So, turns out Joe Lycett didn’t actually shred £10,000 of his own money in response to David Beckham ignoring his public call to withdraw from his reported £10m sponsorship deal with FIFA over Qatar’s LGBTQ+ rights abuses.
Which isn’t really a surprise, is it? The comedian is famed for his outrageous publicity stunts – this is the man who changed his name by deed-poll to Hugo Boss, in 2020, in support of a small businesses who had been sent cease and desist letters by the German fashion label for using the word ‘Boss’ in their names. Last year, he made headlines when he spectacularly ‘stormed off’ Channel 4 daytime TV show Steph’s Packed lunch, as part of a protest against single-use plastics.
When Joe Lycett released his message for David Beckham earlier this month, giving the football megastar and Qatar ambassador the opportunity to ‘end his relationship’ with the country and ‘donate the cash to LGBTQ+ charities’ instead, it was considered unlikely he would get any kind of response. Four days before Joe’s deadline and the start of the tournament, he shared an email he’d purportedly sent to Beckham’s PR, asking if he was ‘to expect radio silence on [the matter]?’
‘I really don’t want to shred ten grand!’ he wrote. ‘I also really don’t want a national treasure that has historically supported the LGBTQ+ community to publicly endorse and advertise a nation state that has an appalling human rights record and has the death penalty for gays – call me old fashioned!’
It was certainly on brand for Joe to make his appeal on the public stage with a campaign that was quintessentially ‘him’, the apparent ‘shredding’ was live streamed on a website he’d set up called benderslikebeckham.com.
But after Joe’s stunt attracted his own criticisms from many, including Love Island’s Shaughna Phillips who tweeted, ‘Someone shredding £10k in this current climate is absolutely vile. Doesn’t matter what the cause was, absolutely disgusting behaviour’, Joe cleared up any confusion with a follow up video today.
‘This is my final message to David Beckham,’ he said. ‘It’s me! That prick who shredded loads of money in a cost of living crisis. So, where are we?
He clarified, ‘I would never destroy real money. I would never be so irresponsible.’
Predictably, the money he’d threatened to shred in the hope of incetivizing Beckham to donate his own fee to charity had itself been donated, before he even released the first call to action.
‘I never expected to hear from you. It was an empty threat designed to get people talking. In many ways, it was like your deal with Qatar, David. Total bullshit from the start. I’m not even queer!’
He clarified, ‘Only joking.’
The finale of his political statement was shredding Beckham’s 2002 Attitude cover, which had been the first gay magazine to feature a premier league footballer on the cover, adding that the publisher had been ‘more than happy’ to publicly sever their endorsement of the footballer in a way Beckham himself was unwilling to do with the problematic host nation.
At the end of the day, it goes to show that shredding actual money was wholly unnecessary for Joe Lycett to make his point. He drew on a sore point of the nation by quite literally throwing money around during the cost of living crisis, and while the outrage has meant a portion of the population have managed to bypass the point of his protest by focusing instead on the audacity of his threat, there’s no doubt the stunt has generated some much-needed publicity for gay rights across the world.