by Stewart Lee
STEWART LEE
How I Escaped My Certain Fate
The Life and Deaths of a StandUp Comedian
To Ted Chippington
Contents
Title page
Dedication
Introduction: Alternative Comedian
1 StandUp Comedian
A transcript of the show recorded on 10 March
2005 at The Stand, Glasgow
2 2004–5
3 ’90s Comedian
A transcript of the show recorded on
10 March 2006 at Chapter Arts, Canton, Cardiff
4 2005–7
5 41st Best StandUp Ever
A transcript of the show recorded on 7 April
2008 at The Stand, Glasgow
Afterword
APPENDICES
I Music Theatre
II English Hecklers in New Zealand
III Derek Bailey/Ruins/Aristocrats
IV Johnny Vegas – Instrument of God
V An Improvised Discussion about Russell Brand on Big Brother’s Little Brother
VI Pestival Set, May 2007
VII ‘I’ll Only Go If You Throw Glass’
VIII Did Tony Blair Plagiarise Stewart Lee?
Relevant Discography
Acknowledgements
Index
About the Author
By the Same Author
Copyright
Introduction: Alternative Comedian
I never wanted to be a comedian. When I was very young I wanted to be a writer, first of all a writer of philosophically inclined thrillers like Robert E. Howard, Ray Bradbury or Stan Lee, and then later a writer of thrillingly inclined philosophy, like Albert Camus, Franz Kafka or Samuel Beckett. But then, at the age of sixteen, I saw a comedian called Ted Chippington open for The Fall in Birmingham in October 1984 and literature’s loss became standup comedy’s loss also. However, unlike generations of would-be comedians before me or after me, I never really wanted to be a ‘comedian’. I wanted to be an Alternative Comedian, because all other types of comedian were sell-out scum and whores of the system.*
* The editor of this book worries there might be people perusing this introduction who were born in the eighties, or even the nineties, and who will therefore need help understanding the archaic term ‘Alternative Comedy’. I don’t think my editor really knows much about the reading habits of young people, and like everyone in publishing, a dying industry with no future, he has his head in the sand. Do they still read at all, the young? I understand from the newspapers that teenagers spend an average of nine hours a week watching internet pornography. Are they supposed to find time to read as well now? Perhaps they are all experts at multitasking. As I understand it is known.
Nonetheless, my editor feels that for many potential readers today’s full-spectrum dominance of standup comedy across all media, in the form of panel shows, top-selling DVDs, live stadium gigs and cash-in books, might be something they take for granted. It was not ever thus, and apparently some context is necessary else these pages appear as nothing more than ‘the demented ramblings of an inexplicably bitter man’.
I started out as a standup in the eighties, just as the Alternative Comedy scene that shaped me was coalescing into a commercial entity; by the end of the nineties, I had co-starred in four television series for the BBC and performed over 2,000 standup gigs. But by the turn of a new century, all my broadcasting work was cancelled, and I’d been circling the standup comedy circuit apparently aimlessly for over a decade. So sometime around the back end of 2000 or the start of 2001, I gradually, incrementally and without any fanfare – or even much thought – gave up being a standup comedian. By the time I quit, ‘Alternative Comedy’, and the machinery around it, was hardly recognisable from its beginnings in the late seventies anyway. ‘Alternative comedy?’ said the Bullseye host and old-school comic Jim Bowen every day from 1979 until his tragic end choking to death on a slice of bully beef. ‘It’s the alternative to comedy.’ And it had been, thank God.
I was born in 1968. For my generation of London-circuit standup comedians there was a Year Zero attitude to 1979. Holy texts found in a skip out the back of the offices of the London listings magazine Time Out tell us how, with a few incendiary post-punk punchlines, Alexei Sayle, Arnold Brown, Dawn French and Andy de la Tour destroyed the British comedy hegemony of Upper-Class Oxbridge Satirical Songs and Working-Class Bow Tie-Sporting Racism. Then, with the fragments of these smashed idols and their own bare hands, they built the pioneering standup clubs The Comedy Store and The Comic Strip. In so doing they founded the egalitarian Polytechnic of Laughs that is today’s comedy establishment. Every religion needs a Genesis myth, and this is contemporary British standup comedy’s very own creation story.*
* In his autobiography I Stole Freddie Mercury’s Birthday Cake, the late, great Malcolm Hardee says it was he who first coined the term ‘Alternative’ in relation to comedy or cabaret, for a night he hosted in a pub called The Ferry Inn in Salcombe in 1978, in order to differentiate it from the more mainstream fare offered by the local yacht club. This is probably the only true ‘fact’ in Malcolm’s book.
