Original subtitles

This programme contains very strong language.

2019 was the most tumultuous year to hit calendars since records began in 2018 -

a time of upheaval, conflict, and a banana duct-taped to a wall.

This is its story, through the mouths of those who saw it.

Standing here in the English countryside,

it may not seem obvious,

but we are facing a man-made disaster on a global scale.

David Attenborough did a TV show about the environment

called Climate Change - The Facts,

which is irresponsible of him because you can't change the facts.

That's what all the science people in the programme kept saying.

Once you've crossed the tipping point, that's it -

you've triggered a catastrophic change.

It was basically a snuff movie starring everyone on the planet,

all the animals and the ice

and the forests and the oceans - everything.

All the way down to the ants, probably.

They didn't actually show what'll happen to the ants,

but they're the first to go in a stampede situation,

so chances are they're fucked too.

2019 was scary in a lot of ways, but I think the scariest part

of the year was when this girl travelling through time

to the Davos summit to bring us all a warning from the future.

I am here to say our house

is on fire.

It was like something from a horror movie

except instead of riding a tricycle around an abandoned hotel,

she was delivering a terrifying prophecy,

and the twist was it's true.

People are suffering, people are dying,

entire ecosystems are collapsing.

Normally I'd just ignore the terrified pleading of a child,

but even I've noticed the weather's been a bit weird this year,

like it's on shuffle mode.

One minute it was colder than ever,

and then it was wetter than ever,

then it was hotter than ever.

At one point, the Amazon caught fire,

which must have been a real blow to those people trying to chop it down.

The eyes of all future generations are upon you,

and if you choose to fail us, I say, we will never forgive you.

Whenever there's a kid asking difficult questions,

it's important to ask,

what's her background? You know?

How can I discredit this?

And it turns out her mum took part in Eurovision once.

# Can you keep a secret? Can you keep a secret? #

So she's just part of the Eurovision elite.

Even though everything Greta Thunderberg said was depressing,

she got really popular, like Radiohead.

And soon she was on tour, hanging out on yachts

and meeting Hollywood stars.

And because she was making everybody focus on this massive threat

to human civilisation, some people got annoyed she was taking

attention away from more important things, like themselves.

No, I think she needs to get back to school and shut up.

Grown men taking the piss out of a 16-year-old girl sounds cowardly,

but when you think about what massive wankers it made them seem

to literally everyone, it's an act of extreme heroism, in a way.

A bit like being a first responder rushing selflessly

into the Twin Towers,

but the cunt's version of that.

They'll probably make a movie about her life.

I don't know what the overall story will be,

but because she's a Swedish schoolgirl

that middle-aged men seem to hate, it'll basically be the opposite

of the last 40 or so Woody Allen films.

Here, schoolchildren across the UK have been taking part

in a day of protests, calling for action on climate change.

We have to do something to save the planet.

ALL CHANT: This is what democracy looks like!

It was a strange feeling,

seeing all these tiny children marching to demand a future.

It filled me with despair, but it also made me quite broody,

and now I can't wait to have a frightened little baby.

The kids say all they want is a future, which is fine,

but a few years ago, they said all they wanted was a fidget spinner.

Make up your fucking minds.

It is one craze after another with them.

They'll be into something else in a few years,

like fighting for water or something.

The kids weren't the only ones protesting.

There were these Extinction Rebel Lion people as well

who took over bits of London.

It's a good cause, but it did look like the whitest carnival ever.

At one point, they stopped people using the tube.

A lot of people said the protesters

shouldn't have targeted public transport because

it's one of the most environmentally friendly ways of travelling.

You're stopping an electric train. It's electric.

But sometimes, in a protest, it's important to do things that

make absolutely no fucking sense and alienate everyone.

The thing with climate change is it's hard to know what to think.

You've got half the world's scientists saying one thing

and the other half completely agreeing with them.

So it's all just their opinion.

If we all ate less meat, that would help.

I'm fully vegan now,

apart from the odd bit of cheese and chorizo.

And Bovril.

Hi. Morning, Martin. Hi, how are you? Morning, everyone.

In the past, politicians had to pretend to be nice

and friendly, like an eerie neighbour who just wants to talk,

but now they've learnt they don't have to be nice at all.

