March of the Lemmings

by Stewart Lee

  170 The rhythm of this sentence is pure music hall.

  171 Likewise, ‘skillet’ was another delicious word to say.

  172 My grandmother was similarly reluctant to talk much about her life before the Second World War, as I suspect she thought she had ‘bettered’ herself and didn’t want to be drawn back to the past. She wouldn’t ever talk about working on the shop floor at Cadbury’s, and thought the National Trust’s decision to salvage the last of Birmingham’s back-to-back Victorian slums, around the courtyards of Hurst Street, where I first saw Ted Chippington, was ridiculous. Why would anyone want to preserve them?

  173 Punchline. When I was putting this routine together, I specifically had in mind the trad. arr. Billy Connolly joke that ends with the line, ‘I need somewhere to park my bike.’ Connolly told this joke, probably the most obscene thing that had ever been heard on British television at that point, on the Parkinson chat show in 1975, and on a 2011 radio show Jack Dee recalled the broadcast as being a pivotal moment in his life. Though I didn’t see the show, my mum would often describe it as the funniest thing she ever saw on television. Was this routine a belated attempt to win her approval, years after she had passed away? It is also influenced, it must be said, by the eloquent filth of the young Frank Skinner, though not by any specific joke. It’s just that a long story in which some old people end up using dripping as an anal-sex lubricant feels like the sort of joke Frank should have written, even if he didn’t. And above all, I also have in mind the Max Miller routine that ends with the line, ‘You can keep your bloody plough,’ which I have previously ripped off in a 2016 newspaper column about why I wouldn’t accept an OBE. I suppose I was experimenting with trying to write a classic old-school comedy routine, and having a legitimate narrative reason to perform it in a regional accent, like an old-school comic, liberated me to do so.

  174 There was never any need to make this suggestion explicit. The laughter always overwhelmed it, thankfully.

  175 Does this segue make complete sense? Not really, but the end of the show is in sight and it’s a sprint to the finish.

  176 Thank God for Doctor Who, which gives the lives of certain boys meaning.

  177 It is not called the Time Machine Doctor Who Museum. It is called the Time Machine Museum of Science Fiction, but all the marketing, and the window displays, are Doctor Who-themed. I tweaked the name to make the joke work. I lied.

  178 The real review was a three-star one from GWRTSY, in April 2014, which said, ‘Stopped out of our way to pay a visit. Nothing in Bromyard was open, except the museum. Very limited appeal except for Dr Who fans – not that much relating to Anderson series. We were in and out in 25 minutes, and that was after going around again!’ So as you can see, I have tweaked it a bit, but not much.

  179 This quote was a genuine comment made by an ex-girlfriend’s auntie, whom I liked very much. I have a feeling I once gave her an Incredible String Band album and a print of a photo of Captain Beefheart because she told me she had enjoyed both as a teenager. In fact, the same woman’s son-in-law was the man whose online comments about me I read out in the Carpet Remnant World show in 2011: ‘I know this guy … not well … but I can in fact confirm that he is a cock! I’ve spoken to him several times in the past at various get-together’s (although not recently) and he is a bit of a pillock! He used to go out with my wifes’ cousin. He came up a few times for Xmas and one or two other things. I found him condescending and arrogant … Anyway they’ve split up now and my wifes cousin seems a lot happier.’ I was a bit shocked by this, as I remember going out with the bloke and his wife and thinking we all got on well, and I had a night out with him in Newcastle after a gig there in the year 2000. I had no idea he hated me so much. It’s like finding out years later that the bloke from The Kane Gang said you stank. Ah well, that’s two bits of material out of one family.

  180 I had forgotten about this exchange, which happened outside the Underbelly’s cow-shaped tent in Bristo Square, Edinburgh, in the summer of 2007, until a punter who overheard it reminded me of it.

  181 At this point, ‘Für Seelenbinder’ would play, by Kosmischer Läufer, a contemporary Glaswegian group writing in character as a ’70s East German radiophonics composer, press-ganged by the communist state into writing inspirational music for the East German Olympic team. It provided the perfect uplift for the end of the show. The lights would gradually darken here.

