg and Prince Andrew all day long. It will not do anything to address the biggest social change since women got the vote: trans ideology. It will not do Isla Bryson, the double rapist who was sent to a women’s prison after deciding he was a woman. It will not do Sandie Peggie, the nurse in Fife who was suspended after objecting to getting changed in front of a male doctor. There’s comedy in all of it, surreal, horrible comedy, but the producers of SNL UK will never touch any of it, because it’s not allowed.

What a confused mess it all is. I genuinely feel for anyone trying to be funny right now. But the fashionable hatred of the day should be the obvious target for any comic with nerve, and today that hatred is anti-Semitism. Joining in takes no courage and no imagination. The world has quite enough of it already, and I have no sympathy for opportunistic mediocrities who use the moment to add to it.

Dimoldenberg was right about one thing. You don’t have to have range. You just have to know which way the mob is moving.