How I Escaped My Certain Fate

by Stewart Lee

  Then, of course, over the years, Ben Elton’s changed. He’s worked with Queen, who were one of the British bands that broke the, er, cultural embargo on South Africa under apartheid.* He’s worked with Andrew Lloyd Webber, who’s worse than that. And, er … And a song that they co-wrote was performed at the inauguration of George Bush. And when questioned about it, Ben Elton said he didn’t see it so much as a celebration of George Bush as a celebration of the President of the United States of America. But of course, they’re the same thing. That’s why that argument doesn’t work.

  * Of all the bands for Elton to work with he chooses the apartheid embargo-busters Queen, and then decides to impose onto their unwieldy frame the notion that they represent a political revolt. You couldn’t make it up, as Richard Littlejohn will say later in this book.

  But the problem is he’s kind of been compromised by proximity to, to success. And, and if you think about it, all the great comedians are kind of outsider figures, commenting on society from outside. Kind of holy fools, shaman clowns, outsiders. Spike Milligan was able to remain an outsider by virtue of having long-term mental-illness problems. Um … Bill Hicks has been able to remain an outsider because he died of cancer at the age of thirty-two. Michael Barrymore has been able to remain an outsider by becoming the subject of a murder investigation after a man was found dead in his pool. I admire Barrymore’s commitment to this abstract notion of the outsider shaman-clown figure. And I think it’s good … I think it’s great to be on this late at night in Glasgow talking about this idea. But um …

  But lately I have more sympathy for what we in the trade call Elton’s compromise. And … ’Cause … In the last few years I, I directed a, a show and it was, it was kind of a hit in the West End. And I had to meet loads of famous people on, on press nights and, um, and opening nights. I met, er, Bonnie Langford. Yeah. I met her twice. I met, er, the tall one from the Three Degrees, Sheila … something, her name is. And one night, I found myself shaking hands before I realised who it was, with Michael Portillo, right? I looked up. I thought it was the little wooden goblin from the Cuprinol advert. But it was Michael Portillo, someone whose policies I had marched against as a student, or would have done if I hadn’t been drunk. But theoretically …*

  * The years pass. This meeting with Portillo was in 2003. Since then I’ve been on various TV shows with him and he seems nice enough. There are worse people, many of them members of the Labour Party. But again here, and throughout the Ben Elton-bashing bit, I am sort of in character as a smug, stuck-up, politically correct, holier than thou leftie, a character I have researched so fully I often feel obliged actually to behave like it in my own spare time, sometimes for years on end.

  There was worse to come than Portillo. On June the 16th last year, I heard a rumour that Cherie Blair was going to come and see the show, right? And I thought, ‘Well, I hope that’s not the case.’ You know, I don’t want to have to meet her. ’Cause I’m one of two million Britons that marched against her husband’s war. I think it’s unethical. I think it’s going to come back and bite us in the arse and we’ll be in trouble about it for decades, once the dust settles. And I, I don’t want to have to be like some E-list celebrity New Labour apologist. I don’t want to meet her, no way.

  And then the next day, the woman from the public-relations company for the show rang me up. And she said, ‘I’ve got some great news, Cherie Blair is coming to see the show, and she wants to meet the cast and the creative team afterwards.’*

  * This is another true story. On the rare occasions when I have been involved with anything that famous people want to come to, it does genuinely amaze me that the supporting PR people think you will want to meet them, especially when meeting them, as is the case with Cherie Blair, has political or ethical dimensions.

  And I went, ‘I’m sorry. I can’t do it. I’ve got … This is where I draw a line. You know. You d–,’ I said. ‘You don’t even want me in the building. If I’m there, I’m going to get kind of political Tourette’s syndrome and just do something like fly an anti-war banner off the stage, or make a speech at the end, or just do something to Cherie Blair that’ll wipe that … whatever that is … on her face. You know, make it go.’