  182 At this point I would ascend the staircase through the DVD rubble.

  183 Now I would put on a concealed black frock coat, with tails, and wield a stick.

  184 At this point, the image of the painting, stitched into the backdrop, would be revealed, usually to applause.

  185 Here I would pose, with my back to the painting, for a smartphone camera on a selfie stick, which mirrors the cane in Friedrich’s painting, the frock coat echoing the subject’s clothes – the Wanderer in twenty-first-century reverse.

  PART III:

  WHAT NOW?

  Epilogue

  The comedian, actor and broadcaster David Mitchell, for whom I am the supply-teacher fill-in at the Observer, kindly allowed me to write the column due the weekend after Brexit was supposed to happen. I explained that my forthcoming book was working to a schematic that would benefit from the appearance of my printed comments, on the week Parliament finally enacted the people’s will.

  Of course, we all know how that ended, but my initial plan was that the immediate post-Brexit column, the one that now concludes this book, would bring things to a neat, if not climax, then at least resolution.

  I could have delayed delivery of this book until Brexit was concluded, one way or another, I suppose, but how long would that take? Weeks? Months? Years? And how many more words would be added to the work’s already unwieldy weight?

  Besides which, I need this book out by the autumn of 2019 so that I can flog it on the next tour and make back the advance for Faber & Faber. Welcome to the world of the modern writer. And I am luckier than most, as I have this farmers’-market system in operation, whereby I can take the product to the consumer at theatres around the land. ‘Books! Get yer books! Fresh from the Faber & Fucking Faber factory!’

  As I write this final section, on 1 April, of all days, it is just past 10 p.m. and I am in a holiday cabin in the Forest of Dean, watching a second set of possible Brexit options rejected. I am on a final-edit retreat with my eight-year-old daughter. She was driven to bed early by Brexit, as the live-action Cinderella movie was overruled by me in favour of live coverage of the indicative votes. Both are grim tales.

  We are in the last available cabin, a ‘dog-friendly’ one, even though we don’t have a dog, and my eyes are watering a little. It could be a dog allergy, I suppose, or maybe it is watching Ken Clarke, Nick Boles and Caroline Lucas crumble live on TV in front of me as the true desperation of the situation becomes all too apparent.

  For the final column before I delivered this book I decided to cover Nigel Farage’s March to Leave. I knew this meant I had to go and see it for real somewhere along its route, so that I wouldn’t subsequently be accused online of being some kind of lying pawn of George Soros and his MSM. Maybe I saw the march as the physical realisation of the imaginary March of the Lemmings I had already chosen to name the book after. It seemed like a ritual to me, almost folkloric, a theatrical enactment of an idea, a clown crusade; it reminded me of the films of the visionary artist Andrew Kötting, who, in Gallivant, Swandown and By Our Selves, set his cast off on journeys across our island, pilgrimages which he seems to feel will, if persisted with, reveal some sort of truth; and it felt like something that happened in the ideological chaos of post-Civil War England, bands of bewildered peasants briefly falling into line behind the hopeful absolutist certainties of ranters like Abiezer Coppe or Gerrard Winstanley.

  My wife accompanied me on my trip north, and when she read the finished column, I could tell she disapproved of it. She was sympathetic to the soon-to-be-disappointed patriot pensioner
s trudging along the lanes, whereas I saw them as people only six degrees of separation, or less, from the fascists, racists and self-interested opportunists piggybacking off their parochial concerns.

  At the end of the day, she is working class, despite her many appearances on Radio 4, and she recognises the protesters as people, irrespective of her ideological opposition to them; whereas the education and privilege I unexpectedly benefited from means that for me they are ‘other’, and represent attitudes and values from which I have spent my life in retreat and curtains that twitched as black people moved in over the road.

