Welcome, welcome, welcome. This is the distraction pieces podcast episode 448. How are you doing guys? I hope you're well. This week's guest is Sarah Salamani who I'm a huge fan of any regular listeners of the podcast will know him and her is one of my favorite comedies of all time as incredibly excited to see that she's working with Steve Cougan on a new project.

So I wanted to talk about all of it. Like it's a project that they've created together. And yeah, I wanted to just have a chat really and we had a bloody lovely one. It really flew by. It gets quite heavy quite early and then it gets light and we have fun. We get heavy again in different places.

It's one of those classic distraction pieces where I don't know man. I love it when it can drift so freely from really serious subjects to really silly subjects. And Sarah was amazing for that.

Thank you all for the love on last week's episode with K tempest. Yep, it's one of the best we've done. It was amazing. K has been on a load of times and they've honestly never felt more or to me felt more themselves than in this most recent one.

So I'm so pleased to get that across to you guys now. So pleased with the reaction that you guys all had. I'm not going to ramble on too much as ever. Speech develop a records.com for all your your merch needs summer is here or the sun started anyway.

And obviously we've got genuinely we've got t shirts and you think yeah, that's the thing a merch store has. We've got vest. Yeah, that's quite that's that's quite much story. We've got sunglasses. All right, that's still yeah, that's right. I've got scrubius pip swimsuits. Okay. It's not a normal merch store.

Not a normal mom and McCool mom patron.com forward slash scrubius pip is where you can support the podcast for a dollar a month and twitch dot TV forward slash forward slash scrubius pip or maybe scrubius pip. Yeah, yeah, forward slash scrubius pip.

Yo is where you come watch me on twitch. I'm on there all the time. I have an wonderful time. I did a words Wednesday episode the other week where I go over all all lyrics and it should still be there to view on demand. And it's all free.

So come and join the family if you confuse what twitch is don't be confused. It's just just streaming platform. You can either go on the website or download the app. All very simple and straightforward. Let's get on with the podcast. Shall we? This is the wonderful Sarah Salamani.

I'm joined today by Sarah Salamani. How are you? I'm good. How are you? I'm good. I'm good. I'm excited to talk to you. Where are you? You're in LA, right? Yes. I live in Laurel Canyon. Amazing.

I'm in Los Angeles. And how's it been out there in these weird this this weird past few years, I guess, there's been a lot going on globally, but also, you know, specifically in America. America's had a lot of issues. England's had a lot of issues. How have you been in this time?

Wow. Thanks for asking. Well, America is a place of extremes. Yeah. And I think when I arrived about five years ago, it was straight into Trump's election victory. And, you know, it was as terrifying and extreme and confusing as is it probably was for a lot of people around the world. He didn't support him.

But with that came an incredibly exhilarating resistance movement. Yeah. And so to live in America is to negotiate that both extremes of the country and to embrace everything that it does have to offer, which includes incredible resilience, incredible organization.

And very inspiring people, very inspiring attitude. And we call it sort of optimism and let that can do attitude, but I think it's something more than that. It's about imaginative capacity.

And I see it in so many different dimensions of my life here and living in California is very specific experience, specific American experience. And the depth of imaginative capacity that I feel here has been a real gift and has informed my work, my life, my relationships. So I'm very grateful to my host country. Yeah.

I love that. Do you feel the industry that you're in kind of made it more of a shock because everyone I know in LA, because I come from the music industry, there are musicians or because I've moved into acting, their screenwriters, their directors, their producers, their actors. And it feels like their welds that it felt almost unimaginable that Trump was going to win. And not to put this on America, it felt unimaginable that Brexit was going to happen.

That Boris would be our leader kind of thing. So do you think of those industries made it more surprising, but then also you could directly see positive artistic reaction, whether that be from comedians from writers from activists, do you think that was, you're kind of in the mix of it.

It's like any big sort of shock to the culture or to the psyche, even if you think about 9, 11, no one really, no one really talked about them at least, no one really understood what fundamental is Islam was you just start educating yourself. And with Trump, it was like, wait, what are we getting nastier? Are we getting more extreme? What is, what does it mean?

And so I think people did start asking questions and certainly in my world, for example, my show Ridley Road on BBC, and I've been trying to get that made for years.

And then when we sort of had this lurch to what could be considered both in England and America, or sort of an embrace of more sort of extreme right wing views, my show made sense in that context.

And you see one advantage of, I live sort of in a fascist dystopia because I studied politics, I'm obsessed with how democracy flourished is and how it dies and how fragile it is.

And so it's quite textbook what's happening. And when you understand history, it isn't so sort of shattering because it's sort of the same pattern, whether it's in Afghanistan and the mountains or West Virginia in America or in Russia.

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