And Finally Artist News Media

Bobby Gillespie’s This Week dance hate captured in new painting

By Andy Malt | Published on Thursday 8 November 2018

Primal Scream frontman Bobby Gillespie’s recent car crash appearance on BBC One’s late night political programme ‘This Week’ has been captured in painting form.

Gillespie appeared on the Andrew Neill-fronted programme to argue that Britain is slipping backwards in terms of social inequality and faced a worsening of this trend if we enter into a hard Brexit and another Conservative government. Neill argued that in a global sense, there has been great progress, with an increasing number of people worldwide no longer fitting the UN’s definition of “abject poverty”. Co-host Michael Portillo briefly agreed, saying that this was the great success of capitalism. Then they all danced around a sour faced Gillespie.

The dancing was an attempt at the ‘Skibidi dance challenge’ – the viral dance thing that originates from the video for ‘Skibidi’ by Russian band Little Big. It was one of the ‘fun’ bits they insist on including in ‘This Week’, which have long helped make it one of the most painful things to watch on British TV.

Gillespie later said that he’d been asked to take part in the dance off before the show aired, but refused. This provided the show’s producers the opportunity to close the programme on a shot of his stony faced glare.

Critiquing the whole situation on Instagram, alongside a video of it all going down, Gillespie said that after being asked about his views on ‘progress’ – or lack of it – he “was immediately cut off by Andrew Neil who quickly handed the question over to Michael Portillo. I never got to say what I fully wanted, my impression was that Andrew Neil sensed an alternative opinion that he didn’t want to hear and closed me down”.

To be fair, Gillespie was given more than two minutes of a three minute segment to get his point across. He just did it very slowly, without ever hitting his key argument hard enough. Still, we’re here to talk about the dancing thing now, not the political debate.

“I found [Neill] to be arrogant, rude and smug”, Gillespie continued. “When I arrived before the show, the producers asked me if I would take part in this ‘dance’ idea at the end of the show. I refused [and] after that their attitude towards me changed”.

“After [the programme] finished, the Labour MP Caroline Flint joined Michael Portillo, Andrew Neil and the producer/crew as they cracked open the champagne – or wine? – and toasted each other. It was a sickening sight. [The clip of the dancing] sums up the attitude of the political class of our country, and the media who support/serve/enable them”.

Oh, look at that, we’re back into the politics. Anyway, the whole event has now been immortalised by Instagram artist Wefail, who paints monstrous political portraits. In the picture, Gillespie’s anger and sadness following his interview is captured perfectly, as googly-eyed Neill dances behind him menacingly.

So happy with the artwork was Gillespie that he shared it on the Primal Scream Instagram profile. Prints of the image are now available for sale, although I think it might be a little too painful for Gillespie himself to have it hung up on his wall.