Some of them overdo it and say things that are so awful,

it sort of backfires.

I think we should treat women the same as men, and that means

if a woman is being a giant bitch, I'm going

to be a giant dick back to her. Any questions?

The news kept covering it in detail. Everything about it was insane.

Some people on the left didn't like having these provocative,

intolerant people around, so they started lobbing milkshakes

over them to test whether they were lactose intolerant too.

And usually, they filmed it as well.

I think, technically, it's called a cream pie video.

There's a sort of middle ground of unpleasantness that works well.

You have to say or do something dodgy,

but not so dodgy no-one will defend it, like a white bloke wearing

blackface in the dark, you know, something that'll divide

and confuse people just enough that they spend their time arguing

with each other rather than with you.

Apparently, everyone's caught polarisation, which is

this sort of brain disease where you're angry all the time.

It spreads on the internet, and there's no vaccine for it yet.

And even if there was, I wouldn't take it,

because I don't believe in vaccines any more, because of Facebook.

What do we want? Brexit! When do we want it? Now!

It's all because of Brexit, basically. It's torn people apart.

My mate Paul's finding it extra hard, because he's bipolar,

and his upside is Remain, but his downside is Leave.

He's barely on speaking terms with himself most days,

which is quite an improvement, actually.

Out! Out! Out! Out! Out! Out! Out! Out!

Out! Out! Out! Out! Out!

I've got so used to hating everything, I was eating

a biscuit the other day, and I suddenly thought, fuck this biscuit!

You know? I don't want a Bourbon cream.

Fuck you, you crunchy fucking cream-filled prick!

Fuck off back to your biscuit tin! And then I thought, what am I doing?

You know? What have I become? Who do I think I am?

Who the fuck am I looking at? Do I fucking want some?

And I kicked the shit out of myself, right there in the kitchen,

really gave me what for, and it all felt a bit better after that.

But Britain isn't the only disunited country.

Since Donald Trump became President in 2017 with no government

experience - something which is still true today -

the USA has also been at war with itself.

Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!

Trump keeps doing stuff like locking kids in cages

and telling people to go back to where they came from,

which they can't anyway, because he's building

a wall around the country to stop them from escaping.

Donald Trump should be a hero to a lot of people.

He's really moved the goalposts on how incompetent you can be and

still keep your job.

I hope they now go and take a look at the oranges,

the oranges of the...er, investigation.

If he'd been in my office, he'd have had at least one verbal

warning by now, and he might have been asked to go on a course.

There was loads and loads of coverage of it.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announcing a formal

impeachment inquiry of President Trump.

The President responding on Twitter, calling it "more breaking

"news Witch Hunt garbage" and "presidential harassment".

Anyway, now they're trying to impeach him, which I think is

some sort of skin treatment to make him the right colour again.

The last president who got impeached was Bill Clinton, who had to

resign and was never seen or heard of again,

but then Clinton's crimes were unforgivable, like doing hand

and mouth stuff with a lady who wasn't his wife.

I don't know what Trump's accused of,

but I'd be amazed if he's ever done something as bad as that.

Anyway, it's not just in Britain and America -

everywhere on the planet's totally polarised,

except for the North and South Pole, and that's only because

penguins haven't got broadband, so they're not on social media yet.

I'm calling you a liar right now.

Don't get me wrong - all this constant modern hate is good fun,

but it's knackering after a while.

All my frowning muscles are worn out and my throat's raw from shouting.

Some mornings, I can barely shake a fist.

I think what I need is a bit of a break,

maybe tone it down for a weekend,

spend it just slightly resenting things.

I need to recharge my batteries, because in 2020,

I'm hoping to hate the fucking shit out of everything that moves.

Throughout 2019, entertainment helped provide

a little respite from our troubled world.

One of my favourite movie moments of 2019

was when they remade the Lion King,

because they got rid of those stupid cartoon drawings everybody

hated so much in the first one and did it properly, using real lions.

It was really impressive. If you think about how long it takes

to do a David Attenborough,

where the cameraman has to hide in a bush for two years just to

film a chinchilla having a shit,

to have to wait until the lions were

doing the exact same thing as the cartoon lions,

in the original,

like, a shot for shot remake,

must have taken forever.

