John Oliver’s Brexit Screed Gets Post-Vote Reaction

Unlike Americans, TV viewers in the UK were not able to see John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight edition from last Sunday, in which he blasted Brexit, until after they’d cast their votes on Thursday. Sky said it was compelled to delay the blistering 15-minute screed, owing to UK’s pesky Ofcom regs that prevent broadcasters from airing things that might actually impact voting. Unlike newspapers, which are allowed to print things that might actually impact voting. Which is just what Sky owner Rupert Murdoch’s British newspapers did, only The Sun and Sunday Times backed Brexit.

In defense of whoever came up with this reg, nobody reads newspapers. Even so, this juxtaposition had Oliver fans’ undies in a bunch this week, and many complained via social media – where Oliver’s show also was posted Sunday night, on YouTube.

On YouTube, Oliver’s video is closing in on 7 million viewers, and loads of newer post-Brexit-voting comments from disciples of Aristophanes, including:

F*ck you John Oliver you establishment shill, we have just won! #Brexit

Eat sh*t, you worthless little bankster puppet. Brexit wins!

and

I changed my last 100₤ today at the bank. got a nice solid rock, probably gonna use it as a doorstopper.

In a statement issued to reporters covering the situation, Sky said that, before the Brexit vote, it had “complied with the Ofcom broadcasting restrictions at times of elections and referendums that prohibit us showing this section of the programme at this moment in time” adding, “We will be able to show it once the polls have closed.”

‘My homeland is on the edge of doing something absolutely insane, and on some level I kind of understand,” Oliver said in the show Britons could not handle seeing before casting their votes. “There is an innate desire to tell Europe to go f*ck itself. The EU does not make itself easy to love.

“It is a complicated, bureaucratic, ambitious, overbearing, inspirational and consistently irritating institution, and Britain would be absolutely crazy to leave it especially because, if it stays, it can reap all the benefits while still being a total dick about everything,” Oliver says in the segment. “And that is the British way.”

Anyway, see above for Oliver’s takedown of Brexit that was considered too hot for British voters to see before casting their votes.