How I Escaped My Certain Fate

by Stewart Lee

  * But look! That’s just what I am doing!

  † It would be incredibly naff for an artist to explain the point of their work onstage. But by talking about it to my mother, in the form of reported speech which the audience are overhearing, I was trying to circumvent any wilful misinterpretation of the show by journalists, fundamentalist Christians, etc.

  And I said to her, ‘Well, three things, Mother. Firstly, to make the point that a symbol, be it an icon or a flag or whatever, is only as worthy of respect as the values of the people that appropriate it. Secondly, that if a symbol goes out into the world, into places where it’s perhaps not understood or wanted or valued, you shouldn’t be too upset if it then takes on a shape you don’t recognise as your own. And thirdly, that if you attempt to apply limits to freedom of expression, either through legislation or intimidation or threats, what will then happen is that reasonable people, often against their own better judgement, will feel obliged to test those limits, er, by going into areas they don’t feel entirely comfortable with.’ I personally haven’t enjoyed the last half hour at all, I do it only to safeguard your liberty. And …

  [Applause.]

  Ah. That’s never had a clap before, which probably means it is time to stop doing this show.*

  * On this recording, I was clearly preaching to the converted. In the week that I performed this show for the last time in the UK, in February 2006 at the Hackney Empire in a double bill with Kevin McAleer’s Chalk and Cheese, Danish police arrested three men plotting to kill one of the cartoonists alleged to have insulted the prophet Mohammed the previous September. Even as I stood onstage there, saying this conclusion, I realised that it now seemed glib. If you were writing a show about religious censorship, even six months later, you would have had to take on board that the odd Christian death threat and the financial collapse of a theatre project was less significant than the (partly manufactured) global panic about the Danish Mohammed cartoons. The bar of religious intolerance had been raised, and one would have been obliged to contextualise the Jerry Springer: The Opera issue in a wider, and more complex, arena.

  Would I have dared play fast and loose with Islamic symbols in the same way I did with Christian ones? Well, not being from an Islamic culture myself I wouldn’t have felt the sense of entitlement. And also, I wouldn’t have known how to deploy them for the effect I wanted, not being entirely familiar with their individual resonances, and my audience, low as it is on Muslims, wouldn’t have known how to interpret whatever I was saying with them anyway. But despite these reasonable reasons, the elephant in the room remains – is it a degree of ignorance of Islam or is it fear of Islamic extremists that prevents non-Muslim comics and satirists from engaging with it with the same commitment they have for the faiths of their own cultures?

  I tried to address this concern in my 2009 TV show, Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, and it was the only section of the series that BBC legal advisers asked me to drop. Maybe if the Daily Mail hadn’t been on at them over Sachsgate at the time they’d have been more confident. I ended up doing a routine about not being able to do the routine, and then was interested to read the usual people insisting online that apparently I was lying, and I was allowed to do the routine about Islam that I wanted to, but that I was just too politically correct and too scared to do it.

  And then she said to me, ‘That’s very interesting, Stew, but I don’t believe you. Why would you really be telling that story?’ And I said to her, ‘All I want, Mother, is just once in my life to be able to put my hand on my heart and say in all honesty that I’ve written a joke that Joe Pasquale won’t be able to steal.’*

  * Zing! Take that!

  Thank you

  4

  2005–7

  ’90s Comedian was a hit. A mathematically inclined PR person subsequently informed me that in terms of its average star rating, statistically it was the best-reviewed show ever in the history of the Fringe. You can prove anything with facts. After the Fringe, I hit the road with the same set in the company of Steve Carlin, a mysteriously under-exposed and puritanically rational Scot given to the driest of one-liners and the most enjoyably torturous extended riffs, and we split the driving around twice as many venues as on the StandUp Comedian tour, playing longer runs in the small rooms and one-nighters in bigger venues than before. I still rarely did anywhere larger than 300 seats, but the Soho Theatre run of ’90s Comedian was double the length of the previous year’s, and Arthur Smith, an inspirational performer and the stepfather of Alternative Comedy, called me ‘the eminence grise’ of standup. And yet it proved nearly impossible to find someone willing to film the show for a DVD release.