I mean, the chances of getting even one shot are remote.

Some people said it wasn't very good

because they couldn't tell one lion from another...

..which is sort of lion racism, really.

And they complained the real lions

weren't as expressive as the cartoon lions.

But that's not real lions' fault.

For one thing, they've never been to acting school.

They're just not given those opportunities,

and, for another thing, that's just how lions' faces work.

They don't have emotion muscles. And, anyway,

they made up for it with all their lovely singing.

# Hakuna matata Hakuna, matata, hakuna, matata... #

The thing is, it looked like actual footage but apparently

they did a lot of it with CGI, which is an even more amazing achievement.

I don't envy whoever had to squeeze all the real lions

into those bright green leotards with ping-pong balls all over them.

All the animals in it look totally real,

except they don't have bumholes,

so when they eat food, they can't get it out afterwards.

They must just keep swelling and swelling until they burst,

all up the walls of that computer universe they're in.

The good thing is now we've got backup copies of all these animals,

so when the environment goes to shit

and all the real ones die, we can still go to the zoo in VR.

Literally, the only difference is going to be the bumholes.

And I can live with that.

Quintin Cappuccino made a new version of that film he does.

It was called "ONSE Upon a Time in Hollywood."

It was based around the Manson killings

which was this genuine tragedy in America

where a load of people were murdered by these mad hippies on LSD.

And it explored that by concentrating on two blokes

who weren't there and didn't exist.

One of the murder victims was Sharon Tate.

It really brought her life back to life.

Like, you saw how she might have gone shopping, or sort

of walked about, or lived next door to these two more interesting men.

Before the film, I didn't know anything about Sharon Tate,

but afterwards, I knew even less, which is good

because it means it kept a respectful distance.

You know, leave Sharon Tate alone.

She's dead, except in this, where she's still alive,

just standing around looking pretty in the background,

not really saying much.

Which is what she would have wanted.

Well, it might be. We'll never know.

So it might as well be what she would have wanted.

I mean, at least she's still working.

Some people got upset because Sharon Tate doesn't get much dialogue.

But there's others who have a worse time.

Like, even though the whole thing was Charles Manson's idea,

he's totally overlooked.

He's in one scene and he has about two lines,

so he's the real victim here!

WILD CACKLING

There was this sort of film thing called Joker.

It was like a dark origin story about the actual

joker off of playing cards.

That's the one card no-one wants.

No-one even plays with it, which is

probably why he felt all left behind and angry. So, in many ways,

it was like a sort of dark reboot of Play Your Cards Right,

but with Robert De Niro instead of Bruce Forsyth.

It's actually set about 40 years ago,

before superhero movies were popular,

which is why no-one in it has heard of the Joker yet.

It's quite controversial.

Like, Joaquin Phoenix is totally appropriating clown culture in it.

There's whole scenes where he's in whiteface.

I mean, I know it was a different time when they shot it,

in 1981, but he must be mortified it's resurfaced now.

He'll probably never get cast in anything ever again.

TV HOST: The film contains "brutal violence and overall bad vibes".

Even though it's a sort of superhero film with a clown in it,

it's not for kids.

I mean, if I wanted my kids to watch one man's painful descent

into total grinding despair,

I'd still be living at home.

Just before the film came out, the news in America was

full of these concerned reports read out by frowning, handsome

people, going on and on about how it might inspire a massacre.

A bit like they secretly wanted that to happen.

Tonight, amid concern that the new Joker movie could be

used as an excuse for a mass shooting...

To be fair, in America, you don't

have to go to the movies to see a mass shooting anyway.

You can just look out the window or go to a shopping mall

or a school or a church or a restaurant or to your own workplace,

or a nightclub, or an ice rink.

Actually, have they done one in a ice rink yet?

You could just keep me saying that in, anyway...

..because they will have by the time this goes out.

The convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein - once a friend

of presidents and British royalty - is found dead

in his prison cell in New York.

