by Stewart Lee
‘It’s difficult to say who the first alternative comedian was. Ben Elton? Alexei Sayle? Victoria Wood? John Dowie, if you really know your stuff? But one thing is for certain. Ted Chippington was the first post-alternative comedian, and without him, everything would be different. Not necessarily worse. But different.’ (From a piece written for the Guardian upon the release of the Ted Chippington box set Walking Down the Road (Big Print records), in February 2007.)
Not long after seeing Ted, in the spring of 1985, I applied to St Edmund Hall at Oxford University to read English Literature. I did so for two reasons. Firstly, I loved English Literature, and the Anglo-Saxon poetry course really appealed to me (although sadly I turned out to be particularly poor at this subject, lacking the requisite grammar-school Greek and Latin). And secondly, a doctor for whom I did a Saturday morning filing job had told me about going to the Edinburgh Fringe in the seventies with an Oxford University student comedy group that had included some of Not the Nine O’Clock News, and it sounded superb. I passed the exams and got a place. I still can’t believe I was really allowed to study there, with all those clever people, reading books all day in the midst of the Cotswold-stone cathedrals of culture. However, the wind of change was already blowing across the comedy continent.
Everything I ever read, and every documentary I ever saw, about the fifties satire boom and its inheritors seemed to suggest that going to Oxbridge was a passport into a BBC Light Entertainment career, irrespective of your actual ability. But the Alternative Comedy scene that was swiftly becoming the dominant trope was expressly and understandably against this privileged old guard. In my early days on the circuit, I kept the exact location of my education a secret, as it would have been held against me; on the rare occasions it leaked out, I felt I had to be twice as good to prove myself.*
* I remember the anarchist comedian and ‘godfather of Alternative Comedy’ Tony Allen being extremely keen to book me for a night he ran in a squat in Hackney after he found out I’d got a 2:1 in English from St Edmund Hall. I’d like to think that the days of fasttracking are long gone, but a disproportionate amount of television comedians who rose to prominence in the last decade do seem, just like in the pre-Alternative days, to be from Oxbridge. Mitchell and Webb, Katy Brand, Lucy Montgomery, Simon Bird, John Oliver, Johnny Vegas and Frank Skinner, for example, all are former presidents of the Cambridge Footlights. What is undeniable is that going to Oxford gave me a degree of confidence, and some organisational skills when it came to writing. But then, I would deny any outright privilege, wouldn’t I? I’m a special case. My excuse is that I’m from a single-parent family, got a full grant, and went to an independent boys’ school on a part-scholarship and a charity bung, so I ain’t the same as all them Oxford toffs. Nobody likes to think their own success is anything but hard won and deserved. I expect even David Cameron and George Osborne maintain, privately, that they’re ‘not like those other Oxbridge-educated Eton fuckers’, and think they have somehow achieved their positions as puce-faced masters of the known universe on merit alone.
I moved to London to be a comic in September 1989. There was a comedy micro-economy in the city where a few thirty-quid gigs a week, in the tiniest of pub back rooms, almost added up to a living wage. I got a flat in Acton with Richard Herring, with whom I had written some student comedy shows, and two other friends from university. From nine to five, I worked in temp jobs orange-juice packing, data inputting and finally the luxury of fact-checking for a horticultural encyclopedia. Every day I’d hassle the forty or so comedy clubs in Time Out for the live auditions they called Open Spots, laboriously dialling dozens of numbers on the revolving disc of the telephone, round and round, day after day. I don’t think the young people of the twenty-first century, with their mobile telephones, can possibly imagine what it was like actually having to dial phone numbers. Kids today! They don’t know they’re born.
Maybe I’d be slotted into an unpaid five minutes, anywhere from the thirty-seater Guilty Pea above The Wheatsheaf on Rathbone Place, where various thirties bohemians drank themselves to death, to the sprawling 180 seats of the old Comedy Store in Leicester Square. The standup guru John Gordillo, then in a double act called The Crisis Twins, saw my act and liked it, and gave me his private-promoter phone-number list, which seemed like an astonishing act of trust and kindness. Click, whirr; click, whirr. After a few weeks of pestering, most places called back.* Every evening, I travelled home across London on night buses, back when you could smoke and drink on the top deck – epicurean allowances which made the most inconvenient journey a hedonistic pleasure – and I’d feel like I was living the mythical life of some fin de siècle artist, despite the looming threat of another early start at the data-input desk.
