Programming note: On Friday our Clubland Q&A live around the planet will air at 3pm North American Eastern - that's 7pm GMT/8pm British Summer Time.
Thank you again for dialing up The Mark Steyn Show every evening. On Wednesday, we had a terrific night ratings-wise, beating Sky and TalkTV combined. Admittedly, the latter is not much of a scalp, as Rupert Murdoch's primetime relaunch of his Piers Morgan vanity network continues its dead-cat bounce. Nevertheless, notwithstanding the £110 million Rupert has unaccountably lavished on Piers Morgan Uncensored, we started the hour with ten times the audience and by the end had widened the gulf to nearly twenty times. GB News is also going gangbusters on radio: we've doubled our audience in the last quarter, and are now the fourth fastest-growing station (over all formats: rock, sport, classical) in the UK. In fact, we were the only talk station to grow in the third quarter, as our rivals at TalkRadio, LBC and Times Radio all fell. I'm grateful to everyone who tunes in and hope you'll want to do so next week.
Thursday's Steyn Show was devoted to those topics that other networks seem to avoid. Telford survivor Samantha Smith was on hand to talk about yet another stillborn report into child sexual abuse. Former ITV/Sky exec Mark Sharman discussed the vaporisation of his documentary by YouTube, and Leilani Dowding covered other aspects of The Big Shut-Up. Bestselling novelist Lionel Shriver rounded out the hour with her thoughts on a generation of free money.
All that plus your comments live as it happens. Click below to view the full show:
If you've missed a Mark Steyn Show in recent weeks or recent years, you can find all our shows from the year to date and many highlights from the archives in a handy Netflix-style tile format here. Make the most of them while you can because, as I've mentioned on air, OffComm has now opened a third investigation against me. Only two are active, because they've given up on the first one. They're sneaky buggers, so they didn't let us know they'd abandoned it, and hid it on their website by not using the correct name of the show.
À propos their latest investigation, one viewer wrote to OfffComm to protest their appalling intrusion upon honest inquiry into the costs of the Covid regime. He has now published the reply he received from them.
There are few things I loathe more than no-name responses from vast powerful bureaucracies. But even more disturbing is OffffCommmm's supposed reassurance that it recognises defendants' "right to freedom of expression set out in Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights". The ECHR? That should never be the applicable standard for a nation that was once the crucible of liberty and whose freedoms predate the European Convention by centuries. This collective of censors applying alien pseudo-standards is, in the tiresome Brit cliché, "unfit for purpose".
If you're a member of The Mark Steyn Club, we thank you for sticking with us in this our second half-decade. Feel free to weigh in below, as we love to read your comments. If you're wondering what the Steyn Club's all about, you can find more details here - and we also have a great gift membership.