However, this simplified fable ignores the rather more complex nature of British comedy in the seventies. It’s a romantic exaggeration to claim that The Comedy Store had an ideological position. It did, for about a week in 1980, but it didn’t when it started and obviously its policy today is defined by commercial imperatives alone. It is true there was an enormous bulk of increasingly dated and dubious workingmen’s-club comics laughing at Pakistanis, poofs and their wives’ mothers. Their hot piss regularly cascaded into my childhood home via the conduit of ITV’s The Comedians, where enthusiastically dissipated tap-room whimsy and economically compressed racial hatred (the latter dishonestly edited out of the series’ cosily nostalgic DVD releases) were interspersed with trad jazz tunes from Kenny Ball or Shep’s Banjo Boys. Like an iceberg barely visible above the waterline of light entertainment, these twats nevertheless made up the majority of live standup in Britain at the time.*
* Bernard Manning remained the liberal press’s chief old-school whipping boy until his death in 2007, largely because he was the only one of these fools anyone could even remember the name of. Personally, I always preferred George ‘Welly’ Roper.
Meanwhile, the slowly dissipating after-fart of the fifties and sixties Oxbridge satire boom meant that posh kids still helmed the high-profile left-field TV and radio shows, such as Not the Nine O’Clock News or Radio Active, as they do again today, and got to tour a Cambridge Footlights show to mid-range theatre venues in the south of England every year, still dressed in matching outfits and singing funny songs about the news at the piano.
Of course, there were dozens of superb seventies acts that didn’t fit this bipolar model and who were guilty of few, if any, of the ideological crimes now retrospectively ascribed to all British standup before 1979. It is difficult to pigeonhole the rarely bettered bone-dry stealth bombs of Dave Allen, the variety-circuit shtick of Les Dawson, the snug-bar surrealism of Chic Murray, the art-house proto-Alternative Comedy of John Dowie, the punk poetry of John Cooper Clarke and the storytelling folk-singer comedians Billy Connolly, Max Boyce, Jasper Carrott and Mike Harding. So, for the sake of simplicity, I will ignore them. (There is probably something on the internet you can read instead.)
Another conveniently ignored factor in the development of the Alternative Comedy scene is economics. For example, when I started on the circuit in London in 1989, Roland and Claire Muldoon’s CAST organisation was a relatively high-profile promoter of New Variety nights, usually with a textbook balance of performers of all racial and sexual persuasions on the bill. But in the
seventies, CAST had been a touring radical theatre group, expressly formed to bring about the collapse of capitalism and to encourage mass drugtaking and compulsory homosexuality, its funding continually questioned in the Commons by the perpetually outraged Tory MP Teddy Taylor. After the Conservative landslide of 1979, the ever-adaptable Muldoons smelt change in the air and scaled down their theatre shows into Alternative Cabaret evenings that espoused the same ideals but didn’t rely on funding that was clearly going to disappear. As the comedy historian Oliver Double noted in his study of the early circuit, ‘Alternative Comedy: From Radicalism to Commercialism’, refugees from left-wing theatre groups also found themselves key players in early Comedy Store line-ups or shows by Tony Allen’s Alternative Cabaret collective. There are few forms of entertainment cheaper to stage than standup. In some ways the Alternative Comedy scene was initiated on an economic model that was incongruously Thatcherite.
But the comedy community I joined in the late eighties still retained traces of its birth in opposition to both the political and the entertainment establishments of its day. As well as being an ethical, admirable and even brave thing to do at the time, working within these politically correct parameters forced the Alternatives to find new subjects and new styles. And if these new comics’ jokes were ever sexist or racist, then they were at least aimed at totemic female figures, like Margaret Thatcher, or at races that had previously not been overtly stereotyped. ‘I’m an Albanian, I’m an Albanian!’ shouted Alexei Sayle on Chris Tarrant’s bandwagon-jumping zoo TV show O.T.T. whilst leaping up and down and hitting himself on the head with a tea tray. I stayed up late and watched, thrilled. If you told me that nearly thirty years later I would be fat and appearing on TV doing comedy in a too-tight suit just like Alexei Sayle’s, I would have swallowed my own fist.