Jeffrey Epstein was this billionaire, who was into sex with

trafficked underage girls, and he had lots of powerful

friends like Donald Trump

and Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew. MASTERMIND THEME PLAYS

Anyway, this year, Epstein died

in a freak necktie accident

while one of his prison guards was blinking for too long.

And his friendship with Prince Andrew was on everyone's mind again,

so Andrew figured he should go on TV and just draw

a line under the whole thing

with a great big highlighter pen.

It was like this one-off episode of Mastermind, where his specialist

subject was a dead paedophile, and even though he knew loads about

the bloke, everyone seemed to think he got a lot of the answers wrong.

You've been on his private plane? Yes.

You've been to stay on his private island? Yes.

You've stayed at his home in Palm Beach? Yes.

BEEPING

It was a really clever format.

He had to think up hilarious alibis, and Emily Maitlis had to

just try not to piss herself or stand up and lamp him.

I was at home, I was with the children,

I had taken Beatrice to a PizzaExpress in Woking.

One of his alibis was that he had

been in a PizzaExpress in Woking at the time,

which is fair enough, because I'm sure that would be extremely

memorable to him. Maybe he had some vouchers that were about to expire

that day. Although for it to be really convincing,

he'd probably need to show us some proof like the little menu

he coloured in while he was there or something.

She described dancing with you... No. ..and you profusely sweating

and that she went on to have a bath, possibly...

There's a slight problem with the sweating,

because I have a peculiar medical condition,

which is that I don't sweat.

He said he wasn't capable of sweating because he had

overdosed on adrenaline when he had been shot at in a war.

A doctor said that wasn't possible.

But they don't know everything about how the human body works.

I mean doctors still believe in vaccines, and those have been

pretty thoroughly debunked by this

WhatsApp parents group I'm in.

Anyway, when the quiz was over,

he announced that he was stepping down from public duties.

I mean, it's hard to even conceive of a world without

Prince Andrew's contribution to it.

That's Britain fucked now.

The worst thing is, now we'll have to hold a state funeral for

Prince Andrew's reputation.

And how much is that going to cost?

Incredibly, Prince Andrew's interview was only the second most

catastrophic TV meltdown of the year after Emmy-winning drama Chernobyl.

There was this show about a place called "Cherno-ball",

about the sort of Russian factory that went bang.

I don't know what they made there,

but I think it was bread because they were all dressed like bakers

in a sort of big kitchen, worrying about the dials on their big mixer.

You could see they were ashamed that they had messed things up

so much because they kept really blushing like they'd seen

what a mess they made and just gone totally red with embarrassment.

To be fair, they probably didn't know how the machines in the factory

were supposed to work because all the manuals were printed

in Russian, which no-one can read.

When the main bread machine bit blew up,

it sent all this flour into the air and loads of people who got

exposed to it had a wheat allergy, so they got bad tummies...

..and came out in a sort of nasty rash.

WAILING

It was a real scandal.

I hope Hovis were watching so this kind of thing never happens again.

The whole area went radioactive.

And the scary thing about radioactivity is

it's dangerous even though you can't see it.

Like when a paedophile hides under a table.

First, the explosion makes all the colour bleed out of the sky

so everything is grim and depressing.

Then there's Trevor off EastEnders stomping around with

his bits all hanging out.

It was like, "All right, mate, this is about a nuclear accident

"but does it have to be such a downer?"

GUNSHOT

It turned into a zombie movie, but they were the worst zombies

I've ever seen. They just kept lying down and sort of crying.

Agh.

They didn't even bite each other.

What was clever was it explained exactly how a nuclear reactor works.

With an RBMK reactor of the type used at Chernobyl, there is

something called a positive void coefficient.

Which is, it sort of has particles in it and atoms

and they sort of rub together.

And then all the power comes out,

but if you turn the dial up too much, everything explodes.

And I couldn't have told you any of that before.

Throughout 2019, British politics was in flux, with old certainties

getting shat through a bin-bag left, right and centre.

At the start of 2019, there was this sort of Theresa May woman,

who'd been Prime Minister by mistake for almost three years.

Some people thought Theresa May looked awkward in her own skin,

but I'm not convinced it was her own skin.

She had this sort of habit of going...

..with her mouth, like a fish that had just got hooked

on a political problem.

