Dom Joly explores conspiracy theories – Portsmouth date

Everywhere you look there are conspiracy theories, and Dom Joly will be looking at them on his Conspiracy Tour, following on from his book Dom Joly’s The Conspiracy Tourist: Travels Through a Strange World (£22, Robinson). Dates include Friday March 1, Portsmouth New Theatre Royal; and Sunday March 10, Devonshire Park, Eastbourne.

“As humans we are naturally conspiratorial in a way,” Dom says. “Conspiracy is a big word but it just means people getting together and disbelieving things and believing other things. But I think things have changed. In the olden days there used to be fun conspiracy theories, things like is Elvis still alive, did we really land on the moon? But I think things have changed and I put it down to the moment when President Trump’s spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway used the phrase ‘alternative facts’ (during a meet the press interview on January 22 2017) and we moved from a consensus about the truth to a situation where everybody has their own truth.”

Dom set up a fake Instagram page to investigate and started following the usual suspects in the world of conspiracy theories – and had the most remarkable response: “I think the fact is that humans like order. We tend to like having explanations for things particularly when things get really weird or if we find stuff unsettling and so we find theories that can put order into the chaos. Conspiracy theories work because they provide simplistic answers that we can easily accept. Whenever somebody dies young, it's a shock and people refuse to believe it and so we just look for order. The fact is we live in a world where **** happens and the fact is that the world is a product of chaos but unfortunately as humans we don't like chaos and conspiracy theories are a way of making us feel like we're a little bit in charge. You feel like you have got a bit of power because you have this secret knowledge.”

James O'Brien called it the footballification of life, an expression that Dom likes: “The conspiracy theory becomes your tribe and it becomes your identity. I think when I started off looking into all this and looked into these people, I just thought that they were really stupid but I have sympathy now for these people rather than scorn. Once you start to scratch the surface of these theories, then online the algorithm targets you and you get drawn down a rabbit hole. You get affirmations and you get fake news. One of the things I was wondering was whether people are arguing these things online just for clicks or whether they really believe them but when I looked into it, I realised that they do really believe them and it's a kind of counter culture. It's a way of rebelling but you can get the target wrong. Yes, you can get pharmaceutical companies doing bad things but that does not necessarily mean that the vaccine that they produce is wrong.”

A particular favourite is the conspiracy theory that Finland does not exist, that it was invented by Russia and Japan in 1917 to stop people from fishing there. Dom went to Finland to find out whether the country does in fact exist and asked the passport guy where he was. The answer was “Finland” to which Dom replied ‘”Can you prove it?” And so it goes on…