by Stewart Lee
[Long pause.]
MUSIC. EXCERPT FROM THE SOUNDTRACK OF HAL HARTLEY’S SIMPLE MEN BY NED RIFLE.
[Deep sigh.]
[Long pause.]*
* Then the techs faded up a snatch of the soundtrack from Hal Hartley’s Simple Men and faded down the lights, while I and the giraffe bowed and waved to the crowd, and closed the whole thing on a heart-stopping hanging cadence that usually brought gasps of admiration for its theatrical audacity, and even the occasional stifled sob. Apart from in Derby, where the guy forgot everything I’d asked him to do and just left me standing there, brightly lit, for ages and ages, while I waited to see if he would ever cue the music and the sound, until I eventually just had to walk off to silence, the cumulative emotional effects of the previous ninety minutes lost for ever, the audience confused and lost, the moment entirely wasted, the whole show ruined.
Ah well. That’s showbiz.
THE END.
Thanks very much, thanks for having us, cheers, good night, thank you …
EXIT MUSIC: ‘STIFLED MAN CASINO’ BY AIRPORT 5.
Afterword
In the summer of 2007, before I did 41st Best in Edinburgh, my new manager suggested I went to see Roland Keating of BBC2 about my long-forgotten and cancelled pilot. I couldn’t see what the point was, as nothing had changed, and I only wanted to do the same show, which, as the email I was read by my old manager made clear, the BBC were not interested in. But I went to see him anyway.
It was a strange meeting. I could never really work out why the original pilot had been withdrawn, and lots of areas of discussion were hurried through, but by the end of the short session, the pilot was back on the slate again. I didn’t think for a moment it would happen, this being the crazy world of TV, where yes means no and up is down. But eventually a week of filming, followed by a live recording of some standup material, was scheduled for December 2007.
I was on the 41st Best tour in Birmingham, in February 2008, with my Australian inspiration Greg Fleet, who had ludicrously agreed to open for me – probably on the run from the Melbourne vagrant who wanted his clothes back – when I heard that a series had been commissioned. We had just had breakfast in the world-famous Mr Egg cafe in Chinatown (advertised with the slogan ‘Eat like a King for under a pound’), opposite the old Powerhaus, where I had seen Ted Chippington in 1984, when the mobile rang and my manager told me of the BBC’s decision. It was while I was looking in the window of the Nostalgia and Comics shop opposite that I broke the news to Greg.
Greg couldn’t understand why I wasn’t more excited, and seemed annoyed that I had remained relatively placid. I suppose everyone thinks a deal like that would be the answer to all their worries, but I’d had this series commissioned and decommissioned once before. I think I was numb with the apprehension that it could all just fade away again, afraid of what it might mean to be recognised in the street and shouted at out of vans again, and worried about alienating the sustainable and supportive audience I was cultivating.
But that night we were on in Salford Quays, and we went to a Chinese restaurant before the show to celebrate. I felt I ought to. I felt it was what people would expect me to do. I ordered a bottle of champagne, but Greg spent most of the meal outside on his mobile, smoking and gesticulating, and so I finished it alone.
Eight years previously, I’d been sitting in the audience of the Rawhide Club in Liverpool, looking at a drunk man trying to formulate a coherent opinion about the shortcomings of British immigration policy, when, in an effort to seize control of my own destiny, I decided I had to stop being a standup comedian. Now, I was drinking champagne on my own in an empty Chinese restaurant in the antiseptic retail park of Salford docks, while my friend, who seemed disappointed in me, stood in the street shouting at someone far away. Tonight I was playing the 400-seater room at the Lowry, having successfully, over five years, built up a crowd in tiny rooms. We were performing to nice people who knew, at least partly, what to expect from the evening. I no longer lost money on live work. There were three DVDs available of standup sets of which I was not the least bit ashamed. And, it slowly dawned on me, it looked as if I was about to do the television series I thought I’d been offered four years ago, but on my own terms.
If my younger self could see me now, he would have said, ‘If that Australian bloke’s not going to eat that special fried rice, can I have it?’