  And she said, ‘Well, that’s a shame, because … Does this change your mind?’ she said. ‘She’s not coming on her own. She’s coming with her guest, who is the president of Scope, the Spastics Society.’ Right, and this honestly happened. I was put in this weird position where you want to make some ineffectual gesture against Cherie Blair, but you don’t want to snub a person from a worthwhile charity, Scope. You know, so …*

  * Modern dilemmas. By snubbing the warmonger’s wife I would also be snubbing the Scope woman. And yes, I know the Spastics Society is now called Scope, and that they frown on the use of the word ‘spastic’, but I needed to use it here to give the moral choice involved more weight, to really hammer home what Scope is all about.

  I thought, ‘Well, I know what I’ll do. I’ll go down, and after the show I’ll say to Cherie Blair, “I hope you’re happy, Cherie. I hope when you look across at Tony every morning, you think of all those thousands of people killed in his war, and I hope you’re happy when you think of all those little kids in Baghdad and Basra with their arms and legs blown off, maimed, crippled for life.” Then I’ll turn to the woman from Scope, and I’ll go, “Maybe you can have a rummage around in one of your charity shops. See if you can find them some cardigans.”’*

  * This often didn’t get a laugh. I don’t really understand why. It’s black humour, but it’s not against the Scope beneficiaries or the victims of war.

  But in the end, I didn’t do that. What I did was, I said that I would go, and then I just didn’t. Yeah.*

  * I just didn’t go. Hurrah for me.

  But … We’re back talking about the war again. Last, last bit. And er … Like I say, there’s this kind of assumption I think from us here in Europe, where we look at, particularly in Britain, where we look at America’s hysterical reaction to the 9th of November, and we think, ‘Well, you know, that wouldn’t happen here. We wouldn’t do that, ’cause we’re reasonable, sensible people here in Britain.’ But we don’t have to look very far back in our own cultural history to see an example of us losing the plot as a, as a nation. And I’m talking of course about the death of Princess Diana, the late Princess of Wales.* It was in the news again last summer because of the Princess Diana Memorial Fountain, which you’ll remember was a rubbish fountain. And fulfilled very few of the job-description criteria of fountains.

  * Going over this show again it does seem like a bit of a ragbag of unrelated stuff. This must be the most contrived segue of the lot, as I limp into the Princess Diana routine, which I initially wrote in 1997, having elaborated on it over the years but never performing in a solo standup show. The new Princess Diana fountain was in the news, which was sufficient excuse to shoehorn it in.

  But it’s ongoing, it’s ongoing. The story never goes away.* I remember when she died, um, ’cause about two days before the state funeral, I went down to Kensington Palace where Princess Diana had lived to, to look at all the tributes left outside, you know. And in amongst all the bunches of flowers and sympathy cards, and poems little kids had written, and drawings and paintings people had done, whatever … in amongst all that, I honestly saw, and this is true, I saw a life-size inflatable model of E.T.† It was honestly there, outside Kensington Palace, two days before the state funeral. And I stood there looking at the inflatable E.T. for some forty or fifty minutes. And I thought to myself, ‘How did that get there? Who would have thought that that was an appropriate gesture?’

  * I am saying this as if to convince both myself and the audience that it is fine to do this routine about someone who has been dead now for the best part of a decade.

  † I did not do this. I watched it on TV. Phelim O’Neil, a friend of my then girlfriend who is now a film critic, told me he saw an E.T. in the flowers.

  And
I imagined a household somewhere on that awful autumn Sunday morning, where perhaps the wife had woken up first, and she’d watched the news and she went through to her still-sleeping husband, and she said …*

  * This was the first routine I ever wrote, I think, where I began to stretch the silences, the lack of laughs, the tension, to the point where I’d be worried about ever winning back the room. Since doing this routine a lot in the late nineties, and on the 2004/5 StandUp Comedian tour, it now seems easily manageable. There’s always a clear end in sight, and lots of little handrails to grab onto in the midst of all the uncertainty, but at the time it felt like a nightly leap into the void, acting out the grief of the people in the story to the silent onlookers. Today, I’d go much further away from the shallow end.

