by Stewart Lee
People under – ‘I’m thirty-seven, I like bondage sex. I had a mask on and some jam went on me.’ Did it? D’you remember proper bondage sex that we used to have? In the ’80s, in the ’70s, in the ’50s, friends of the theatre, remember? Proper, you know, degrading, you know, if you weren’t in hospital at the end of it, you’d done it wrong. And you had to do it again.149
Not like now. ‘I’m thirty-four, I like bondage sex, a feather went on my bum.’ Did it? Were you asphyxiated in a career-ending accident? No? Shut up then, get your fucking pouch of yoghurt, get your fucking cat-face bag and fuck off!150 And that is my message to the under-forties.
But, joking apart – yeah, I was joking. I took an exaggerated position for comic effect. I’ve been doing it all night. A little peep for you there, Southend, behind the wizard’s curtain.
[dances and sings in a high voice]
Behind the wizard’s curtain, with Stewart Lee,
He is gonna show you all the secrets of comedy.
Well, what would you do if a woman said ‘£5’,
When you were hoping that she’d say ‘50p’?
Would you squirrel it away at the back of your head
And bring it back later on instead?
Behind the wizard’s curtain.
Behind the Wizard’s Curtain.151 It’s a thing I’m working on for Dave.152 Hey, get this, right, it was my idea and I wrote it, but apparently it’d be better if Greg Davies presented it. Doesn’t seem fair, does it?153
Anyway, I was talking about the S&M and the fetish thing there, right, it’s an exaggerated example to choose, but let’s stay with it ’cos it dovetails into something I wanted to talk about, which is this, right: I think any area of interest people have, any hobby, whether it’s woodwork, sailing, you know, er, collecting stamps or something mad like the fetish thing, whatever it is, it’s so much easier now to find out about these things and to meet like-minded people because of the Internet. So much more so than it was, say, even twenty-five years ago that I don’t know if any of our passions, if any of our hobbies, our interests, will ever have the same depth of meaning that they had to us a quarter of a century ago, because you’re not required to put yourself out, you’re not required to – to commit to anything.
You know, let’s take the, the fetish thing for a laugh, right. Now if you wanted to get into that twenty-five years ago, you know, you probably couldn’t even have done it in Southend, right, you’d have had to, you’d have had to go to Burnham-on-Crouch,154 right, so – to the very worst part of Burnham-on-Crouch – and you’d be in – in some underpass and there’d be some horrible shop there with a bloke behind the counter drinking amyl nitrate out of an egg cup and he’d sell you some tickets to some fetish event in London in about two years’ time, and you’d go there, to The Clink or something, and go, ‘Hello, where d’you get that collar thing? Who are you? How d’you do this? When’s the next meeting?’ And it would take you ages, wouldn’t it, to get into any kind of subculture, but when you finally did, it would mean something because you’d committed to it, right?
But it’s all changed now. One of you could go home tonight from here, couldn’t you, and think, ‘Oh, I’d like to be in the fetish thing,’ and you could go on Amazon, bop, bop, bop, next-day delivery, Taiwanese fist glove, and that’s there tomorrow, midday. And your partner goes, ‘What’s this?’ ‘It’s a Taiwanese fist glove.’ ‘I didn’t know you were into all that.’ ‘I am.’ ‘Since when?’ ‘Last night, about half past ten, I just decided.’