  For several reasons, I really wanted to record ’90s Comedian. Taping StandUp Comedian had forced me to ditch that set, draw a line under it and move on, which had been hugely useful creatively. It killed the possibility, which had stifled me in the nineties, of dragging the same dead stuff around the clubs for years. That set was now out there, and people who had seen it would be ready for more extreme material, both in terms of content and of style. In addition, I had a sense that ’90s Comedian was significant because it reflected a very particular period of public anxiety about taste and decency. I also knew that there was a limit to how long I could go on performing it: religious paranoia was either going to pass, or worsen, and ’90s Comedian was of its time.

  However, my management, who had filmed and produced my first DVD for 2entertain, were unable to find anyone interested in releasing the ’90s Comedian show commercially. I told them to offer the material to cable TV channels, like Paramount, for free.* But there were, apparently, still no takers. Despite all the good press and growing audiences, I could not give this set away.

  * Recently, a former comedy executive from Paramount told me she didn’t remember being offered the set for free. Now you have to take stories like this with a grain of salt; people want to appear like they have always been on your side. And even if, despite being asked to, my management hadn’t offered my material free to Paramount – and of course there is no actual evidence to suggest that they hadn’t – it would only have been sound business practice. It would make no sense, from a strictly commercial point of view, for them to value the commodity of my critically acclaimed act at zero. In the poker-playing school of artist representation they subscribe to, big management is biologically impelled to bluff its way towards a higher fee, even at the risk of blowing the whole deal. But this financially driven waiting game is sometimes the opposite of what an artist wants, namely to move forwards creatively. None of my favourite albums of the eighties – The Nightingales’ Pigs on Purpose, The Fall’s Hex Enduction Hour, Dick Gaughan’s Handful of Earth, Eleventh Dream Day’s Prairie School Freakout or The Dream Syndicate’s Days of Wine and Roses – would have seen the light of day if the artists behind them had had my management, waiting to sell their stock at the crest of a wave that never came. I once overheard my manager telling someone that his acts didn’t ‘get out of bed for less than a grand’. Simon Munnery explained this meant he was spending a lot of time in bed.

  I mentioned my frustration at my management’s failure to find a way of documenting ’90s Comedian in interviews. A comedy fan from Cardiff, Chris Evans, contacted me directly and offered to step into the breach. Chris was an IT professional who also ran an online baby-clothes company called Go Faster Stripe. He knew three Top Gear studio cameramen on whom he could call for a favour, and a woman with video-editing software on her laptop. Chris offered to film ’90s Comedian at his local arts centre on a micro-budget and sell it through his baby-clothes company’s Paypal site. We agreed to split any profits, should there ever be any, once he had covered his overheads. The room and the crew fees were taken care of by ticket sales. Chris bought the editor a camera as a thank-you for her work. The only real expense was the fee for DVD certification by the BBFC, which came to just under a grand.

  Chris quickly covered his costs, and the availability of the show on DVD, and also
bootlegged onto the internet, has certainly helped me to build an audience over the last few years. Meanwhile, Go Faster Stripe has gone on to film sets by the sort of comedians other comedians and comedy connoisseurs love, but whom big DVD companies never think to capture, with the result that it now has the most important catalogue of British live comedy anywhere and really ought to get a grant from the BFI. There are three commercially available live DVDs of Peter Kay doing the same set in different rooms. Now, thanks to Chris, there is at least one of John Hegley or Simon Munnery or Tony Law or Robin Ince doing something.

  In May 2005, my manager had told me that the then head of BBC2, Roland Keating, wanted to see me about doing a TV series. It is very strange to be asked in to see a TV executive at their request. Usually you have to beg, like a dog. But maybe my manager had been begging on my behalf, like a dog, and had managed to get Roland Keating of BBC2 to disguise the meeting as having been his initiative, because he knew I had my pride and wasn’t keen to ever do television for anyone ever again anyway, having had enough of being fucked about by Roland’s predecessor in the nineties, the unfathomable Jane Root. Or maybe it was some kind of agreed compensation for the BBC broadcast of Jerry Springer: The Opera, a decision that ultimately cost the show whatever live commercial future it might have had.