  I used to like doing this bit in theatres and bigger venues where there was a stage, so I could roll around the lip in imagined woe here, and even allow myself to fall a few feet on hearing the tragic news if the drop didn’t look too great to risk, though I remember hurting myself quite badly dropping off the stage of the Hi-Ficlub in Melbourne in 2000. Today, I love counter-weighting the apparent measured monotony of my routines with sudden bursts of possible physical jeopardy, and on the If You Prefer a Milder Comedian tour of 2009/10 I found myself in loads of nineteenth-century theatres full of ledges and empty audience boxes I could drape myself out of during moments of feigned mental collapse, to the distress of the panicked ushers.

  ‘Please. Please wake u– … I need you to wake up and be with me now. There’s been a t– … Some terrible news. I need you to get up, come in the front room and watch it on the television with me, ’cause I can’t be alone. So please wake up.’

  But you know, he’s asleep, he’s asleep. He’s going …

  [lying down, as though half-awake]

  ‘What? It’s fucking … It’s half past six on a Sunday morning. I am asleep. I know I’m speaking but I am asleep. I don’t want to get up. I’m asleep. So … just … I know you’re upset but just say what it is. What is it?’

  And she’d have gone …

  [stands up]

  ‘Please. If you … If you love me, just this one time, just get up. And … Because it’s an awful thing and I need … I can’t be alone. I need someone to comfort me and share. Just … please. Get up.’

  [lying down]

  And he’d have gone …

  ‘Look, I was out late last night. I’ve got, I’ve got work at seven … tomorrow. This is my … this is my one day for sleeping in. I don’t want to get up till about half past eleven, to be honest. And even then I’m not going to get dressed. I’m just going to be, like, in my pants and stuff, just sitting around. I kind of … I don’t know what you … If you were just to say what it is … You know … What is it?’

  [stands up]

  She’d have gone …

  ‘Princess Diana, Lady Di, has … she … has been killed.’

  [lying down]

  And he’d have gone …

  ‘No! [pounding fist on floor] Not the Queen of Hearts!

  The Rose of England … and Scotland, and Wales, and bits of Ireland, no! How did it … There’s no God! How did it … why? How did it happen?’*

  * There’s another Lee and Herring echo here, as we would often write characters whose dialogue consisted mainly of them shouting ‘Why?’

  [standing up]

  And she’d have gone …

  ‘It was in a car crash in Paris last night. They don’t know the exact details yet. But she’s dead.’

  So presumably at that point, he’d have got up, got out of bed, tried to get dressed, you know, get some kind of grip on his emotions and his feelings. Calm down his grief. And then he’d have said …

  ‘I’d better go out and get a life-size inflatable model of E.T. You know, for the gates of her home.’

  And his wife would have said …

  ‘Yes. But you’d better hurry, ’cause there’ll be a rush on those now. We don’t want to be the only people not putting one there.’

  And I was talking about this onstage in Croydon at the time it happened, and a bloke shouted out, ‘I was there! And I saw that! And it wasn’t a life-size inflatable model of E.T., it was a life-size inflatable model of ALF!’*

  * This actually happened. I think one of the things I have consciously copied from Greg Fleet is to embrace talking in a routine about times that routine hasn’t worked, and I think there’s a direct relationship here to his bit about accidentally doing a routine about shark attacks to an audience that includes a couple who lost their son to a shark. We’re comedians. Why do we pretend to be like you and do routines about everyday life? This is my everyday life, being heckled about an inflatable alien in Croydon, so I will talk about it, and it will be fascinating to you, because it is so different to your everyday life. Yes. You. In your suit and tie.