Is it too much of a cliché to end the book with the phrase: ‘And that’s how I escaped my certain fate’?
No?
In that case …
And that’s how I escaped my certain fate.
Appendices
I: Music Theatre
Music Theatre, the genre which gave us Andrew Lloyd Webber and the tribute show, combines the worst aspects of music with the worst aspects of theatre to create a mutant hybrid that is the worst form of live art that exists. There are few aspects of human artistic endeavour that are of less moral or aesthetic worth than Music Theatre.
As you may have guessed, I hate Music Theatre. What you may not have guessed is that for the last three years, without even realising it at first, I worked in the medium itself. In the spring of 2001 the composer Richard Thomas asked me to help direct, and write some extra words for, an opera he was writing about the American talk show host Jerry Springer. We worked the show up for eighteen months with friends and acquaintances who gave their time largely for free in small rooms at Battersea Arts Centre and The Edinburgh Fringe Festival and eventually the finished product, Jerry Springer: The Opera, was staged at the National Theatre and then London’s West End, where it won four Olivier awards.
Somewhere along the line, a hit musical had been created. This was a strange and delightful surprise for everyone involved, and especially for me, as before I started work on Jerry Springer: The Opera I had never seen a musical. I had always assumed Music Theatre wasn’t something I’d enjoy. Out of professional curiosity I went to see some, and found Music Theatre to be even worse than I could ever have imagined. It is important for me to point out here that my views in no way reflect those of any of my co-workers or employers in Jerry Springer: The Opera, all of whom I have nothing but immense respect for.
Admittedly, my initial exposure to the genre of Music Theatre wasn’t ideal. The first musical I ever saw was not Carousel, or West Side Story, or Guys and Dolls, but We Will Rock You, The Queen Musical By Ben Elton and Queen. It’s as good a metaphor as any for the problems inherent in the genre. We Will Rock You, The Queen Musical By Ben Elton and Queen is set in a dystopian future where all rock music is banned. Some BBC comedy show wardrobe department style punks who live underground in an old tube station covered with generic rebel graffiti are inspired by the music of Queen to overthrow the state. In real life, Queen’s relationship with politics is less clear cut.
Miami Steve Van Zandt was compelled to form Artists Against Apartheid after Queen broke an international cultural embargo and played South Africa under apartheid in the early 80’s, and who will ever forget Brian May playing the National Anthem off the Queen’s roof in jubilee year? When Hendrix massacred The Stars And Stripes it threatened the status quo. What Brian May did to God Save The Queen merely confirmed it. At one point in We Will Rock You, The Queen Musical By Ben Elton and Queen a list of people who, like Freddie Mercury, ‘died for rock and roll’, invokes Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain. Ironically, Kurt Cobain’s own suicide note offers Queen’s relentless professionalism as an example of one of the things he didn’t want to become, as one of the reasons he is taking his own life. The teenage American hardcore punk in me wept fan tears of anger.
But the real problem with We Will Rock You, The Queen Musical By Ben Elton and Queen, is not these moral-philosophical quibbles. It was just the sheer lack of ambition. Put 1000’s of people in a room, get them to sing along to a bunch of songs they already know, string them over the loosest story line possible, give them glow sticks to wave and send them home happy. All you can take away from We Will Rock You,
The Queen Musical By Ben Elton and Queen is huge admiration for the way the cast do their best to make it work, confirmation that music theatre performers, whether they love a show or hate it, remain the super-efficient, highly trained warrior-ninjas of the stage. Most British people go to the theatre only three times in their lives. It is sad to think that for many people, We Will Rock You, The Queen Musical By Ben Elton and Queen will be one of those three times, and that it is a wasted opportunity to show them what great theatre can be.
We Will Rock You, The Queen Musical By Ben Elton and Queen remains the worst musical I have ever seen, and obviously the show can only have been conceived in a spirit of extreme cynicism. But its problems define the genre’s physical limitations. There is a perceived crisis in Music Theatre. Where are the new ideas?, ask opinion pieces in the industry papers. The answer is, they are out there, but not in Music Theatre, and under current circumstances, never will be. Music Theatre is fatally compromised.