* It took nine months of two calls a day for Jongleurs to give me an open spot at their Battersea club, the only one they had in those days. The gig that night was compèred by Jack Dee, who was about to become famous off the back of some beer adverts. I died and was never allowed back.
In February 1990, after six months in London, I got through the heats of the Hackney Empire and City Limits magazine New Act of the Year competition, and won the final, beating Simon Munnery’s Security Guard character, which was much funnier than my act. (‘I went to work today. Nothing happened. That’s what I get paid for.’)*
* I had seen Simon in a remarkable double act in Edinburgh the previous summer, the iconoclastically named God and Jesus, and first spoke to the skinny genius (and that’s a noun I use sparingly) that same week. I found myself trying to shield his tiny body from an attack by Jeremy Hardy’s wife, the comedienne Kit Hollerbach, who had flown at Simon like a harpy from the darkness of the Pleasance Cabaret bar to accuse him of being a neo-Nazi, as one did in those days, and seemed to be saying that I must be a neo-Nazi too if I was speaking to him. But I wasn’t and nor was he. Not then, anyway, but we all get more rightwing as we get older.
Even the host of the event, the hypnotically lugubrious Jewish veteran Ivor Dembina, knew I’d been lucky. ‘You were the best on the night, fair play,’ he said, in a tone typically laden with world-weary wisdom and an indefinable regret. ‘Well done,’ said John Connor, the head judge, who was also the comedy critic of City Limits and the producer of The Comedy Store’s Cutting Edge night, ‘we’ll show these Oxbridge wankers like Rob Newman and David Baddiel what real comedy is.’ ‘Oh,’ I answered, not thinking, as we walked into the backstage darkness, ‘I went to Oxford.’ ‘Did you?’ said Connor. ‘But you’re not like those wankers, are you?’ he added with all the desperation of a disappointed sex tourist who has just discovered his beautiful Thai prostitute has a penis, and is wondering whether just to try and make the best of it. ‘I like David Baddiel. I think he’s good,’ I said. I’d seen Baddiel in Edinburgh the previous summer. He was the first standup who seemed to speak in an idiom that was recognisably aimed at our generation. His distinctive tone of voice was soon to be imitated across all media for the next decade.
My prize for winning the Hackney Empire and City Limits magazine’s New Act of the Year competition was £500, a booking at the Hackney Empire, a booking at The Comedy Store and a slot on a TV show I can’t remember the name of. I received the money on the night, but the Hackney Empire slot took a decade to materialise, The Comedy Store hasn’t booked me to this day, and the TV show never called. And the winner’s certificate was made out to ‘Steward’ Lee.
Ivor Dembina told me that because of the sort of act I was, stiff and still, I should always have the microphonestand boom set in a vertical position. ‘Who is this guy?’ I thought. Well, he was Ivor Dembina, the Obi-Wan Kenobi of comedy, and he was right. Learning that I needed a vertical boom stand, which I now call Dembina’s Upright Position, was the best thing I got out of being The Hackney Empire New Act of the Year. That, and an upsurge in circuit bookings, which meant I soon gave up my temping jobs. Since November 1990, I can honestly say, with some degree of pride, I have never done a decent day’s work i
n my life.
In 1990, I was taken on by a newly moulded standup comedy management agency for Alternative Comedians, run by a failed impresario, the thwarting of whose theatrical ambitions had forced him to apply his enormous brain and Cheshire Cat charm to the blossoming standup scene. There were only two other similar outfits: Off the Kerb, which specialised in the sort of gay, transsexual, animal-based, drag and novelty acts beloved by its flamboyant founder Addison Cresswell; and Stage Left, which managed and booked more overtly hard-line performers such as Jeremy Hardy and a young Mark Thomas. My new agency’s roster made them seem like the future and they did the deal on a handshake, in the days before binding contracts, promising that they were about to set up a national network of money-spinning student gigs. ‘I’ll just pass you to our live department,’ the big manager would say, cupping his hand over the phone and passing it along the sofa he shared with the little manager, then the company’s only other employee and a vocal fan of the hardcore anarcho-punk band Conflict. ‘You cannot win a nuclear war!’ ran the spoken-word sample at the beginning of The Ungovernable Force, played full blast as he drove me to my undeserved Jerry Sadowitz support slots in a Ford Fiesta.
