by Stewart Lee
* I chose this jaunty blue-beat number because it seems, subliminally, to tie in with Princess Diana. And because I liked dancing around to it backstage.
2
2004–5
Critical response to StandUp Comedian’s Edinburgh run was largely favourable, with the three major comedy reviewers establishing typically personal positions that they were to deviate little from over the next five years. The scholarly, but qualified, enthusiasm of The Times’s Dominic Maxwell: ‘Lee’s wilful sophistication will not strike everyone’s funny bones. Like the avant-jazz that’s playing as you file in, it relies on your knowledge of the rules it’s toying with. But the self-reflexive playfulness never descends into onanism, because it’s tethered to Lee’s attack on a world dominated by half-truths. Form matches content. A stunning return’; the cautious, reluctant praise of the Guardian’s Brian Logan: ‘Lee’s technical excellence is driving him in directions I find easier to admire than enjoy. I appreciated his control while longing for the joke(s) to end. There are brilliant pay-offs, but he makes you work for them’; and the indecisive bafflement of the Independent’s Julian Hall, who reviews me suspiciously, as if he thinks some kind of trick is being played on him: ‘Surly, arrogant and laboured, you either love or hate his onstage persona … hit and miss.’*
* When I had returned to standup in 2004, it was not as a former and failed TV comic from the ‘comedy is the new rock and roll’ era, but as the Olivier award-nominated director and co-librettist of an opera routinely described as the greatest piece of musical theatre for thirty years. I benefited enormously from this change in the way I was perceived by broadsheet newspapers, and I think my then management deliberately exaggerated my role in Richard Thomas’s idea with this aim in sight. I got highbrow credibility on the back of someone else’s unassuming genius.
Word of mouth was good, and two weeks in the 180-seater room at London’s Soho Theatre followed in November, with a budget fixed at a level where I could not only break even, but actually make money. Then I got sick during the shows, shaky, feeble and hot, and my bright orange wee burned my shrivelled urethra on exit. I couldn’t sleep or stand or eat. I’d get to the venue early and lie flat in the dressing room for hours to gather enough strength to hobble about for the length of the set. My GP agreed that my urine was a disturbing colour, but the sample I gave her got lost in the system, and eventually my girlfriend hassled my manager about my condition. He got his connected Notting Hill doctor, who knew which strings to pull, to check me out, and I was immediately admitted to the Whittington hospital in Archway. Between the three of them, they probably saved me from something more serious.
‘Do you ever get rectal bleeding?’ they asked at the hospital. ‘On and off.’ ‘On and off for how long?’ ‘Ten or fifteen years, I suppose.’ It hadn’t really occurred to me that I had been ill for some time. But I’d had various ongoing bowel problems since getting ulcerative colitis as a teenager, which hospitalised me the day after I first saw The Fall live, the acidity of Mark E. Smith’s onstage persona perhaps being too much for a young boy’s stomach to take. And these problems had intensified since I first became a full-time standup, to the point where I stopped even noticing that continuous rectal bleeding, the billowing clouds of flatus and the eternally unstable stools that made visits to the toilet during the nineties and the early part of this century such a constant source of amusement to me and others. The smell of farts hung around me perpetually as if it were, as Frank Skinner said in the most poignantly eloquent moment of standup he ever wrote, ‘an ermine cloak’. In retrospect, it comes as no surprise that I should have been heading for hospitalisation. My diet from 1991 to 2004 consisted mainly of Diet Coke, beans on toast, crisps, Wheat Crunchies, margarine, lager and curry. To paraphrase the late satirist and crackhead Willie Donaldson, ‘You cannot eat as I have ate and not end up like this.’ It turned out I had a serious attack of an ongoing condition called diverticulitis, a step up from the ulcerative colitis I’d had as a teenager. I was rushed up to a vacant hospital bed and put on a drip and lots of drugs.