Some art exists to ask questions, and to play with expectations. Some people want art to take them to a place they would never have imagined going to in the company of people they would never have imagined meeting. Bob Dylan, Samuel Beckett and Reeves and Mortimer all do this. Other people want art to reconfirm the things they already know, and send them away feeling better about themselves. This is the job of Coldplay, Music Theatre and those kind of Comedy Store/Jongleurs standup comedians who invite the audience to think, ‘Yes, that’s exactly what happens whenever I try and open a sachet of tomato sauce too, brilliant!’ These polar opposite intentions can be equally difficult to achieve, and I’d wager that there’s an element of genius involved in simply thinking of the idea of SingalongaSoundOfMusic equal to the moment of epiphany enjoyed by Beckett when he realised it would be a good idea to strap Billie Whitelaw into a harness and light only her mouth while she rambled all but incoherently for twenty minutes in Not I. But one of these end points is clearly vastly more valid than the other.
The tragedy of Music Theatre is that it cannot afford to occupy the superior position. West End ticket prices, caused by the vast overheads such shows incur, are high. Broadway prices are even higher. Seats are filled up with coach parties whose bookers can’t risk alienating their clients, and people for whom seeing the show is the one big night out of their year, possibly even of their lives. Economically, tribute shows to Abba, Queen and Rod Stewart are safe. Demographically they’re hitting the exact strata of society and generation of music fans that has the money to sustain them. The Madness musical, Our House, discovered a viable musical coherence in the working class milieu of Madness songs and played some interesting games with narrative structure. But Madness fans aren’t yet old enough or wealthy enough to give such a show a long run. And they fight in the bar at half time which scares off the American tourists who make up 50% of the audience of any big London theatre show.
Music Theatre can’t afford to be the space that punters enter in order to be challenged, changed or confused. When I was genuinely baffled by the appeal of a recent West End production, a Music Theatre professional, whose abilities I respect, explained to me why I hadn’t got it. ‘You check your brain in at the door,’ he explained, ‘and just go along with it all.’ It seems sad that even industry insiders justify the genre as an opportunity to suspend your judgement, rather than engage it.
I saw The Producers, which opens in London this Autumn, on Broadway last year. On some level, part of its impact was due to embracing Music Theatre’s limitations. It is the story of two producers who try to actively lose money by staging what they imagine will be the worst musical ever, a song and dance show based on the life of Hitler. The Producers is very funny. It seems to be a surreal, panic response to Nazism and the Holocaust. You either cry, or make a comedy musical about it. But it also addresses, sublimely, the basic insincerity of Music Theatre, its reliance on camp humour and kitsch values, and shows how ineffectual they are for dealing with significant issues. When the audience have hysterics at The Producers, they are in a way acknowledging the banality of the medium they themselves are complicit in endorsing. Great art exists in the spaces between the certainties. Economically, culturally and artistically, Music Theatre can’t afford spaces, only certainties.
Esquire magazine,
October 2004
II: English Hecklers in New Zealand
Here’s a piece written on the evening after a terrible gig – not for publication, but for my own benefit – in a righteous, misanthropic and entirely unattractive spirit of arrogant and precious self-justification. It is an example of why no one should blog. Nonetheless, I’ve included it because it captures the feelings of a comic who has just died, and reveals lots about my confused state of mind, professionally, at the time.
I have had a great run so far at the New Zealand comedy festival in Auckland. The Classic on Queen Street is one of my favourite five spaces to perform worldwide. It’s a converted porn cinema, there’s table service but it’s genuinely unobtrusive, and it has the kind of faded glamour you can’t manufacture. Pretty much all the shows here have enabled me to do what I hope to do – take people on funny journeys into spaces they wouldn’t have expected to arrive at in a standup comedy set. When there have been heckles or interruptions they’ve been playful, witty, supportive – things you could have fun with – or just genuinely confused people who want to understand, asking questions, with whom you could also engage in a positive way. When there was heckling it normally had the feel of a lively debate, or a flirtation. Nobody was humiliated or hurt, onstage or off.