  Am I why Brexit happened? And maybe Brexit, to date, has been, for all of us, a struggle to define our own idealised selves in opposition to the values and/or prejudices of others, even if at the expense of the country as a whole. Now, something needs to change, as the final reader comment in this book, from the mysterious Disabled Scapegoat, goes some way to suggesting, even though they erroneously ascribe me with enough money to rescue Hartlepool single-handedly.

  This social division was crystallised, quite comically, two days later. On Friday 29 March, the day that Brexit failed to be implemented, we went with our son to see Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s new play, Emilia, about the unsung black female Elizabethan poet Emilia Lanier, at the Vaudeville Theatre on the Strand. I had arranged to meet my wife and son opposite Charing Cross station, at the statue of Oscar Wilde, to whom I have been compared sarcastically in the Daily Star by Garry Bushell, but their progress had been slowed by police officers ushering them away from the surrounding area.

  Farage’s March to Leave had swollen in its closing hours, from a hundred or so diehards to nearly two hundred thousand people, including a hardcore far-right contingent attending a breakaway rally hosted by the Islamophobic tax fraudster Tommy Robinson, and the police thought it was going to turn nasty.

  So picture this. It is half-time in Emilia, a wonderful, vibrant piece that attaches contemporary concerns about representation, race, gender, exclusion and identity to a vividly realised historical drama. I and the other metropolitan elitists are in the theatre bar on the first floor, drinking wine and looking out of the windows at the Strand, where police riot vans are storming towards Trafalgar Square. The pro-Brexit demonstration is turning nasty, the skinhead contingent making it look like a Sealed Knot re-enactment of the far-right ’80s rallies we grew up fearing as teenagers.

  There was something brilliantly absurd about the situation. It seemed like a reimagining of a pre-revolutionary scene from the early reels of Dr Zhivago, the citizens rioting outside in the Moscow streets as Lara and Victor Komarovsky look on from some bourgeois balcony, but this time the peasants were revolting in favour of their oppressors.

  Nonetheless, with the parties fragmenting along Brexit lines and the riot vans rolling down the Strand, it was clear there was no future in writing more polarising polemics about the Brexit impasse. And the Leave loyalists knew it too. Not a single one of the 1,098 below-the-line comments on my final column of the first Brexit era was pro-Brexit. The Brexit Internet warriors, too, had given up on their sustained kamikaze flights into the rock-walled fortress of my certainties.

  And yet the fucking thing was still dragging on. And the divisions Brexit has exposed will drag on for ever now, even if the superficial, and comparatively trivial, question of our membership or non-membership of the EU is finally resolved.

  So what next? I don’t know. What do I say, and what voice do I say it in? I’ve a new live show due in September 2019, and I return to temporarily fill Mitchell’s Observer slippers once more in May. I’ll figure something out, I suppose. This isn’t really about me, is it?

  All I can offer, as an unsatisfying conclusion to this book, is my final column of the first Brexit era.

  With the end in sight, Brexit pulls into a layby

  31 March 2019

  The March to Leave is a sparsely attended, fortnight-long, 200-mile protest ramble, aimed at securing Brexit, a trembling Parliament its final destination. I wanted to see it in the flesh so I could tell my grandchildren ‘I was there’, before taunting them with descriptions of toilet paper.

  Nearly three years ago, during the week of 13 June 2016, I watched members of the public on live TV debates, people bamboozled not only by funny Boris and those Leave lies, but also by how percentages work and what words mean. And I realised Remain would lose the referendum.

  And so, as a metropolitan elitist snowflake and cultural Marxist, I was disappointed by the referendum result, but when the departure date of 29 March 2019 was confirmed, I knew how to weaponise my inconvenience. I would treat all my subsequent newspaper columns henceforth, until we left the EU, as interrelated episodes of a complete work that would only make total sense when read as a whole, like my inferior literary forebear Charles Dickens would have done had he experienced a Brexit, instead of just Christmas and some misery.

