What it feels like to… be a Simpsons super-geek

I started watching The Simpsons when it started on TV in Australia, which would have been 1991. I would have been 13 but I heard about it before that because I had a friend who went to America on holiday and they came back and were talking about it because they were all talking about it in the States.

In the early nineties, when that show started, it wasn’t like now; now you can turn on one of the Fox stations and they’ll have like 10 episodes of The Simpsons on in a day. Time was you got to watch something once on TV and then maybe they’d repeat it. But it was an interesting thing in Australia because between season four and season five we had to wait around two years.

Between those two seasons there was about a year and a half where it was on five nights a week and they would obviously repeat all the episodes. It’s one of those things where by the time that fifth season came along everyone was very well versed in the first four seasons. Myself and a bunch of my friends, we’d tape them off the TV and watch them and re-watch them.

I’ve probably always known more than an average person about The Simpsons but if you’re talking about when I went full circle with being a super-Simpsons-geek, probably about three or four years ago.

One time, as a bit of a joke, a bunch of the writers organised to go to a Simpsons trivia night. They were all talking beforehand about how they thought they’d go and one of the writers was like: ‘We’ve got to be going pretty well,’ and all of the rest of the writers were like ‘Are you kidding me? No way we will win. Fans know so much more about the show than we do, even though we wrote the bloody show!’ Sure enough, they went and did the quiz and they got slaughtered.

The quality dropped around 2000 but there’s so many good episodes that were made before that. It was such a relevant show, that touched on so many issues; it’s got that really densely packed pop culture reference-ness to it. I feel like if you take the best parts of it, you can almost analyse everything with it. You pretty much couldn’t come up with an episode about something that The Simpsons hasn’t already done.

There’s an episode in season seven, it’s called Much Apu about Nothing, and it’s basically one where Mayor Quimby tries to divert attention from being a pretty terrible politician by scapegoating immigrants. They’re going to deport Apu and then the joke at the end is that Marge says: ‘Thank God everything worked out for all the people we care about,’ and it cuts to Groundskeeper Willie with his bags on a ship being deported.

I’ve got a joke in the show to draw the parallels between that episode and Brexit and Trump, because there’s a lot of similar things. The irony is that that episode ended exactly the same way Brexit’s going to end, because literally the picture of Willie with his bag packed is the last image of the episode. It’s going to end exactly the way Brexit’s going to end: with Scotland packing their bags.

I’ve got my first show in Hull; I don’t know how my Brexit joke’s going to go down considering that sixty-eight per cent of them voted leave. It’ll split the room.

I like Scotland as a country and I like the people. I’m not sure what Scottish people think of Groundskeeper Willie. I think Australians and Scottish people have a very similar sort of irreverence and they don’t take things too seriously. They’ve got a similar sense of humour.

I don’t really have a favourite episode. I don’t think you can ask a parent to choose from 450 children but you can narrow it down to a good 200 children, I can tell you that much.

Yianni Agisilaou's show The Simpsons Taught Me Everything I Know is at The Stand, Edinburgh on September 26, and The Stand, Glasgow on September 27

Toby Symonds