But it wouldn’t mean anything, would it, it wouldn’t mean anything. Right. You know, I – OK, I used to collect records, right, and, er, I started about 1979 and I spent the next two decades wandering around with a little list in my pocket, looking for these things, and then I’d go – I started touring in ’89 and I’d go to these different towns in Leeds, Birmingham, Glasgow, I’d go into the record shops, ‘Have you got this?’ ‘No, we’ll ring the dealer.’ And he’d come, and it would take me ten years sometimes to find the thing you were looking for.155 And when you finally did, it was amazing. Then, in 1997, I got online, in an afternoon I found everything I’d been looking for for twenty years, right. But it didn’t mean anything. It did not mean anything.156
And it’s changed so much in our life that if you talk to your grandparents or your great-grandparents157 about trying to do bondage sex and fetish sex and S&M, you know, in the war, when it was Hitler, Adolf Hitler, or in the ’30s, when a lot of the things they needed were very scarce, very hard to come by, it was harder for them to get into all this stuff, but I think it meant more to them – well, you snigger because you ca— … you’re – you’re of a generation where you cannot conceive, can you, they cannot conceive of not being able to instantly get what they want. And it is – it is a tragedy, I think.158
And, and I remember talking to my – to my gran about this, and I remember her saying that in the ’30s, you know, if she wanted a deluxe latex sort of, er, like a sex harness for bondage, so she could be hung up from a beam or something, erm, you know, it wasn’t like now. They – they couldn’t just go into Ann Summers, you know, there was no Ann Summers. They lived in Kidderminster. People still live there now. Still live there now.159
What – what they had to do in the ’30s in rural Worcestershire if they wanted a sex harness, is – yeah, ha-ha – is … they would have to walk, they would, and they would walk and walk and walk and walk, miles and miles and miles, all round rural Worcestershire, all round Bromsgrove, Redditch, Alvechurch, Inkberrow,160 Rowney Green,161 er, Bellend, Fishponds, Upper Piddle, Wyre Piddle, all these sort of places,162 just looking on the floor. For an old bit of string and twine, and sturdy weeds and vines, and then they would knit all these together, and they would make their own sex harness, just out of old rubbish from off the – And d’you know what? A sex harness made out of all stuff off the floor in Worcestershire in 1937, that would’ve meant more to them than probably any possession any of you have ever had, or any feeling that any of you have ever had, or any thought that any of you have ever had, because you live, don’t you, in a time that is of no value, and consequently you are of no value. And you are like an empty husk billowing across a desolate landscape, bereft of all sense and meaning, and you know it.
And I remember talking, I remember talking to my grandad about this sort of thing. My grandad. And he said to me, he said it was different, he said to me in the ’30s in rural Worcestershire, if he wanted a deluxe latex zip-up gimp mask for sex, a sex mask, it wasn’t like now. He couldn’t just go on Amazon and order a sex mask. What they had to do in the ’30s in rural Worcestershire, if they wanted a sex mask, is they would have to walk, and they would walk and walk and walk, miles and miles and miles south from Kidderminster, down what is now the M5.163 You’ve got the M5, haven’t you, the M40, coming in here, then the 42, Banbury Way, the 50, Ross-on-Wye, South Wales, the M4, Reading, Twy—, Twy—, course back then it was a leafy lane.164
Then about – then about halfway down there, where Droitwich, junction 5, is now,165 they’d go off east, not west round the back of Frog Ponds, Bromsgrove, east, Pershore, er, Evesham, Vale of Evesham, where all the vegetables comes from, and they would find a potato farm, and Gran would distract the potato farmer with rhetoric and dance. And Grandad would creep in the potato farm, and when he’s found hisself a potato sack, he’d empty all the potatoes out of it and then cut two eyes holes in it. And that was his sex mask, an old potato sack. And he’d put it on, and the hessian would gouge horrible wounds into his crying face, but that was their sex mask, the potato sack.
And d’you know what? A potato-sack sex mask from off the floor in rural Worcestershire in 1937, that would’ve meant more to them than – OK, what’s the most treasured possession you’ve got? ‘Oh, Stew, it’s a photo of our daughter the moment she was born.’ Is it? ’Cos that’s meaningless, isn’t it? Compared to a potato-sack sex mask. But it is. ’Cos what did you do with that image the moment you took it?
