For many people, the most memorable thing about the Union’s Comedy Debate 'This House is Overworked and Undersexed' was the bizarre moment when someone who was dressed up as a robot, silver foil wrapped around cardboard boxes attached to their body, not to mention the well-endowed dildo, came scuttling into the room and started acting out some sexual positions with the proposition debater, Matilda Wnek. The lights were turned off, there was a disco ball emitting a dazzling array of colours and part of Wnek’s speech was blaring through the speakers in a robotic voice. The looks of incredulity from the audience was matched only by my friend’s bewildered question: “Is this actually happening?!”

However, for me the most interesting part of the evening came later when Varsity were allowed to speak with Ollie Locke from Made in Chelsea and the comedian Liam Williams. I could not have spoken to two more different people, both with fairly negative views of each other. I spoke first with Ollie Locke. He came into the room and was very well-mannered, giving the girls kisses on the cheek and shaking the mens' hands. He joked in the debate that his reality TV show was “basically about having sex” and that this was something “Spencer certainly does”. He spoke openly to the house about his sex life, even admitting to “fingering a post-graduate on a punt!” What were his motivations for leaving the show? “I had three break-ups on Made in Chelsea. One I really, really cared about… the hardest things are the breakups because they are as real as you could possibly imagine. There are a lot of people who say Made in Chelsea is fake and that it is scripted reality and constructed etc… but there are twenty of us that understand what that means… If you knew how real it was, you’d prefer it and think it was a better show.”

Having watched a few episodes myself, I find it hard to believe that the story lines aren’t engineered or at least sensationalised for the purpose of entertainment. In fact, Locke seems to go back on his assertion that Made in Chelsea is grounded in some form of reality when he says “it’s our job to have a party lifestyle because through a microscope it’s what everyone in the world would see as Chelsea. It's that glamorous, not particularly working very hard and having a wonderful time… people don’t want to be bummed out and watch people work, they do that themselves all day”.

I then sit down with Liam Williams, who, during the debate, took an ironic persona, parading with bowler hat and cane. He joked that the Leeds-born Liam Williams, who was in the show Capitalism, was merely a “pound shop Russell Brand”; a façade covering the “true” posh Liam Williams. His comic style leaves audiences feeling somewhat uncomfortable; an effect which only serves to enhance his message about the problem of social inequality in our society. In his caricature, he joked that one can justify unpaid internships because “without a stint as a slave, how will you gain the motivation not to be a slave anymore?” He mocks trickle-down economics by positing that “dropping money in the street or leaving money in the ATM” is an effective way to redistribute wealth.

As I sit down with Williams, it is obvious that he feels very strongly about social inequality: “I have an anxiety that I really still think society is biased and favours people from privileged backgrounds, people who went to public school, people who have money already. That’s something that has to be challenged. I almost wish it wasn’t the case because then I could get on and say ‘well aren’t airports funny’ or whatever, but I can’t really relax while knowing that things are so unfair”.

It seems that Williams always seeks to make deeper reflections on the state of society through his comedy. What about his time at Cambridge, did it lead him to want to rail against social inequality? Whilst at Cambridge he admits to thinking “‘I’m in a bit of a petri dish here, I’m in a bit of a concentration of people from privileged backgrounds’… The rest of the country is not like this. We can delude ourselves whilst we’re here. I don’t feel like a malcontented contrarian to say that ‘most people here don’t know what its like'…  I’m not saying its utter privation but it’s a different way of living in the wealthy regions. Not to be too reductive but it’s a different experience of life for people who go to private school and those who don’t… I had a lovely time here and found a lot of sympathetic people but the general atmosphere suggests an obliviousness to the way it is for most people”.

Williams clearly feels some enmity towards his proposition partner, Locke, whom he abandoned during the debate to join the other side. He justifies his view that “I think that guy is a prick” by saying that “if you come here and give an interesting, self-reflective speech, fine. But he didn’t. It was a self-indulgent speech… He parades a kind of souvenir upper-class status that we’re all supposed to ironically invest in”. Williams might speak for many when he questions the ethos of the show Locke starred in, which seems to imply “we’re by birth well off and therefore interesting.” To this, Williams can only say “fuck you!” 

People often assert that class is dead. Is this something Williams accepts? “The class divisions are extremely complicated now but inequality is far from dead, and in fact its getting worse… That guy [Locke], as far as I can tell, has made his name by being involved in a show which makes light pantomime out of long-standing, easily achieved social status… I don’t think I should uphold any politeness to anyone who is having an easy float through life and who can come to the Cambridge Union and make a bit of a mockery about the fact he got off with a Polish cleaner as if that’s some kind of embarrassing indiscretion, and the idea of a Polish cleaner is like absurdly disgusting to his sensibilities. Fuck you, mate.”

People say that it is necessary in the entertainment business to have parents who are able to financially support you when starting out. Is this true of stand-up comedy? “That observation is more pertinent, maybe to acting, because it requires a lot more overheads… There is a similarity between our current time and the late 80s… Stand-up then really flourished because arts funding was destroyed under the Thatcher government and people who were previously doing theatre couldn’t do it anymore because they didn’t have the funding and they couldn’t afford to go to drama school. So they start doing stand-up which is one man and a microphone, or one woman and a microphone… I really champion stand-up comedy as a democratic art form.”