  I asked my manager why this meeting had been requested. He said Roland Keating of BBC2 was ‘very excited about my work’. I asked him if Roland Keating of BBC2 had ever seen any of my work, as I found it difficult to believe a TV executive would be ‘very excited about my work’ if he had ever actually seen any of it. My manager diplomatically avoided confirming whether Roland Keating of BBC2 had seen any of my work, but just smiled his enigmatic Cheshire Cat smile and repeated that Roland Keating of BBC2 was very excited about my work.

  It’s possible, I suppose, that Roland Keating of BBC2 had seen my work and was very excited about it; and that my manager was being mysterious to allow me the possibility of believing that it was he, my manager, who had engineered the degree of excitement about my work, despite the very excited executive never having seen it; or it is possible, I suppose, that Roland Keating of BBC2 hadn’t seen my work but was still very excited about it; or it was possible that my manager had done some deal to encourage Roland Keating of BBC2 to commission something off me. Who knows? TV is insane.

  I told Roland Keating of BBC2 that I wanted to make a standup show like Dave Allen did in the seventies, slow and ponderous, with no fast cuts or exciting camera angles, thinking this would shake him off. But Roland Keating of BBC2 then told me I could have this series without even doing a pilot, and that I was to get on with writing it. After we left the meeting, it was heartening to see my manager genuinely surprised for once. The head of BBC2 had just told me, with witnesses, that I had my own TV series, no pilot required. It did seem too good to be true.

  After I’d begun work on mapping out ideas for the show, it turned out the TV series was to be made by the production company owned by my manager, which came as a surprise to me. My manager told me that he assumed I understood that the show would be made by his production company and sold on to the BBC, but I had assumed it would be in house at the BBC. Maybe he had told me otherwise. I wanted it to be in-house BBC as my experience with my manager’s production company was that although well-meaning, the actual work they produced was not to my taste, whereas my experiences of the civil-servant creatives toiling within the BBC itself had usually been good. But my manager said that when he had said ‘we’ were going in to see Roland Keating of BBC2, this meant I was going in as the artist and he was going in both as my manager but also as a representative of his own TV production company to see if ‘we’, i.e. me and his production company, could get a deal. It is possible he explained this. I got tinnitus while auditioning opera singers at the National Theatre in the autumn of 2002 and it’s never quite gone away, meaning I often miss sounds in the upper frequencies, and my manager had a very high voice, like a vole or a little girl. Or perhaps these details had been in an email or a letter I hadn’t seen fit to read. Obviously there had been a terrible misunderstanding. I explained to my manager that I didn’t want to do the show with his production company as I hated all their TV output, which always looked cheap and shoddy and tasteless, and he graciously allowed me to reposition the project as a BBC in-house one, which I had always assumed it would be, a kindness and an act of self-lessness which would have cost him thousands of pounds’ worth of business had the series been commissioned.

  At some stage around this point, the head of BBC2’s offer of a series without needing to make a pilot was reduced to me being offered a pilot. I can’t remember why, although it is true that I hadn’t approached getting on with writing it with much enthusiasm as I never seriously thought the series would happen anyway. I wanted to concentrate on building up the live audience, a much more practical and achievable aim. Not unreasonably, my manager lost patience with me and told me I had to ‘stop behaving like Jerry Sadowitz or someone and start making some money for the company’, and that I couldn’t just do what I wanted in life. Then the star producer Armando Iannucci was attached to oversee this pilot for the BBC, in house, and I began to take the possibility a bit more seriously.