  I would make recurring novelistic characters of the likes of Michael Gove (the Vengeful Orphan), Sarah Vine (the Daily Mail hate funnel) and Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Cake Disaster Weight Loss Haircut Bullshit Wall-Spaffer Johnson; and I would gradually unravel the resolve and tolerance of the work’s defeated and unreliable narrator (me) as Brexit dragged on.

  And, finally, I’d use neurolinguistic programming to provoke the regular below-the-line comment providers and automated Kremlin bots on the paper’s website into performing as a predictable dramatic chorus. I would play you all like a pipe!

  In a stroke of genius, I arranged to deliver the completed manuscript of March of the Lemmings (as the work was to be called) on the weekend we finally left the EU, creating the definitive, and most balanced, overview of the Brexit era, from the street-level point of view of a middle-class, middle-aged man, working in media and living in a 78.5 per cent Remain-voting constituency.

  But the departure date is suddenly postponed, and among Brexit’s many unforeseen consequences is the fact that tonight I have to complete the last chapter, a story that, like that other great European cliff-edge caper, The Italian Job, has no convenient dramatic conclusion. Those cheeky chancers thought they’d get out of Europe with a fortune! But did they?

  On Wednesday morning, I woke early to drive to Towcester, in Northamptonshire, to intercept the March to Leave, in the hope that the pro-Brexit trek might provide me with the ending my story suddenly lacked. Perhaps I would die in a head-on collision with the Led by Donkeys van that shadows the ramblers showing film of Leave politicians’ lies, my death creating a final scene rich in dramatic irony.

  I drove north-west, listening to the radio. Ranking Roger, from Birmingham’s 2-tone pioneers The Beat, had died of cancer. I was sad. The days when popular culture closed ranks against racism and the far right seemed long distant. Meanwhile, news reports made it clear the last wheel on the fiction-festooned Brexit bus was finally falling off, with desperate diehard Brexiteers expressing support for a deal they had already acknowledged was worse than being in the EU. No-deal reality bit.

  Driving through rural Buckinghamshire, past village-green memorials and Second World War airfields, it was easy to understand the nostalgic national fantasy that psychic vampires like Rees-Mogg and Farage fed off. I stopped to see the great eighteenth-century garden at Stowe, its vast follies suddenly remnants of a soon-to-be-fallen civilisation, Mayan pyramids in waiting, crumbling and caked in guano.

  In a layby on the A413, just south of Towcester, the hundred or so attendees of today’s leg of the March to Leave were assembling, the coach that carried their cases stowed nearby on the A43.1 I passed between them as they filled their mobile toilets with their micturations, tied their laces and raised their flags. I wasn’t the droid they were looking for.

  It’s Day Twelve and, Farage long since vanished, today’s celebrity is Tim Wetherspoon, who moves among the faithful, raising morale with his scoutmaster charm, his chiselled calves like the carved legs of a decorative pew-end woodwose, his burly body an Albert Uderzo cartoon of a pira
te.

  I waited on a bench to watch the protesters walk through Wood Burcote. No one had turned out to see them, apart from me and a bloke in a Human League T-shirt, and though there were occasional supportive car-horn toots, a pointedly positioned EU banner at the marchers’ next mobile-toilet layby provided more editorial balance than any edition of the Today programme since Sarah Sands took over.

  Farage’s friendly flag Wombles looked like any random group of affable English eccentrics, a flock of Fairport Convention fans or a gaggle of real-ale enthusiasts. It was just that these hale fellows had voted to leave after the unveiling of that ‘Breaking Point’ poster, had assembled here in Buckinghamshire at the behest of a man busy building alliances with far-right leaders all across Europe, and were marching to a drum that inspired neo-Nazis worldwide, irrespective of Tim Wetherspoon’s landlordly bonhomie.

  Events hadn’t offered me the definitive final paragraph I needed, so I fired up the humane punky reggae of The Beat’s 1980 debut, I Just Can’t Stop It, and drove south. The song ‘Two Swords’ puts forward the notion that opposing political forces only sharpen their respective blades by slashing at each other, and that you must remember your opponent is your brother, ‘even though that cunt’s a Nazi’.