During the hours of darkness, the hospital experience had all the oddly comforting and hallucinatory grace notes that I remembered from childhood tussles with rare diseases and broken bones. Nurses at nursing stations in the night, lit by softly glowing desk lamps, their soft voices humming just at the edge of audibility. Croaks of pain in the dark from behind drawn curtains. Minimalist cycles of fluttering electronic bleeps and blips. Stomach gurgles and apocalyptic farts. One night, I remember, I staggered to the TV room with my drip to try and watch the first ever episode of I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!. I was alone with a cup of tea and the telly, and things were momentarily normal. A thin man with a beard came in, wearing just pyjama bottoms and a brown leather jacket with a picture of a wolf on the back. He asked if he could join me. Then he stood between me and the television, pulled down his trousers, pointed out, one by one, the weeping wounds on his legs, and then started to rub petroleum jelly into them in a vivid ooze of blood, pus and the translucent gel. I had to go back to bed. I never did become an avid viewer of I’m a Celebrity. When you’re hospitalised in a big city in the NHS system, you realise how many people are not especially sick, just lost and confused, alone and with no one to love them.
I lay awake at night, doped and thinking. People get ill. Then they die. I’d been ill and I hadn’t known. Perhaps I might have died? This seems hysterical and banal now, and part of me knew it was hysterical and banal at the time, but that did not make it any less arresting. I did not want to die yet. I had things to do.
I was discharged with dietary advice. For the foreseeable future, try and eat lots of roughage, maybe a baked potato every day. And drink lots of water. No coffee, no carbonated drinks, and, the man suggested confidentially, if you must have alcohol, something flat and soft like Guinness. Guinness was my favourite drink and I loved baked potatoes. I’d be fine.
My mother was away, and she invited me to go and stay in her house to recuperate, so I unclipped my drip, rescheduled the remaining Soho Theatre gigs and drove west, to the new-build estate adjoining a once remote little village south-east of Worcester to which she’d retired. I pottered weakly about the empty house, all tidy and quiet, eating baked potatoes and sluicing myself with pints of Malvern water. I was still on a lot of painkillers. I tried to drink but it flattened me. I’d lost so much weight I felt like I was in a different man’s body, or mine, twenty years ago, when I looked like the young Morrissey. I had to pee every twenty minutes. If I wanted to smoke, I had to stand in my mum’s garden. I was thirty-six years old. One day, I drove to Hay-on-Wye and looked for Arthur Machen books, staggering about in a half-dream in the shadow of the hill. One night, I watched Master and Commander on DVD, and I enjoyed it, which is unlike me. And from the window of the white fluffy bedroom, always open because the stifling heating was jammed on and no one has ever known how to turn it off, I looked out at the Malvern hills.
Everything was wobbly and trippy. The fields buzzed green and black. I felt ashen and pin-eyed, like an actor pretending to come down from a rave in an early-nineties ITV police drama. The skies out there seemed grey and enormous, as if they were coming to crush me into the floodplain of the Severn, deep down with the civil war dead in the flatlands all around Cromwell’s, the insensitive ly named Indian restaurant, and Powick hospital, where a Dr Sandison dosed 683 schizophrenics and depressives with LSD in the fifties. I tried to go for walks, but the paths along the sides of the roads petered out or led nowhere, and lorries rattled past alarmingly, because the new-builds had been new-built where no new-builds should be built. I could just about make it as far as either a duck pond in the middle of a cul-de-sac, or an electricity substation on the edge of a sheep field, or a shop staffed by bleached women who sold pork rolls to lorry drivers who had stopped in the lay-by, or to the village pub, now a swanky restaurant, the die-hard drinkers crammed around what was left of the bar, trying to avoid eye con
tact. So, after a while, I went home.
In January, I set off to tour the cool hipster comedy venues the uncharacteristically sympathetic booker Charlie Briggs had scoped out. I was determined to downsize from the scale of the ‘comedy is the new rock and roll’ era, which was when I’d last toured a show, and to do everything myself, to see if, this time, I could make it worthwhile. I was booked into nearly thirty rooms of between one and two hundred seats, hand-picked by Charlie as a base to build from. Advertising was minimal, because suddenly there was MySpace and a website with a mailing list, new methods of direct mass communication that hadn’t really existed last time I’d been on the road. I drove from Travelodge to Travelodge in my Mini Metro, listening to The Fall and John Lee Hooker albums from the fifties. And the blurb I wrote for the tour flyer and press release read like a personal manifesto: ‘After an enforced lay-off from performing, and bewildered by critical acclaim in a world he never made, the “fifth best standup of his generation” returns in search of clarity, self-respect, and immediate sensual and intellectual gratification.’* (The ‘fifth best standup of his generation’ was an unattributable quote I made up, to combat the fact that everybody seemed to have similar things on their posters these days.) And after years in the slow, detached process of commercial theatre with Jerry Springer: The Opera, I was, genuinely, in search of ‘clarity, self-respect, and immediate sensual and intellectual gratification’.
