OUTCAST WORLD

When Liam Rondi watched a GB News panel discuss the murder of a baby and heard a guest claim that gay men are more likely to abuse the children they adopt, he was sitting in his flat in the south of France, a country he had moved to two years earlier partly to get away from the direction Britain was heading in. He picked up his phone, recorded a rebuttal and told people how to complain to Ofcom. Within a week there were 1,300 complaints, and by the time Caroline Farrow had appeared on Alex Armstrong Tonight to link Pride with paedophilia, and Bimini had built a complaints generator, the total had passed 15,000 and Ofcom had opened two investigations into the channel.

In this episode he talks about the trope that is older than he is, why an apology broadcast two weeks after the fact reaches almost nobody who saw the original, what it is like to fight your own country's battle from abroad with no newsroom, no organisation and no lawyer behind you, and why, for all the invitations he expects never to receive, he would point blank refuse to go on GB News.

Ofcom's investigations into both broadcasts are ongoing. GB News says it complies fully with the Broadcasting Code and will robustly defend them.

What happens when the places that helped us become ourselves disappear? A Brummie drag and The Voice UK legend has the answer...

Drag artist and musician Fatt Butcher joins Graeme Smith to talk about the dance floors that changed their life—and why losing a gay bar means losing far more than somewhere to drink.

Growing up in a small village during Section 28, Fatt watched Queer as Folk with the volume barely on, wondering where a queer life might be possible. Finding Birmingham’s gay village opened up a world of first kisses, new identities and possibilities that had once felt out of reach.

Now, Fatt is turning that experience into Congregational: a drag funeral for the gay village that attempts to resurrect it, complete with a queer choir, mirror balls, dance music and a decidedly unconventional approach to worship.

But this isn’t straightforward nostalgia. Graeme and Fatt get into the contradictions of spaces that can save lives while relying on selling us another drink, the loneliness of performing five nights a week, and reclaiming the joy of singing together after a complicated religious upbringing.

Plus: smoking-area friendships, poppers and dubstep, turning hate into a badge of honour—and what it actually takes to build a community beyond the dance floor.

During the 1980s, half the patients on some of London’s AIDS wards were Irish. It is a staggering fact—and part of an almost-forgotten chapter of queer history.

Homosexuality remained illegal in Ireland until 1993. Many queer Irish people crossed the Irish Sea in search of freedom, safety and the chance to live authentically. They created homes, friendships and chosen families in Britain. But as AIDS devastated the community, many also found themselves on London’s wards, far from home.

At the centre of this episode is Fr Bernárd Lynch, the openly gay Irish Catholic priest who founded New York City’s first AIDS ministry in 1982. He cared for people as they died, challenged the Church over safer sex and gay rights, and later continued that work in London, including at the London Lighthouse.

Bernárd’s testimony—alongside the experiences of others who lived through the crisis—is at the heart of Mammy’s House, a new black comedy now running at Upstairs at the Gatehouse in Highgate until 13 September.

Graeme speaks to Bernárd and the play’s co-creator and star Derek Murphy, whose screen credits include RTÉ’s We Watch, You Watch and hit sitcom Killinaskully. Derek explains why he was determined to bring this uniquely Irish story to life, combining humour and humanity while doing justice to people whose experiences were in danger of disappearing.

Bernárd has now seen Mammy’s House twice. He considers it one of the most profound and authentic depictions of the era he has encountered—and believes it gives this extraordinary community the recognition and dignity it deserves.

It's the last weekend of this year's Edinburgh Fringe and in our time in Edinburgh we've spoken to some of the most interesting new and established artists from around the world.

OUTCAST WORLD is live from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe — the biggest arts festival on the planet — meeting some of the queer and queer-adjacent performers bringing their stories to Edinburgh this summer.

In this episode, Graeme meets New York performer and musician Joey Jennings, creator of Little Pink Dress — a deeply personal one-man musical about growing up gay, chasing the Hollywood dream, family, addiction, recovery and finding your way back to the person you were before the world started telling you who to be.

At the heart of the show is a real little pink dress Joey wore as a six-year-old — sleeping in it, dancing around his room in it and living out an uninhibited childhood love of performance, pop music and dressing up. Years later, it was Joey’s mother who suggested that if he was going to tell his story, the dress had to be part of it.

Joey talks about spending more than a decade pursuing the “serious actor” life in Los Angeles — and how an industry obsessed with image, masculinity and youth gradually left him feeling increasingly disconnected from himself. He describes auditioning for straight roles, trying to inhabit a more hyper-masculine version of himself and eventually realising that the dream he had chased since childhood was damaging the very part of him that had wanted to perform in the first place.