And how long ago the eighties seem now. Suddenly the decade has the dusty, foggy flavour of the forties or the fifties. When did we grow old, we who guffawed at Monty Python and Spike Milligan on BBC2 as children, and learned Young Ones scripts off by heart in our teens? It was a different world. This was the era when you could still scrape by on dole money, full student grants, like mine, or Enterprise Allowance Schemes and call yourself an artist without needing to earn a crust from art itself; when regional arts centres and the long-lost Arts Labs still hummed with a sense of community and common purpose, rather than just being used as tour stops by covers bands and hypnotists; when standup comedy and rock music were still not deemed worthy of reviews in broadsheet newspapers, except under special circumstances; and when alternative and underground culture was bush-telegraphed direct to your brain by inky fanzines and word of mouth.
In those dogmatic days, sexual relations with women, who could often be found wearing earrings depicting men being castrated, were a complex ideological negotiation. How many student-union anti-sexist men’s groups were staffed by young boys who wanted only to be kissed? How many heroic lesbians first headed south only as a result of political expediency? Frequently, the most a man could aspire to was to be described as ‘a sound bloke’, an epithet which mixed left-of-centre political inclinations with a suggestion of un pretentious solidity. Yet in many ways things were simpler. The teenage girls we tried to date did not wear T-shirts saying ‘Whore’, ‘Slut’ or ‘No Gag Reflex’, nor queue up to get talent-spotted by lads’ mags in the Student Union Super-Pub, formerly known as The Mandela Bar. Oh, Winnie, how fortunate that you did not live to see your memory sullied so.
Back then, under the shadow of an unattainable ideal of ideological purity, nobody, not bands or standup comedians or comic-book creators, wanted to be seen to ‘sell out to the Man’ by doing an advert or appearing on Top of the Pops or achieving any level of commercial sustainability. Gigs were performed on pallet stages in smoky pubs and scary squats, and were advertised on photocopied sepia-toned flyers pinned to walls. This was before computer graphics programs meant that even jumble-sale adverts have the production values of Hollywood movie posters, and before the internet could rally a crowd to see minor cult figures at the click of a mouse.
And today’s young consumers would not tolerate our lack of sophistication. The first cappuccino I ever tasted was in the Queen’s Lane Coffee House in December 1985, when I went up to Oxford for university interviews, and it came with a tuna mayonnaise roll, served in a seeded bun with salad. At that time, the mid-eighties, these two items comprised the most exotic meal I had ever seen, and I remember the shock of the taste to this day. Back then, exciting food was still a novelty. Even pizza was regarded with suspicion. Pubs stopped serving at 10.30 p.m. and closed all afternoon. There were only four delicatessens in the whole of the country and all they sold was Belgian biscuits.
And it was cold back then! It snowed all the time and we wore fingerless gloves and black woollen beanies and dead men’s Crombies and Dr Marten boots every day, not out of punkish affectation, but out of sheer necessity. There was no shame in a duffle coat in those dark days. Michael Foot, the last socialist leader of the Labour Party, a man who had actually put his life on the line voluntarily, fighting Fascists in the Spanish civil war, wore one. (He always said he didn’t, but he did.) And so did Alan Davies, who, along with Jack Dee, was the first Alternative Comedian of any profile to break ranks and do a big advertising campaign, flogging Abbey National policies sometime in the early nineties.*
* Alan Davies later became infamous for biting the ear of a homeless man who shouted at him one night as he left Soho’s exclusive media hangout the Groucho Club. I am sure there are mitigating circumstances in this story – perhaps the tramp had an especially delicious ear – but it is too good an event not to use as a mile-high metaphor for the way the Alternative Comedian’s role has drifted somewhat since the early days of the circuit. Once we stood shoulder to shoulder with society’s outsiders. Now we view them as a late-night snack.