The new agency’s client list was already impressive: the aforementioned Sadowitz, a comic I remain quietly in awe of, who was then involved in a complex, controversial and hilarious reaction against the politically correct orthodoxies of the day; Simon Munnery, who was now pushing his Alan Parker Urban Warrior character, a satirical love-letter to the punk revolutionaries he’d worshipped as a teenager; and David Baddiel and Rob Newman, whose sassy pop-literate acts and shoe-gazers’ haircuts were about to create a whole new audience for Alternative Comedy – girls. Today, I and all those other acts are long gone from the agency. Only David Baddiel remains, a once proud raven, his head now bowed, pecking the dry earth and tethered to the ground by the heavy chains of history, for fear that he too should fly away.
When I went back to the Edinburgh Fringe for my fourth visit in 1990, no longer a student comedian, my management company introduced bold new ideas to the standup comedy scene, such as advertising and two-colour posters. (The innovative idea of insurmountable performers’ debts, paid off piecemeal by working for the management company’s other departments, was yet to come.) The photo copied bits of paper everyone else pinned up in Edinburgh newsagents’ windows suddenly seemed so drab. The eighties were over. The bright new dawn of nineties comedy was rising, and we drove around Edinburgh under cover of darkness in a panel van, flyposting illegally with pots of paste and brushes, like the A-Team with jokes. The romance of it! Me, Simon Munnery, the comedy musician Jim Tavare, our brave two-man management team and a German crusty they had press-ganged into joining them, all of us pasting over Jeremy Hardy’s face again and again and again and again, like pathetic and ungrateful schoolboys vandalising a photo of the headmaster. Nobody on the Fringe had ever seen anything like it. Advertising! It was outrageous, and flew in the face of all eighties ideals. But in retrospect, the Stage Left acts, smoking rollies in their Red Wedge T-shirts and supping pints of Special Brew in the Pleasance courtyard, were right to be annoyed. It was the beginning of the end, and I was an accessory.
With regard to earning a living week to week, there weren’t the nationwide opportunities for comics to play all over the country at arts centres and provincial theatres and local comedy clubs that there are today. But my new management were as good as their word and established an almost viable network of student comedy gigs at polytechnics and universities nationwide. No one had really thought to do this before. It seemed like Simon Munnery and I were always the advance party, sent out to colonise uncharted educational territories. We would find ourselves required to perform in the corner of a bar, with no stage, no lighting, no microphone, no seating and no posters advertising the show or its start time, booked by a forgetful Entertainments Officer who seemed disgruntled that our presence might mean he would have to turn off MTV, the jukebox, the fruit machines and the Space Invaders. In the end, to try and explain to the students how to set up a comedy gig, we sent out a drawing of a stick man holding a microphone with lights pointed at him.
Comics would head off in twos and threes and split £300 or so a show, after commission and before tax. We slept in dodgy DSS bed and breakfasts for as little as six pounds a night, or else saved the money and crashed on strangers’ sofas. Although I did tours of these universities and polytechnics, in various combinations of different acts, on and off for the next decade, they were often a struggle.*
* At Bangor student union, forcing the comedians to leave the stage by whatever means necessary had become a point of pride for both the audience and the Entertainments Officer, who would then dock your money in proportion to your shortfall in stage time, despite essentially orchestrating your early exit. Playing this venue in 1994 with Richard Herring, and already wise to the trick, I told Rich that we had to stay on for our full time come what may. When the Ents Officer invited the rugby team in to heckle us off, I copped an old line of Simon’s and said we’d only leave the stage if they threw glass. Bottles duly flew. The security staff tried to get us offstage but, as glass smashed around us, I forced them to establish that our removal was their decision, not ours, thus ensuring receipt of our full fee of £140 each.
