Comedian Joe Lycett has spoken out about his recent stunt targeting David Beckham over his promotion of Qatar for the 2022 World Cup.
Lycett condemned Beckham for his lucrative deal with Qatar, threatening to shred £10,000 in cash if the former England footballer didn’t renounce his support of the country over its stance on gay rights. (It is illegal to be gay in Qatar.)
After Beckham, whom Lycett described as a “gay icon”, failed to respond, Lycett appeared to shred the money (£1,000 for every £1m of Beckham’s reported deal with Qatar) in a video shared to social media. However, he later revealed that he had in fact only pretended to shred money, and had donated £10,000 instead to LGBT+ charaties.
During an appearance on Lorraine on Friday morning (9 December), Lycett reflected on the stunt.
“This is the thing, I’m open for countries to be diverse and to have their own beliefs and all of these things,” he said. “The world’s an interesting place, there’s all sorts of diversity in the world and I’m not against that.
“But I think as a baseline, I think killing people and jailing them for being who they are, should be condemned across the board wherever it happens. It happens far too much across the world. And it happens here sometimes, so we should always call it out.”
He went on to say that there are “lots of really good things about Qatar” but “the thing where they want to kill me” was “not a good thing”.
“I’d love to not die actually, Lorraine, because then I’d stop coming on the Lorraine programme,” he joked. “I love being on Lorraine! It’d be weird having me as a corpse on this show.
“So I’ve not heard anything from [Beckham]. I’m very polite and a very nice young man … I’d still love to speak to him and I promise I’ll be nice as well. Hopefully we’ll have a bit more discussions with his people and hopefully we’ll get somewhere with that. So I’m holding out hope. There’s still time for him to change his mind. The World Cup has not yet finished.”
This week, Lycett also reflected on his headline-making appearance on Laura Kuenssberg’s morning show back in September, in which he sarcastically praised Liz Truss.
The comedian also ruled himself out of the running to replace Matt Lucas on The Great British Bake Off.