Even when she was smiling, you could see her face start thinking,

"I'm not sure about this," and then she'd start...

Like...all over the shop.

Anyway, her biggest problem was she'd set herself the job of

delivering some sort of Brexit deal,

but no-one could agree on what that was.

In fact, the only thing anyone did agree on

was that she was making the disagreements worse.

CHANTING: What do we want? Brexit!

When do we want it? Now!

Let's get out.

Let's have Brexit!

Leavers kept saying Brexit was the will of the people.

What I believe we must do is deliver on the will of the people.

And the 48% who had voted Remain weren't happy about that,

because they were people too.

But in a referendum, the side that wins gets to decide

which way everyone else had really wanted to vote in the first place,

and then add that to their score.

So once you factor that in, the result goes from 52% to 100% Leave,

which is why it's the will of the people.

And you can't argue with that.

Or even secretly disagree with it,

because it's your own will.

Anyway, the MPs kept trying to do Brexit again, and again,

and they couldn't quite shunt it through the voting...hole,

or whatever it is they use.

MPs have rejected Theresa May's withdrawal agreement

for a third time, throwing the UK's Brexit strategy

into further confusion.

While all this was going on,

Corbyn still didn't know how he felt about Brexit.

It was really difficult for him.

Even harder than trying to work out what anti-Semitism is.

So he decided to appeal to Leavers and Remainers by not saying anything

that might inspire either of them.

And when you're trying to unite opposing sides like that,

the last thing you need is a bunch of fucking centrists in your party,

getting in the way.

Some of his followers told them to fuck off and join the Tories.

So they did -

the obedient bastards.

Suddenly there was this group called Change "uck",

who altered the face of British politics for an entire afternoon.

By April, the whole thing was in total shitlock.

So we had to hold a European elections.

That's when Nigel Farage invented the Brexit Party.

It's one of those no-nonsense names that does what it says

on the tin - like that pile cream called AnuSol.

Although that comes in a tube, not a tin...

..I expect.

When the votes were counted, the Tories hadn't done great,

so Theresa had to Article 50 the shit out of herself.

She said she was going to quit,

and did a bye-bye speech where her voice went a bit wobbly at the end.

To have had the opportunity... to serve the country I love.

I felt a bit sorry for her,

because it shows she really was capable of regular human emotions,

like self-pity and resentment.

Once Theresa May had gone, they had a race to be the new Prime Minister

among all these young hopefuls like Michael Glove,

and the first baby to be Home Secretary,

and this sort of teeth bloke, who looked like a cross

between Eddie Redmayne and the Child Catcher.

But the frontrunner was always Boris Johnson.

When you see him on the news with his hair and his face,

looking like an overstuffed scarecrow that's fallen in a trough

of pink-flavoured Angel Delight, you think,

"Hang on, I'm going to absolutely piss myself here."

Like a cartoon's just come on.

But instead of telling jokes,

he just sort of makes posh buffering noises.

I'm cautiously optimistic.

How-how-how-what... Is that a good enough, erm...?

Anyway, Boris won, so he had to become Mayor of Britain for a bit.

The thing is, the elite establishment

still kept trying to stop Brexit.

But, luckily, now there were these everyday, underdog,

honest men of the soil like Jacob Rees-Mogg ready to take them on.

Boris had this genius bloke working for him, Dominic Cumberbatch.

He used to work on the Leave campaign, and they made

a film about it where he was played by his brother, Sherlock.

It really brought home just how clever and bald he was.

Because he seemed so clever in the film,

everyone assumed he was clever in real life

and that everything he did was part of a clever strategy.

Even if he blew off into his hand and smelt it -

not that he did that, but if he had

it would've been for a clever reason.

Anyway, Boris kept trying to make Brexit happen,

but he couldn't manage it either, even after he'd tricked the Queen

into turning Parliament off and on again.

So he gave this speech saying he didn't want an election...

I don't want an election. ..and that no-one wanted an election.

You don't want an election.

And then he asked for an election.

As if that was going to work!

Tonight at ten, we're at Westminster, where MPs have approved

the first December general election since 1923.

They hailed it as the election of a lifetime -

a couple of years after the other one they called

an election of a lifetime.