You sent it off, didn’t you, to two hundred people, in your address book, a hundred of whom you don’t really know, fifty of whom you actively despise, and every time that image lands, like a wet sock falling into a urinal, a layer of meaning is shaved off it, isn’t it? Shave off the meaning, shave it all away! Until you’re left with a Turin Shroud gossamer-thin tracing-paper imprint of this supposedly profound moment in your life that no longer has any value because you fucked all the meaning out of it again!166
And these are the old stories the grandparents used to tell. You’re probably like me, Southend. Your grandparents used to tell these old stories and you used to think, ‘I must write them down or tape-record them before they’re all forgotten,’ but we never do, do we? I actually did. In the 1970s, I tape-recorded all these old stories of my grandparents, but in the ’80s, when my brother-in-law moved in, he taped a Deacon Blue album over them.167
Right, that’s the first one of them. Well done. The second and final Deacon Blue joke is – it’s right up near the end of the show, but it isn’t the actual end of the show. I do it, and then there’s about thirty seconds more until the actual end of the show. So when you hear the second Deacon Blue joke, don’t go, ‘Oh, it’s finished now,’ and start getting your coat on and wriggling around. Just – wait!
So I was talking about the S&M and the fetish scene, and it’s a mad, exaggerated example to – to choose, but, er, it’s a good way, I think, of looking at – at how our access to information, our access to different cultures has – has changed, and our grandparents and our great-grandparents did see incredible changes, and my – my grandad was still around at the sort of start of the Internet age.
And he – I remember him talking about it, and I think, you know, he said he couldn’t believe it, and he did, he did say to me once that – he said in the – in the ’30s in rural Worcestershire, if he did want to do, er, S&M and fetish stuff,168 er – seriously, I’m not doing a, a joke now – but he said it was, it was very different. I mean, he said to me they just couldn’t get the – couldn’t find things, you know. He said to me, for example, back then if they wanted to do that sort of thing, you know, there was no Ann Summers deluxe strawberry-flavoured sex lubricant gel, there was nothing like that. Well, there wasn’t.
And, and, er, all they had then in the ’30s, in, in rural Worcestershire, if they wanted to do that sort of thing, was a big lump of dripping.169 And this was kept, wasn’t it, the dripping, on a – a marble slab out the back, in the pantry to keep it cool on the marble, and, er, yeah, on the marble slab, and, erm, I know, it’s funny to you. ‘Didn’t they have a fridge?’ No, mate, they didn’t have a fridge.
And, you know, maybe it was Christmas, and Grandad was in a – in a good mood, he’d go, ‘Come on, Gran, let’s have bondage sex.’ Not his own gran, obviously, he wasn’t sick. That’s not – he wasn’t – that’s what he called his wife, ’cos he loved her. And they would get undressed there in the freezing black darkness of the – of the hovel they lived in, shivering and crying in the black dark, the flea bites bleeding all over them. They would put their potato-sack sex masks on. And the hessian would gouge horrible wounds into their faces, horrible weeping sores, and they’d be shivering there and crying, in the black dark, and bleeding, and all the while trying to maintain a state of arousal, and doing it because unlike your cosseted generation, they believed in something, they had values.
Not like now. ‘I’m thirty-three, I like bondage sex. Get under the duvet where it’s warm and I’ll harm you.’ I’ve seen, I’ve seen where they lived: the wind howling through the cracks in the stonework; the floor just straw and mud and dung, animal dung; all the farm animals in there with them, sheep, goats, ducks. Some of the ducks were traumatised by the things they saw. They were laying square eggs for years afterwards.170
And then finally Gran would go, ‘Now it’s time to go down in the cellar and get the coal and light the fire to put the dripping in the skillet171 to melt it down.’ And Grandad would go down in the cellar, shivering and crying and naked and bleeding in the freezing black dark, digging up the coal. And the coal dust would billow up into his potato-sack sex mask and he’d be coughing up huge toxic black clogs of poisonous black phlegm and bleeding and crying in the frozen darkness. Until finally the fire was lit.
And then Gran would hold up the dripping, and at this point she’d always say the same thing to him, and when we were kids and she was telling us this story, we’d go, ‘Come on, Gran, say the dripping thing!’ And she’d go, ‘No. That’s in the past.’ And we’d go, ‘Come on, Gran, say the dripping thing.’ ‘No, I can’t remember it.’ And we’d go, ‘Come on, Gran, say the dripping thing!’ ‘No, people don’t wanna hear about that.’172 Christmas Day, six kids round the table, ‘Say it, Gran, say it, say the dripping thing, go on.’ And finally she’d give in.