But these shows paid the bills. And we were young, and I loved riding the motorway network in second-hand cars, especially with Simon, hopped up on fags and lager, listening to tapes of The Fall and pissing in hedges, all the way from Peckham Rye to Jerusalem.
During the same period, 1990 to 1995, I’d been chipping away at writing for radio with Richard Herring, who had gone as far as buying an Amstrad word processor the size of a Mini Clubman, while I still clung to my electric typewriter, with its futuristic correction-ribbon facility. Richard had given up on standup after a string of frustrating try-out spots, though lots of the material people baulked at in 1990 has proved a perfect fit for twenty-first-century audiences who love the fine line he now walks between hilarious obscenity and criminally prosecutable obscenity. Instead, Rich approached the puzzle of trying to write for radio with a tenacity, enthusiasm and originality that dragged me along in its wake.
In those days, BBC Radio discovered new comedy writers by simply inviting anyone who wanted to write for Radio 4’s long-running weekly shit satire show, Weekending, to just come into the building, without even the most basic identity check, and meet with the producer of that week’s show. He or she would tell the assembled mass of stinking eccentrics what sort of sketches the show was still short of. These wannabe writers, smelly and covered in food, shaggy of beard and baggy of trouser, sockless often, sometimes howling drunk and without a clean shirt between them, then sat in an airless room for the next twenty-four hours, tapping away at typewriters, as no one had laptops back then, before finally submitting some formulaic sketch in which John Major was Robin Hood or Darth Vader or a cat or something.
Some of the non-coms, as ‘non-commissioned’ writers were known, would sleep under desks overnight, curled up in their beards. The nightwatchman would always turn a blind eye when his torch flickered across their dreaming faces, for he could see the non-coms for what they were: spirits come to earth, voodoo children, faerie folk adrift in the world, gnomes and leprechauns in human form, harmless as flies, but with less hope of careers in radio. But if you could get stuff used regularly by Weekending, you might get a contracted commission for a minute of material every week worth £25.*
* Non-commissioned writers who finally found fame include Al Murray, Harry Hill, the screenwriter Georgia Pritchett and the merchant seaman and Pot Noodle Goth Peter Baynham, who eventually wrote the Borat movie and then moved to Hollywood to grow his hair. Most of the regular non-commissioned writers faded from view, but what a superb system. ‘How do we discover new writers?’ ask the BBC think tanks. Just invite them in, whoever they are, irrespective of the security risk they might pose, like Weekending used to before you cancelled i
t. Then you will find them.
Even though I was often away doing gigs, and my main interest remained standup, Richard’s enthusiasm for writing for radio pushed us through the process fairly quickly, and after getting a commission to write for Weekending we then wrote for On the Hour, the Steve Coogan and Chris Morris vehicle that became TV’s The Day Today, though it transferred without us due to a petty argument and our delusional and insolent sense of entitlement. Throughout the midnineties we did various shows as Lee and Herring for Radio 4 and even Radio 1, which back then had many spoken-word and specialist shows, and developed the rudimentary chemistry of a viable double act. I was thinner than Richard at the time, and as some kind of contrast between the two players is all that is required in a double act really, we were soon able to elaborate our minimal weight differential into a fully formed comic relationship and take the act to BBC2 with the series of Fist of Fun.
In 1993, Newman and Baddiel played Wembley Arena, where Rob Newman flew high up into the air on a wire whilst talking about how he liked Crass as a child. Janet Street-Porter saw a picture of this in The Face and declared ‘comedy is the new rock and roll’. But when Rob Newman flew up in the air at Wembley it changed comedy in Britain for ever, probably for the worse. Suddenly standup looked like a career option for ambitious young people, and a cash cow for unscrupulous promoters. Could ye olde eighties Alternative Comedy still be ‘alternative’ when there were T-shirts of its latest stars on sale in skinny-fit sizes at stadiums? Rich and I had the same management as Newman and Baddiel, and perhaps they had hoped for the same stadium-filling results when we did TV, but we just didn’t have that kind of fan base. Knickers were rarely thrown at us, and if they had been, we would have worn them as hats, or just as knickers, our own having been cast away, filthy, in the lane.