Writing this now, God, how I miss the cultural side of the eighties – the rhetoric, the raggedy clothes, the politics, gigs you were frightened to go into, Radio 1 when it had weird bits, Channel 4 when it was radical, the NME when it had writers, and the thrill of discovering underground music and new comedy for yourself. Or maybe I just miss being eighteen, and like all those columnists who turned forty sometime in the late nineties and wrote simultaneous think-pieces on why Punk was the best thing ever, I’m just confusing the thrill of being young with the notion that the era in which I was young was in any way especially creative or remarkable.
Nevertheless, because various brands of bespoke comedy are now ubiquitous on television, in clubs and on the internet, I don’t think anyone today will have the same experience we had, of stumbling across a slice of that new Alternative Comedy when it was fresh and unformed. And to find it you had to dig. There were a paltry two editions of Paul Jackson’s well-intentioned BBC2 circuit sampler Boom Boom Out Go the Lights. There might be specially recorded sessions on the John Peel show, from John Hegley or Eric Bogosian. And occasionally, in some provincial town that didn’t have London’s burgeoning comedy scene, you’d catch one of the Alternatives opening for your favourite band. To me, growing up in a conservative suburb south-east of Birmingham, these voices seemed like transmissions from Mars. I saw Peter Richardson from The Comic Strip opening for Dexys Midnight Runners as a Mexican bandit, and a young Phill Jupitus doing performance poetry at a Billy Bragg gig under the name of Porky the Poet. And in October 1984, I saw Ted Chippington, the man who made me a standup, supporting The Fall, and everything changed.
Ted Chippington took the stage at The Powerhaus, Hurst Street, Birmingham, in Teddy Boy regalia, to a crowd that wasn’t expecting him. For the next half an hour, he stood rooted to the spot, scowling and supping beer, and in a flat Midlands monotone delivered variations on the same joke, involving a torturous misunderstanding of a place name, or a make of car, or an abstract concept, and all of which began with the phrase ‘I was walking down this road the other day’. These he interspersed with listless interpretation
s of pop hits. People were paralysed with laughter or furious with irritation. At the point tuned-in comedy consumers were beginning to process the new standup styles of Ben Elton and Alexei Sayle, Ted was already dismantling the form itself. With every frill removed, and with the very notion of what a joke was boiled down to the barest of bones, Ted was standup in its purest form, belonging neither to the politically charged world of the new standups nor the reactionary hinterlands of working men’s clubs. I was utterly transfixed and my heart was racing as I realised that standup could be anything you wanted it to be. You didn’t even have to look as if you were enjoying it. And I thought, ‘That’s what I want to do.’*
* ‘Eventually, Ted became a minor cult, though he never played any conventional comedy clubs, preferring to perform where he was not necessarily wanted. In 1986, a collaboration with Birmingham bands The Nightingales and We’ve Got A Fuzzbox And We’re Gonna Use It nudged Rocking With Rita to the bottom of the charts, and the DJ Steve Wright’s fascination with Ted’s oddly moving take on The Beatles’ She Loves You led to brief major label interest and three TV appearances. Years later Vic Reeves arrived by another route at a similar, but more sophisticated, form of bent light entertainment. At the dawn of the nineties, Ted’s audiences were in on the joke, so he split to seek fame and fortune in Los Angeles, eventually ending up driving trucks to Mexico and working as a cook. And then the trail went cold.
‘In the late 1980s, at university and the Edinburgh fringe, I met other teenage, would-be comics who knew Ted’s lone album, Man In A Suitcase, off by heart. Ted’s releases documented him struggling with hostile crowds, though his indifference seems now almost sublime. Ted taught us that a bad audience reaction didn’t necessarily mean that what you were doing was worthless, and we co-opted his low-energy insolence and fed off it. At the risk of seeming delusional, I now think you can hear second and third hand echoes of Ted in the routines of comics who probably never even heard him. The relentlessness of Ricky Gervais’ Aesop’s Fables bit is Ted with a tailwind, and in 2005, when I had the superbly baffling young Edinburgh fringe award-winner Josie Long open for me on tour, a disgruntled Leeds punter remarked, “This is the worst thing I’ve seen since Ted Chippington, twenty years ago.” I couldn’t have been happier.
