Nish Kumar isn’t the first television comedian to throw himself into activist politics in recent times. Another former panellist on the now defunct BBC comedy show Mock the Week, Frankie Boyle, did likewise a decade ago, and with little success. So far, Kumar’s decision to do similarly seems to have proved even less popular.
Having appeared alongside Zarah Sultana early this month live at the London Podcast Festival, Kumar was at the forefront of the anti-Trump protests orchestrated by the fringe left this week, appearing as host at the Stop Trump protest in Parliament Square in London, where he tossed from the stage a large balloon with a picture of J. D. Vance into the crowd.
‘It's the job of the news to be balanced – not comedy.'
— LBC (@LBC) September 18, 2025
Discussing Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension, Nish Kumar doesn’t think the UK should be smug about its free speech laws when his own comedy show was cancelled. pic.twitter.com/c80vDlSZew
Speaking of his reason for appearing at the protest, Kumar said that it was necessary to make known his displeasure at Trump because ‘he’s a sort of emblem of hope to white supremacists, to racists, xenophobes.’ He called the anti-Trump crusade ‘a fight between the forces of decency and common sense… and…racism and racists, and homophobes and transphobes and misogynists…he’s just the latest in a string of people who have attempted to destroy our societies.’
Many on the right have been scornful on social media of Kumar’s most overt foray yet into the world of politics. And there is indeed something unbecoming about a graduate in English and History, a person who has shown himself to be perfectly affable and civilised on shows such as Richard Osman’s House of Games, displaying the same kind of simplistic binary thinking of the far left and regurgitating the formulaic, mindless cliched epithets that they throw up with unfailing regularity.
Aficionados of television comedy, on the other hand, should be grateful that Kumar is transitioning into politics, and hope that this move will be permanent. Because he was as equally an irksome and tiresome presence in that arena, where he contributed to the ruination and downfall of not one, but two, television comedy shows: Mock the Week and The Mash Report.
Before the Great Awokening of 2016, which among other things, led to a greater urgency within the BBC to have more women and ethnic minority representation on all its television panel shows, Mock the Week had enjoyed a decade as a sharp and coarse knockabout take on the news. It was highly entertaining and genuinely popular for it.
But that crucial year of cultural revolution, and the Brexit result that took the establishment – comedians included – by complete surprise, were to sow the seeds of that show’s demise.
Kumar’s increasing prominence on the programme both epitomised and helped to steer its new doomed trajectory. This became manifest with Kumar’s morbid obsession with Brexit, with unceasing jokes about Nigel Farage and the stupidity and gullibility of the great unwashed, and trying to reduce any story to racism and the folly and privilege of ‘white people’. After years of sad decline, Mock the Week was put out of its misery in 2022.
The Mash Report, which he presented from its beginning in 2017, was never going to last as long, appealing from the outset more to the kind of shallow left-wing student audience that Radio 4’s The Now Show catered for. But as with its radio equivalent, The Mash Report left the rest of the general public cold, what with its turgid, infantile leftism.
After it was axed in March 2021, it was relaunched later that year on U&Dave as Late Night Mash, fronted again by Kumar, only to be cancelled yet again two years later. Appearing on LBC yesterday, in light of Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension from US television, Nish Kumar was still bellyaching about the BBC cancelling The Mash Report on the ground that it was politically biased.
‘Nish Kumar doesn’t think the UK should be smug about its free speech laws when his own comedy show was cancelled,’ added the tag to the LBC video it reproduced on X.
This ignores two points that need clarifying. Firstly, the BBC has a unique obligation to pursue impartiality when it comes to political matters, given that it’s funded by a compulsory levy on the public. Secondly, The Mash Report was ‘cancelled’ only in that now increasingly old-fashioned, literal sense of the word: it was axed because it was no good, wasn’t popular and wasn’t up to standards. It wasn’t cancelled in the new, often figurative, sense: silenced for being offensive to the sensibilities of a powerful, vocal or censorious lobby group. As Graham Linehan succinctly put it yesterday, in reply to Kumar’s whining: ‘You weren’t cancelled, Nish. Your show sucked.’
Nish Kumar is very welcome to join the herd of the fringe left bleating interminably and unconvincingly about the looming spectre of fascism. Let’s hope he sticks to it, because the last thing we need is him returning to our television screens.
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