Which means they're probably not talking about a human lifetime,

but a mealworm or something like that,

which is stupid because everyone knows mealworms can't vote.

They can't hold a pencil.

Early on, Corbyn and Johnson had to go on this sort of game show

where Boris had to mention Brexit as often as possible,

and Jeremy had to pretend he hadn't heard him.

Neither of them looked very statesman-like.

Corbyn had these off-putting glasses, and Johnson was like

a failed reboot of the Honey Monster making a court appearance.

It was like a Mock The Week special where they kept getting laughs

with their material, but by accident.

Does the truth matter in this election?

I think it does. And I think...

LAUGHTER FROM AUDIENCE ..and I think it very important.

While the debate was on, the Tories changed their Twitter name

to "factcheckUK", so they looked like an independent

fact-checking service.

They got shit for that but, to be fair,

it only fooled everyone who saw it.

The Tories had this simple slogan they kept saying over

and over again...

Get Brexit done.

Get Brexit done.

Get Brexit done!

..which meant you knew who to vote for if you wanted

to get Brexit gone.

People said Jeremy Corbyn's Brexit position was hard to understand,

just cos it couldn't be summed up in a snappy sound bite

or a short book.

But it was really simple.

He said he'd negotiate a new deal then put that to the public

in a referendum, which he'd be neutral about.

Then he'd subtract the deal you've first thought of,

fold the result in half

and multiply it by the Jews.

What's the problem?

There were lots of people talking about tactical voting.

To vote tactically, you had to ignore who you wanted to vote for

and instead vote Lib Dem, which is short for the Liberal Dems.

They're this sort of middle filler party that used to be run by

the world's oldest Doctor Who, Winch Cable, until

he regenerated into this Girl Guide leader called Jo from Swindon.

The Tories had the right-wing press on their side,

but Jeremy Corbyn had Momentum behind him,

which was ironic.

Then the Chief Rabbi said the Labour Party had a serious problem

with anti-cementism, and the next day Corbyn was interviewed

by Andrew Neil, and he didn't say sorry once.

Or twice.

Or at all.

Boris Johnson was supposed to be interviewed too,

but when he saw what Andrew Neil had done to Corbyn,

he must've shat his own arse up his back,

because suddenly he was too busy doing other things.

Boris avoided everyone.

He dodged Jeremy Vine in the big Channel 4 weather chat,

and when Good Morning Britain asked him to speak to Piers Morgan,

he was so desperate to get away he hid in a big fridge...

He's been taken inside, into the freezer.

You've gone into the fridge. Excuse me.

..which is the most relatable thing he's ever done.

To be fair, he was being furiously held to account by the press -

you only had to glance at the front pages to see that.

And he was brave enough to appear on This Morning, which is

a notoriously hostile environment.

For Amanda Holden.

One morning, a reporter tracked Boris down and asked him

to look at this shocking photo of a boy sleeping on a hospital floor.

But when confronted with this image by an ITV reporter today,

the Prime Minister at first refused to even look at it.

It's not fair to expect Boris to focus on an interview with

a suffering child directly in his field of vision.

He might be overcome with emotion and just start laughing.

So he did the decent thing and nicked the reporter's phone.

Anyway, in the last few days the polls tightened,

and Labour and the Tories were neck and neck.

Apart from the huge gap between them.

Boris Johnson leads the Conservatives to a resounding

election victory.

When the result came in, it was a landslide.

The Tories won seats in places they'd never even heard of

and probably hadn't even stood in.

It was clear everyone in Great Britain had voted Tory -

unless you count Scotland,

which we probably won't have to much longer.

People said Corbyn couldn't win an election if he tried,

which wasn't completely fair,

because it turned out he couldn't win two elections if he tried.

I will not lead the party in any future general election campaign.

Corbyn said he'll step down next year.

He'll probably go back to his allotment,

and alienate some sprouts.

Then Boris stood outside his palace and said he wanted

everyone in Britain to forget their differences and come together -

be they Leaver or Remainer,

letterbox or bumboy.

I urge everyone to find closure and to let the healing begin.

It's a lot of power for someone like him, but I'm sure it'll be fine.

He'll probably look after us

like we were his own children.