There’s also a frank conversation about drinking, getting sober in 2023, therapy, moving from LA to New York and beginning to rebuild his creative life.

And then there’s his mum.

Little Pink Dress is, ultimately, a love letter to the single mother who encouraged the artistic kid she was raising, introduced him to the country and folk music that now runs through the show, and whose voice Joey says has remained in his head telling him to keep going.

The result is an unusual collision of country rock, musical theatre, queer identity, childhood memory and autobiography — including a cowboy version of Joey who represents the masculine mask he once believed he needed to wear.

They also talk about why Joey stayed away from social media for years, the strange vulnerability of finally releasing songs he had kept private for so long, and what happens when you hand the most personal parts of your life over to an audience.

Recorded as part of OUTCAST WORLD’s Edinburgh Fringe 2026 coverage.

Joey Jennings: Little Pink Dress.

The Fringe changes pace once the last week arrives, the flyering gets a little more frantic, the queues at the good venues get a little longer, and the shows that have built word of mouth over three weeks are the ones worth fighting for a ticket to. Outcast World has been across the city all month checking out the best Edinburgh has to offer.

Gareth Waugh: Is Pepsi OK?

There is a version of this show that plays as a straightforward hour about a bad gig or a worse manager, and then there is the version Gareth Waugh actually built, which unfolds more like a true crime podcast than a stand-up set, except the person telling it is also the one who got taken. Waugh, an Edinburgh local who has supported Kevin Bridges and John Bishop and taken every strange booking going from cruise ships to the PDC World Darts Championship, was scammed out of money on a podcast job that appeared to be connected to Coca-Cola. The man behind it was someone Waugh considered a friend. What follows on stage is the unravelling, told through a PowerPoint of receipts: email threads, video calls, bank statements, text messages, all projected as evidence while the story gets steadily harder to believe.

Outcast World has a stake in this one that goes beyond a recommendation. The same man behind the scam in Gareth's story is one we crossed paths with too, and there are names in that show that have been changed or redacted for reasons that will make sense the moment the lights go up. Go and see it, and see if you can spot who's who.

Gareth Waugh: Is Pepsi OK? runs at Monkey Barrel 2 until 30 August.

Science Stories for Grown-Ups

A gentler close to the evening, and a genuinely lovely one that's queer coded. Giulia and Richard are two scientists turned performers who spend an hour giving the back catalogue of science a personality, atoms with grudges, chemical reactions with feelings, thermodynamics rewritten as something closer to a bedtime story than a lecture. Fire, water, and the Twin Paradox all get the treatment, and there is a book of the stories on sale afterwards for anyone who wants to take the wonder home with them. It is the kind of show built for the people whose science teacher, as the pair put it themselves, crushed the curiosity out of them the first time round. This one gets it back.

Some Fringe shows you have to see to believe, and Final Queen is very much one of them, so this week I sat down with its creator and star Harrison Sweeney to work out how on earth you build a drag circus horror comedy about a queen road-tripping across the Australian outback to audition for Kylie Minogue, getting hopelessly lost, and ending up in an abandoned farmhouse fighting off chainsaw-wielding bushrangers, ghosts and a rolling cast of slasher villains, each one staged as a different circus act.

It is, on paper, one of the maddest pitches of the whole festival, and it opened to four stars on its very first preview, which tells you the madness is the good kind. Harrison came to drag during lockdown and to the stage through circus school in Melbourne, where he trained in aerial rope and hula hoops long before he ever put on a wig, and his co-creator Rachel Carey is a horror specialist with lesbian vampires and demonic parodies already on her CV, so between the two of them Final Queen was probably always going to look exactly like this.

Underneath the fake blood, though, there is a real argument, and it is the reason this one belongs on Outcast World. We get into why drag is inherently political, why the final girl who survives the horror film turns out to be such a natural fit for a drag queen, and the shared history of three art forms, slasher cinema, queer performance and circus, that were all once dismissed as too low to count. We also cover the far less glamorous reality of a Fringe run, which for Harrison means scrubbing stage blood out of a white dress by hand in the shower every single night. It is funny, it is warm, and it is a proper conversation about what queer survival actually looks like in 2026.