I like to watch the crowd come in. I play a CD of a long Evan Parker sax solo while they do. I figure if people can’t put up with that then they will probably not be able to put up with me. About one in ten times someone will come up to the sound desk and ask to have the fucking horrible music turned off. The people that do this are always subsequently the people in the audience without the patience to enjoy my set. Tonight an English man in a red football shirt took a table with a party of ten to fifteen other men and started shouting from his seat for the music to be turned off. I identified him as the alpha male of that group and realised the evening would probably stand or fall on his approval. The kind of people that go to comedy in a big party usually need their laughter to be approved of by one particular member, and the sort of person who is that member of such a group will usually feel that I am threatening to their status as the clown/leader of that group and will try to undermine me. Since I came back to standup I have largely been playing to people on my wavelength, and I was never a Comedy Store or Jongleurs act, so I rarely encounter this mentality.
Sure enough, within a few minutes I realised the show was sabotaged. The man began jumping into crucial little spaces between feedlines and punchlines with his own attempts at pay-offs that were not as funny as mine, and usually reactionary in nature, but which nevertheless slowed the momentum of the show. I said to him, from the stage, calmly and politely, that I had identified him as the alpha male of his group even before the show started, and realised that as clown/leader of his pack I knew he would subsequently be obliged to undermine me. Even this bald statement would not silence him. He and his pack were here for the Lions tour. The Lions are a British rugby team. Things in the set that I considered to be in playful bad taste were so enthusiastically gobbled up by the British sports fans that I felt their meaning and intent changed, and I felt ashamed to say them.
Towards the end I use the word ‘fingering’ in a set-up towards something else. At the arrival of the word ‘fingering’ came the shout, ‘Now you’re getting somewhere.’ I explained that this section was my least favourite of the show, and the fact that it seemed to have struck a chord with the rugby fans showed we really were on different wavelengths.
Usually I can silence hecklers with relentless logic, but what I was doing was so far away from what the sport fans expected from comedy that they didn’t even realise that, to all intents and purposes, they had been defeated, an
d so their barrage of witless inanity continued. Of course afterwards, they all want to buy you drinks, and genuinely seem to feel their interruptions have done you some kind of favour. One said his favourite comic was Eddie Izzard, which I accommodated, but when they expected me to engage in an enthusiastic debate about how brilliant Peter Kay was I felt I was out of my depth and left. They didn’t even know what they had done. They thought they had helped me to be more like a proper comedian. They thought they had improved the show.
It’s funny and sad that my only disastrous show here in Auckland should be as a result of the kind of British people I never usually encounter in Britain actually coming to my show, but when I went back to the flat later I began to feel depressed. The British rugby fans were trying to defeat the world of new experiences, rather than embrace it for what it is, or enjoy its difference. This is why British holiday resorts in Spain are full of British-style pubs and Fish and Chip shops. This is why there aren’t any Spanish locals on Spanish beaches making a killing selling delicious Spanish-style food.
Privately, the debate continues amongst comedians, ‘What is Daniel Kitson doing?’ Why, many wonder, does he do The Stand when he could do the big room at Assembly? Why does he insist on shaking off half the following he has established every couple of years by doing a sensitive story show? Why doesn’t he have a nice haircut – surely he could afford it now? But Kitson once told me that after his Perrier nomination, he was doing a run at the Soho theatre. Sitting in a toilet cubicle one night he overheard some of his audience standing at the urinals talking, didn’t like how they sounded, didn’t like them, and realised he would have to begin a process of refining his fan base.
Scott, who runs the Classic and promotes me here, said I was wrong about the heckler being the alpha male of the sport fan group. He said the alpha male would have money, cars, women and be silent. The heckler was a kind of delta male, the jester to the king alpha male. He would spend his life in the orbit of power, trailing it, circling it, but never achieving it. This is of course true. But it didn’t give me any pleasure. It just made me even more sad to think that a perfectly serviceable show had been sabotaged as just yet another act in the drama of some inadequate’s quiet, or in this case not so quiet, desperation. What a wretched night.