* The bit about ‘a world he never made’ is a nod to Steve Gerber’s seventies Howard the Duck comic, a sacred text to reach for whenever you feel lost, like a giant speaking alien duck might if it found itself in disco-era Cleveland.
I asked Josie Long to open for me, a young comic who talked about paintings and the wonder of science onstage, swore loudly and pathologically in tea rooms, and appeared to make most of her own clothes. Josie was one of the acts I’d been impressed by when I started back on the circuit. She hadn’t toured before, and being away with someone who was interested in what Aldershot town centre would be like, for example, leavened the deadening effect of the driving. And there was an element of the miner’s canary about her role in the proceedings. On the rare occasions when the crowd didn’t go for Josie’s open-hearted surreal spiel, I knew that despite Charlie’s and my best efforts to book a tour that connected only with the hot freaks of alterno-Britain, we were in a venue full of sports fans and squares, and I was going to have to work hard.
It was a cold, harsh winter, and I was still shaky and weak. I sat at the wheel, gurgling back the prescribed bottles of water, necking painkillers, looking for baked potato stands in windswept city centres and stopping every thirty minutes to empty my distended bladder into any available space. In Glasgow, after I’d jumped out of the car in a traffic jam to piss up some wheelie bins by a multi-storey, a now soggy junkie crawled out from behind them, in the midst of injecting heroin into his forearm, and said, ‘For fuck’s sake, man!’, but with an air of resigned and philosophical acceptance, as if we were both in this together.
The tour had a frosty, somnambulant quality. Before a lovely gig above a pub in the little Derbyshire town of Wirksworth, we walked to the Nine Ladies stone circle on a snowy Stanton Moor, through the tree houses and smouldering fires of frozen eco-protesters who were trying to prevent an American-owned quarry edging any closer to the stone circle. The locals left them food in boxes at the bottom of the hill. The Actor Kevin Eldon joined us for a non-cost-effective trek to the Isle of Skye, where we drew thirty people, still more than I’d played to in Dundee five years earlier. And in Lincoln, there was a heavy snowfall during the gig. I went back to my room, a monastic cell you could rent cheaply from the bishop in the actual cathedral cloisters, and Josie stayed and played snowballs in the grounds of the university with the audience. She was having enough fun for both of us, which was good, as I was perpetually shattered.*
* In February, while Josie and I were making a tourist stop at Worcester Cathedral, I received a text from Daniel Kitson saying that Malcolm Hardee, one of the progenitors of Alternative Comedy as we know it, had drowned. I was disproportionately upset, as I didn’t know him well, but he had been one of the first people to book me, and represented the anarchic spirit that was slowly disappearing from the circuit. Malcolm’s funeral, a euphoric variety show and rolling eulogy jointly presided over by Arthur Smith and a tolerant priest at St Alfege Church, Greenwich, was one of the greatest pieces of theatre I have ever seen, but I wonder if the sense of hysteria at the subsequent wake reflected, in some way, the fact that Malcolm’s death symbolised the end of an era. Malcolm’s signature act – the naked balloon dance he performed as The Greatest Show on Legs – was recently appropriated move for move by some scumbags on a Simon Cowell TV talent show.
The gigs, though, were great, and worked much better than they would have done in the partially filled municipal hangars I’d become used to. At the end of the tour, after I deducted all my costs, I think Josie’s support fees of £100 a night added up to only a little less than I’d made myself. But I had made something. For the first time in fifteen years this was a wedge of live work that had been absolutely and incontrovertibly worth doing. ‘Come back next time,’ said the promoters of these real places with their hand-reared audiences who actually liked comedy. There was a whole world out there of enthusiastic comedy promoters and discerning comedy consumers that my management had never connected me with. And people liked the show.