Well, she’d hold up the dripping, and she’d say to Grandad, she’d say, ‘Now, here’s the dripping, but remember, before we melt this dripping down, as well as being a lubricant for your selfish pleasure, this dripping is also your dinner.’173
And then they’d have to make a choice, a very stark choice; a choice unlike any choice your cosseted, spoiled, lazy, facile generation will ever have to make; a choice between the pursuit of selfish pleasure and basic human sustenance and survival.
But talking to my grandad years later, he said if they did choose the pleasure, if they were careful they could normally scrape together enough of the dripping …174
So it’s an exaggerated story, that. They didn’t live in Kidderminster. They lived in Malvern Link. Not as funny a name, is it? So I’ve changed it.
Weird that, isn’t it? Why’s one – why is one name funny and another one not funny? What – what – what makes things funny? Well, if we knew the answer to that question, there’d be no need for this whole charade, would there? If you knew what made things funny, you could stay at home, couldn’t you? Making yourselves laugh. Instead of having to pay a professional to do it for you.
And the under-forties have my sympathy. They’ve grown, grown up thinking the values of the free market are normal, that everything’s up for sale and that we’re all customers in a set of transactions whose needs must be met, and everything is up for sale, isn’t it? The forests, national parks, education, health.175
You know, further education, for example, wasn’t supposed to be a transaction which increased the cash value of the customer in the job marketplace. Further education was supposed to be an opportunity to participate, ideally for no charge, in a quest to enlarge the global storehouse of all human understanding, admittedly while drinking heavily subsidised alcohol. And losing your virginity in a tower block named after Winnie Mandela.
But we’re all customers now whose needs must be met, and the best example of this customer mentality, I think, I saw on the guest book of the TripAdvisor holiday review website.
Now I’ve got a ten-year-old boy, and he’s a massive Doctor Who fan,176 and his favourite Doctor Who thing is not the multi-billion-pound Doctor Who World place in Cardiff Bay, it’s a little museum in the cramped two-room cellar of a little cottage in the square of the Herefordshire market town of Bromyard, and this cellar is full of the eccentric owner’s mad collection of Doctor Who props and costumes and sets, all crammed in there. It’s called the Time Machine Doctor Who Museum,177 and all around Bromyard there’s posters of the Tardis. It says, ‘The Time Machine Doctor Who Museum’, and it is made abundantly clear that the Time Machine Doctor Who Museum is an entirely Doctor Who-based museum.
But there is a one-star review of this Doctor Who museum on TripAdvisor. And it says, ‘The Time Machine Doctor Who Museum has very limited appeal, except for Doctor Who fans. We were in and out in 25 minutes and that was after going around twice.’178 They went round twice. They went round once and they couldn’t believe how little non-Doctor Who content there was in the Doctor Who museum. They thought if they went round again, they might see a diorama of the life of Isamb
ard Kingdom Brunel or an interactive display of the mating cycle of the Asian short-clawed otter. It’s a Doctor Who museum. You can’t complain that there was too much Doctor Who stuff in the Doctor Who museum. It’s not aimed at you. Not everything’s aimed at you. Reminds me of an elderly relative who, on having gone to see Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Cats, complained to me afterwards that she hadn’t been expecting it all to be just about cats.179
And a person under forty came up to me after a gig, and he said to me, ‘I didn’t really enjoy that, to be honest, mate.’ And I said, ‘I don’t know what you expect me to do about it. You just paid to see me, and I am me.’180
But we’ve turned away, it would seem to me, from the wider world.181 Everyone’s looking inwards, back through their own boundaries, back through their own borders, and you have to pay for everything now, and nothing comes for free. Except the last U2 album. Whether you wanted it or not. Like a Trojan virus. And I – I don’t really know what I’m supposed to say to any of you now, ’cos you all live in a reflecting hall of digital mirrors made of Facebooks and Twitters and Snapchats and Instagrams and Deliveroos and selfies and WhatsApps. You’re the kind of people who were run over by a bus because you were crossing the road while looking at a bus-timetable app.