Conspiracy theories used to be fun; now they are dangerous. Why are people drawn to them? Dom Joly joins Adrian Chiles to share the story of his journey into the heart of conspiracy mania.
Conspiracy theories used to be fun, a bit of laugh. Did we really land on the moon? Was Paul McCartney cloned? Nowadays, however, in the aftermath of Donald Trump, a global pandemic and the ever-increasing influence of social media algorithms and AI, they are part of the body politic and a massive cause of division and mistrust.
Comedian Dom Joly set out on a global journey to find out what’s going on. His travels saw him meeting followers of QAnon in Cornwall, some New Age-ers in Glastonbury, hunting for UFOs in Roswell, chasing Alex Jones of Info Wars around Austin, Texas, trying to prove that Finland exists and taking a flat-earther to the edge of the world.
On the way Dom inevitably found the funny and the quirky, but he also tried to understand what makes people so drawn to conspiracy theories. What if those he has long dismissed as crazed loonies actually have a point? What if we are the sheeple and they’ve been right all along?