  I didn’t even know what an ALF was, I had to ask him. He said, ‘Oh, it’s an American kids’ TV thing. It’s an alien – A-L-F, Alien Life Form. It’s like a cross between a pig and an aardvark, from space. And it sometimes wears a nappy, and it says kind of wise-ass things.’ And he said he’d seen one of those there. I didn’t see an ALF outside Kensington Palace, before the … And I’m not saying there wasn’t one there, maybe there was at some stage. But by the time I arrived, it had got covered up under flowers or carried away on a river of infants’ tears. I don’t know, I didn’t see it.*

  * Sometimes people complained to me about this routine after shows, but very rarely, and I could usually defuse the situation by showing how it was about the public response to the princess’s death, and not simply personal mockery of her. But once, at the club on The Tattershall Castle boat on the River Thames, a woman came up to me crying about it, and I began my usual explanation. She stopped me and said she was upset because an AIDS ward named after her father had been renamed after Princess Diana when she died, and she was just sick of hearing about her everywhere. It’s impossible to guess what will upset people.

  It never goes away, it’s back in the news now, the Princess Diana Memorial Fountain.* Last year, people went, ‘Oh, it’s great, it’s, it’s what she would have wanted. It’s a place where families can hang out, children can play. It’s what Princess Diana would have wanted.’ It isn’t. What Princess Diana would have wanted would have been to have not been killed. And then in death, not to have become the unwitting receptacle of the hysterical, overemotional, shrieking grief of twats. That’s what she would have wanted.†

  * How convenient for me.

  † The material from here on in isn’t really a good enough end to a show, but as the show didn’t appear to me at the time to have a definite theme or through-line, it was hard to know how to end it. So I do what you’ll see most comics do, when you watch the hour-long DVD of the unrelated series of gags they’re touring off the back of a regular slot on a TV quiz show – I speed up and shout to give the impression that some kind of conclusion is being reached and then quit the stage on a roll, hopefully before anyone realises that choosing the material to close on was a largely arbitrary decision.

  But in retrospect, the show did have a theme: extraordinary popu lar delusions and the madness of crowds. It was all there in undercurrents, but I never realised. One simple sentence could have tied everything together. But you can’t go back.

  It didn’t even work! It didn’t even work, Glasgow! Children were supposed to be able to play in it. They kept falling over, breaking their arms and legs. They made it out of slate, or sheets of ice, or something. They were getting dogshit-eye-blindness disease from the water. In the end, they had to close it down, fence it off, put warning signs on it like a decommissioned Chernobyl nuclear reactor. ‘Don’t go near the Princess Diana Memorial Fountain! It’s dangerous! Don’t even look at it! You’ll get cancer and die! Run away!’

  But it’s ridiculous. There should be a memorial to her, there should be a memorial to her, because she did some amazing things. She worked, worked wit
h charity and landmines. And she got one GCSE in domestic science. And to achieve that, and only that, when born into such a position of privilege and wealth, requires a steely determination of focus. You’ve got to know from an early age that you want to achieve next to nothing, and work hard at it, when all the odds are in your favour.*

  * Irony.

  And that’s why there should be a memorial to her, the People’s Princess, right. That’s why I’m going to make my own, I’m going to make my own memorial fountain to the Princess Diana Memorial Fountain. It’s going to be called the Princess Diana Memorial Fountain Memorial Fountain Fountain. But it’s not going to be some state-approved, Viscount Althorp-subsidised architectural carbuncle. It’s going to be simple, like she would have wanted. It’s going to be me, lying on my back in Hyde Park, near the Princess Diana Memorial Fountain, naked, with a colander over my penis. Every hour, on the hour, I’ll piss up through that. Children can come and play in it if they want, families can gather round, I don’t mind. You can do it yourselves, Glasgow, do it yourselves. You don’t even need a colander. That’s gilding the lily, to be honest. Just do a piss anywhere you want. In the street, in your house, in a library, in an antenatal unit, in the face of a treasured family pet or an elderly relative.

  And if a policeman says to you, ‘What are you doing? What on earth do you think you’re doing … madam?’ just say, ‘I’m paying tribute in the only way I understand to the memory of Princess Diana, Princess of Wales.’*

  * Is this an end? No. Pathetic.

  I’ve been Stewart Lee. Thanks a lot for bearing with us tonight, thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.

  Now go.

  EXIT MUSIC: ‘QUEEN OF THE WORLD’ BY LLOYD AND CLAUDETTE.*