Frankie Boyle is the comedian we need in these dark times.

2020 began with Australia on fire and a billion animals dead. It’s sobering to think that will be the feel-good story of the year.

He’s writing for The Overtake, a small, independent and excellent publication made by – in their own words – (relatively) normal people. If you can throw a few quid their way it would make an enormous difference – especially if you cancel a subscription to a Murdoch paper or the Daily Mail to do it.

The UK press are currently running a campaign begging advertisers not to desert them: they claim that now more than ever we need high quality journalism. Which is true, but many of the papers doing the begging – such as the Mail, the Express, the Telegraph and the Murdoch press – would have a better case if high quality journalism was something they actually did.

The likes of Murdoch will survive coronavirus – although in the US, his sons are “girding for a pandemic of public-interest lawsuits over misinformation and conspiracy theories” peddled by his TV networks, so here’s hoping – but smaller, independent publishers such as The Overtake, The Ferret, OpenDemocracy and many more need your support right now.

Back to Frankie:

The world’s worst people think that everybody is going to come out of this in a few months and go willingly back into a kind of numbing servitude. Surely it’s time to start imagining something better.