Comedian Robin Ince: 'I had no choice but to resign from the BBC – here's why'

The touring year ends where Nina Simone sang in the NIA theatre of radical arts in Hulme. I am always happy to be in Hulme.

Like so many names in Manchester, I first learned about it from Morrissey’s wordplay. His first video release of his pop promos was entitled Hulmerist. Hulme was also where I kipped when I was in Manchester playing the stand-up clubs. It was here that I first felt at home in the company of comedians.

I stayed over with my heavily tattooed and hirsute former street performer pal Martin Bigpig. Here was a man who would fire a gun using a length of rope and the power of his pierced nipples. Eventually, one of his nipples suffered repetitive strain injury and he went down to one-nipple marksmanship. He really was a bulletproof comedian, he could play rooms which the rest of us could barely survive seconds in.

With particularly rowdy hecklers at the Belfast Empire, if all verbal putdowns failed, he would resort to holding the offender over the balcony. He never doubted his grip, but the heckler did, and so, silence.

He has now retired back to his homeland of Northern Ireland where he lip-syncs to Charles Bukowski poems and tends his bonsai trees.

It was also not far from here that I first saw Johnny Vegas, a wonder from his first outing with true poetry in his soul. What a thing it was to hear him talk of those that broke his heart. “Love is a postman and you’ve got a vicious dog called pride”. 

We are here to record the final episode of this series of The Infinite Monkey Cage. Others with more northern bones shiver, but I don’t feel the cold. We are here to talk of the North Pole and our experts transport us through undersea kingdoms via polar bear confrontations.

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I hold a secret that the panel don’t know and every now and again I feel it tremble within me.

This will be my final recording as I have resigned as a BBC science presenter. It was back in September, but I decided to keep it quiet until we recorded the final show. As we approach the final minutes, I wonder if I will have the strength to stand up and make the speech I need to. Once the guests are clear, I tell our brilliant producer that I need to say something. I don’t want her too near as I don’t want her getting any of the blame should there be reprisals.

I explain to the audience that I felt I had to resign as a freelance BBC presenter as the executives frequently found issue with my beliefs outside the BBC, and I know they got a lot of bother if I ever said anything remotely supportive of the trans community or trans allies.

I could not balance remaining and agreeing to the restrictions. I had thought of my heroes, Sinéad O’Connor, Audre Lorde and James Baldwin. Audre Lorde said that her only regrets in life were her silences. Baldwin said that prejudice was just another word for cowardice. Sinead said: “The job of an artist is to be themselves at any cost.”

I was trembling with emotion as I delivered these words. I finished and walked off stage. Teary in a stairwell, I heard the noise of support.

I believe there are so many people full of kindness, acceptance and a belief in justice, and we are hearing too much from the brutal, the conniving and the greedy, as if the kind people did not exist. I was shocked to wake up the next morning and see the number of messages of support.

Later in the week I heard the usual hate manufacturers turning me into clickbait, but my revenge is to ignore them and have an ice cream in the park while listening to my head playing Nina Simone’s “Ain’t Got No, I Got Life”.

Robin Ince is a broadcaster and poet.

Ice Cream for a Broken Tooth: Poems about life, death, and the odd bits in between by Robin Ince is out now (Flapjack Press, £12).

You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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