After seeing StandUp Comedian in Edinburgh and wrongly imagining I would soon be huge, a DVD outfit called 2entertain paid my management company’s production company to film StandUp Comedian for commercial release.* I saw enough from whatever fee my manager’s production company were paid to make the DVD to pay off the mortgage on my flat. (I never thought to ask, or don’t remember being told, what the actual fee paid to my manager’s production company was, although I am sure this must have been discussed with me.) The DVD’s executive producer tried to convince my manager, who he also was, to make me film it at the Bloomsbury Theatre to save money, and not to worry about spending any of the budget on making it good as all live comedy DVDs ‘were always shit anyway’. But I managed to persuade both of him to let me film it in the more intimate and tense surroundings of The Stand, Glasgow, which worked perfectly.†
* Prior to the release of the StandUp Comedian DVD, TV’s Jimmy Carr told me, over breakfast in Montreal, that my problem was that although critics and comics thought I was good, there was no commercially available filmed evidence of anything I had ever done to convince members of the public I was worth seeing. The sick funnyman kindly offered to put some of his own TV millions into filming my standup to help me, but as I then got the offer from 2entertain I was never required to see how much I could have stung him for. Peter Kay and Matt Lucas, who pretended to be physically handicapped and mentally and physically handicapped, respectively, and wiggled about to a Proclaimers song for Comic Relief, may seem more generous, but secretly Jimmy Carr is little short of a living saint. That said, of all the comics working in Britain today, I believe it to be I who am perhaps the most charitable, not in terms of the actual amount of money I give, but in terms of the time I give up for charity benefit shows. Richard Herring, of course, carries a bucket for Scope with him everywhere he goes, which also doubles up as a receptacle for his audience to be sick into.
† A 2entertain executive later told me, in secrecy outside the first night of a terrible West End adaptation of Steptoe and Son, that they couldn’t do a follow-up as the price charged by my manager’s production company had been too high considering their possible sales, which I had repeatedly told them would be the case whenever I met them. As with my management company’s telesales live department, while one was grateful for a large and life-changing one-off payment like this, these smash-and-grab ram raids never seemed to build towards return bookings or long-term relationships. I still felt, perhaps naively, that a better way forward would be to do worthwhile work at a cost-effective level at w
hich no one lost out, in the belief that it might ultimately be rewarded on its own merits. On the other hand, shifting my mortgage in one fell swoop was an amazing thing to do, and even what I saw of the fee for the StandUp Comedian DVD was three times more than I’ve ever earned for similar work since.
It was great to have the show filmed too. It drew a line under the material and forced me to move forwards. The problem now was how to follow it up. StandUp Comedian had been assembled from the best leftovers of a decade and the few ideas I’d had in my sabbatical. What was I supposed to talk about now?
In-between my discharge from hospital and the start of the tour, in December 2004 and January 2005, I went to Hanover with the composer Richard Thomas to help out on a piece he was writing for the Schauspielhaus there. I wasn’t really switched on and felt like a passenger. I never really figured out what my role was, how to speak to anyone, or what to eat and drink. All the Germans we worked with evidenced a deep and dry humour. ‘There are no old buildings here,’ Richard said to a German actor. ‘That is because you destroyed them all,’ he answered. The Weihnachtsmarkt by the station glittered pleasingly, and I finally found an Irish pub where I could drink halves of Guinness all day. But the flat we were billeted in was freezing and we ended up spending too much time there, sitting up, dealing with phone calls and emails and mass panic when, suddenly, out of nowhere, the Jerry Springer: The Opera shit hit the born-again Christian evangelist fan.
Because the show was now on its last legs as a live West End proposition, the producers had decided it was time to auction it off to the BBC, who had long been seeking a transmission, and then send it out to tour the provinces. The TV director Peter Orton, who had played sax for the sixties mod group The Attack, was contracted to film it, and caught a great performance with the sublimely subtle David Soul in the lead. I was happy the piece was going to be out there, for anyone to see, for free. And then a rightwing Christian pressure group decided to use objections to the show’s religious content to catapult themselves into the public eye, causing 65,000 people to complain in advance of the broadcast, their vociferousness eventually leading the police to advise some BBC executives to go into hiding on the night of the programme.*