In this episode

How a year-long game of "what if" turned into the Fringe's most demented pitch

Grace Lightning, the love child of the final girl trope, a queer circus performer and a camp Aussie drag queen

Why drag is political whether it means to be or not, and what the tagline "who are the real monsters?" is really asking

The shared outsider history of slasher films, queer art and circus

What sets Australian drag and its larrikin humour apart from the Drag Race UK aesthetic

The unglamorous truth about blood, laundry and twenty-four shows in twenty-six days

Networking, faith in the work, and missing your castmates when the show is just you

A quickfire finish, one Kylie track to die to, one to kill to, and the one thing Grace could never survive

Final Queen runs at Big Belly, Cowgate, at 9.30pm nightly until 30 August, with rest days on the 17th and 24th. If you are anywhere near Edinburgh, go, and tell them Outcast World sent you.

Outcast World is back from its summer break — and we’re in Scotland for the Edinburgh Fringe.

From now until the Fringe wraps up, Graeme is getting immersed in the biggest arts festival in the world, taking in the queer and queer-adjacent culture of Edinburgh and meeting some of the best comedians, artists, musicians and performers in town.

And yes, Outcast has brought the campervan.

We’ll be bringing you new interviews and special episodes from Edinburgh over the next few weeks, alongside some classic conversations from the Outcast Fringe archives.

First up, Dan Tiernan.

Gay, dyspraxic and ferociously funny, Dan has become one of the most exciting names in British comedy. We head back into the Outcast archives to hear what happened when Graeme caught up with him at the Fringe as his career was taking off.

Then we meet Compagnia Bellanda, an independent Italian dance company from Friuli Venezia Giulia in Italy’s far north-east.

Founded by creative partners Giovanni and Claudia, the company takes Giovanni’s roots in breakin’ and hip hop culture and pushes them into contemporary performance. They’re in Edinburgh with *Il canto dell’assiolo* — *The Song of the Scops Owl* — a 45-minute duet using the haunting, repetitive call of a tiny Italian bird as a metaphor for intimacy, desire, tenderness, control and relationships that never quite resolve.

It’s the first stop as Outcast World gets immersed in Edinburgh Fringe for the next few weeks.

Comedy. Art. Music. Performance. Queer culture. Queer-adjacent culture. Old friends and new discoveries.

Graeme is in Scotland for Outcast — and there’s a lot more to come.

In the buildup to our Edinburgh Fringe 2026 coverage we bring this uncut interview with one of the funniest Edinburgh Fringe guests we've had on the show.

The Edinburgh Fringe is part of the world's biggest arts festival and is famous for up and coming comedians and performers to show their wares. Kuan Wen spoke to Graeme Smith at the last festival about doing the festival, his comedy and his feelings on the security of his country of Taiwan in the face of global uncertainties.

Kuan-Wen talks about how in his dating experience... ANDREWS ARE THE WORST! In an interview that had us crying laughing that we're bringing to you uncut.

Recorded for the BOYS! BOYS! BOYS! podcast at a MEETS event in January 2026, this conversation with Liberal Democrat politician Carl Cashman looked ahead to what might happen during a turbulent year in British and international politics.

Several months later, it turns out they got a fair few things right.

Carl joins Graeme Smith for a candid conversation about whether queer voters should give the Liberal Democrats another chance — and whether the party could once again find itself holding the balance of power.

He faces questions about the coalition years, broken promises over tuition fees and why so many voters still feel burned by the Lib Dems’ time in government. Carl also sets out the red lines he would want from any future coalition, including protections for LGBTQ+ and trans people and opposition to further welfare cuts.

There is plenty of political gossip too. Carl argues that the Labour government is not genuinely progressive, questions whether Andy Burnham is becoming an opportunist and considers whether Burnham could eventually replace Keir Starmer.

The conversation also takes in the rise of the Greens, wealth taxes, immigration, Nigel Farage, Donald Trump, Brexit and what defending LGBTQ+ rights should actually look like in British foreign policy.

And is it really true that 80% of Liberal Democrat members are LGBTQ+?

Subscribe to Outcast World for more queer politics, sex and culture.

On a raft of issues it's becoming clear that a change in the man at number 10 for the UK may not bring the change in policies and direction many had hoped for, despite Andy Burnham's victory over Reform at the Battle Of Makerfield!

Yes its great to see Reform on the run and the rise of a new left leaning politician. But will Burnham bring a fresh approach on the most pressing issues of our times. Or will be be another centre left disappointment?

The London heatwave has meant Graeme has to host from his living room and not the studio today. But Nick Charles is in the studio in Manchester linking up to talk about his Burnham worries and carry the show for G who is almost demoted to a guest for today on a laptop!