  One of my ideas for the series was to perform standup sets of different styles in different places. I decided to try and do a set of observational comedy, from the perspective of an insect, whilst dressed as an insect, in front of an appropriate audience. Then I was approached by an old friend, Bridget Nicholls, an eco-activist with pirate blood who was organising an entomology-based arts event called Pestival at the Barnes Wetlands Centre that May. Would I do the opening-night cabaret in some capacity? I decided to do my proposed insect act there, Armando began to make tentative arrangements to film it on the night, and I investigated costume-makers.*

  * I think, looking at it now, that like many things in my shows, this insect idea also has its roots in a conversation with Simon Munnery. For one of the Cluub Zarathustra cabaret shows, Simon had come up with the idea of an insect comedian of some sort. There was a precedent for this in his work. During the Edinburgh Fringe in 1990, I had helped Simon experiment in an onstage collaboration with a worm by driving him to Mike’s Tackle Shop in Musselburgh, where all kinds of worms were commercially available in large quantities.

  As Simon’s proposed act involved the worm being publicly slain, I overcame my ethical opposition to this by suggesting that rather than being dug up from the Scottish earth, the worm should be purchased from somewhere where it would otherwise have been sold to a fisherman, who would only have impaled it on a hook and fed it to a fish anyway. Normally, I don’t think I could have countenanced assisting someone in slaughtering a worm in the name of entertainment, but I had recently read Hemingway’s persuasive 1929 book on bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon.

  In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway convinces the reader that the artistry of the bullfight is so great that we can spare a few bulls and discount their pain. As a toddler I remember being taken to a bullfight in Spain by my mother and amusing the locals by cheering for the bull to kill the man, and I put a load of slides my father had taken of the event down the toilet in protest, but Death in the Afternoon swung me, albeit temporarily. And I was convinced that whatever the comedy genius Simon Munnery had in mind for the worm, it would at least be the match of the artistry of the capering Spanish butchers. And certainly, the tiny hangman’s gibbet that he was constructing out of balsa wood in our flea-infested Edinburgh flat was a work of art in itself.

  Simon was booked into the Fringe Club that night, a massive space in the student-union building. Back when the Fringe was run on dole cheques and goodwill, before the money men moved in, the Fringe Club offered free showers, free poster space and free nightly entertainment to masses of ungrateful people drunk on subsidised booze. Simon took the stage in the persona of The League Against Tedium, a top-hatted dictator character given to highly quotable and unforgettable aphori
sms, usually about his superiority to all other living things, and a kind of rightwing mirror image of his earlier Alan Parker Urban Warrior incarnation. I don’t remember it going especially well that night, but by the end of Simon’s allotted time his failure was sealed.

  In an attempt to display his superiority to worms, The League Against Tedium took the worm and tied it with cotton to the gibbet, which was set on a table front-lit by a powerful lamp that back-projected the shadow of the worm’s wriggling body thirty feet high onto the rear wall of the venue. Then, to a cacophony of boos and jeers, and the sound of women bursting into tears, The League Against Tedium took a pair of scissors and ceremoniously snipped the worm in two, the half of its body that remained tied to the worm-gibbet jerking spasmodically in confusion and discomfort.

  Hemingway convinced me that bullfighting was worth a few worms. But as he exited through the back entrance of the building, to escape a crowd baying for his blood, Simon Munnery had not convinced me that he was worth even one worm.

  For the Cluub Zarathustra insect act, five years later, Simon suggested putting an insect in a tank and pretending it was a comedian, though at no point was killing it in public ever discussed. I thought the insect should be as big an insect as possible, like a stick insect or a praying mantis, and that it should have some kind of mini-microphone stand in the case. Simon wanted to get the comedian Jeff Green to voice the insect’s act from offstage, whilst a camera relayed footage of the insect onto a big overhead screen. Jeff ’s act at the time was composed of good-natured laddish bits on everyday experience. I think Simon just wanted Jeff to do his actual act, and for that to be the standup act of an insect, whereas I wanted to write something like the act I ended up doing here in 41st Best. But we both agreed that for some reason, Jeff Green’s voice, a high and keening Scouse falsetto which was instantly likeable, would be the ideal voice for the tiny insect comedian.