How I Escaped My Certain Fate

by Stewart Lee

  Well, of course, like so many things, this never came to anything, but there are morphic resonances of it throughout British comedy ever since, of which my own attempt at observational insect standup is but one. My wife Bridget Christie, entirely unaware of the Jeff Green/Stick Insect idea, has recently been appearing around London in a home-made ant costume – not onstage, though – just for her own amusement. And when I was scriptediting Harry Hill’s shows for Channel 4 in the late nineties, the floppy-collared loon™ became fascinated by the comic possibilities of flies, filling miniature television studios, sealed inside Perspex tanks, with hundreds of them, specially bred from sacks of maggots which were delivered at the start of shooting.

  I contacted Harry through his spokesman to ask him for his memories of the fly skits, and this was the reply I received:

  The fly thing is a while ago but I believe it to be my idea. The first one was The Fly Cruise and we also did Play Your Cards Right. I can’t really remember. I think we did about five and that Al Murray did the buzzing noises of the flies. The flies were supplied by an animal wrangler who had to get the maggots at the right stage to hatch in time for the show. Although the mini sets were filmed under Perspex boxes inevitably a lot of the flies got out and then turned up on the set for the recording of the standup sections of the show which led to many retakes being needed.

  Thanks, Harry!

  It was the job of our director, the old-school BBC bow-tie-and-moustache man Robin Nash, to try and film convincing light-entertainment-style footage of the massed flies. Robin was mentioned earlier in this book, as it was he who insisted on splitting Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ into two parts when he produced Top of the Pops because he thought it too long for television. Perhaps Nash was being punished by the ghost of Freddie Mercury, now an actual lord of the flies with power over insect life, by being made to film his unruly subjects.

  For the fly sketches it was difficult for Robin, even with many years of experience filming Pan’s People and Legs & Co., to get what we television professionals call ‘singles’, which are shots of performers in isolation from their fellow actors. The flies had proven resistant to direction, and many of them had died and were just lying in a heap. To this day I remember Robin standing in the gallery and tearing his hair out in rage as he bellowed to the camera operators on the studio floor, ‘No, on his face! On the fly’s face!!’

  TV’s Harry Hill takes up the tale:

  I too remember Robin shouting ‘No! On the fly’s face!’ And also, one of the first things I ever saw at the Edinburgh Fringe festival was Simon Munnery at the Fringe Club cutting a worm in half and I remember being quite shocked by it. I think he was booed off. That same night I saw one of my future managers heckling an Asian woman in a wheelchair by shouting ‘Sad fuck!’ It was the year of Newman and Baddiel. All the flies are dead now.

  Warming to his insect theme, Harry continues:

  I recently resurrected the fly thing and did insect EastEnders on TV Burp, my multi-award-winning ITV show. It was a proud moment – an all-insect-acted sketch on ITV prime time. Oh my! If you’d told me that I would be doing that thirty years ago when I originally thought of insect-acted sketches I would have collapsed in a big old heap of laughter.

  Dear readers, despite it mentioning Hemingway and describing the execution of a worm, this footnote has been the most showbiz section of this book so far. I bet you liked it.

  The pending Pestival performance aside, I’d already agreed not to do a new standup show for the summer of 2006, intending to leave the field fallow for a year, hoping to escape an inevitable critical backlash after two well-reviewed sets. And Roland Keating’s promise of a small BBC fee would create a degree of what we now know as quantitative easing, so I threw myself into some theatre projects: a workshop of something about William Blake I was toying with for the National Theatre Studio, featuring Johnny Vegas and the folk-singer Eliza Carthy, and directing a revival of Talk Radio by Eric Bogosian, an American performance artist and comic I used to listen to on the Peel show as a teenager, with Phil Nicol for Underbelly in Edinburgh. But on Friday 7 April 2006, in a pub across the road from the National Theatre rehearsal studios, my manager told me the BBC had now withdrawn their offer of even a pilot.

  A few weeks later, I went in to see my manager for the official line on the withdrawal of the BBC offer. I sat opposite him in his office, and he sat behind a computer, reading out a letter from the head of comedy, Lucy Lumsden, which explained that the work I had done on the proposed show no longer fitted with the BBC executives’ ‘original vision of the programme’. The cancellation blew a minor hole in my finances, knocked my faith in the trustworthiness of TV executives and, more pressingly, left me obliged to do my insect act at Pestival without anyone to foot the bill for the insect costume.*

  *In the end, I just did Pestival as me, talking about insects, but pretended I did it in the insect gear when I came to retell the story in the subsequent standup show, 41st Best StandUp Ever. A transcript of this is presented here as Appendix VI.

  That summer, in Edinburgh, I realised what the 2007 standup show could be about. I wanted to explore the bureaucratic process by which a firm offer of a TV series, with no pilot necessary, could eventually be withdrawn, without any real explanation. Even though the actual story was very specifically about television, there were universally applicable themes, such as the Kafkaesque way our progress in life is impeded or aided by official decisions made for apparently random reasons by pen-pushers we never even meet, that anyone could relate to. I wanted to call it ‘The Decommissioning Process’, and use my decommissioning letter as a starting point for the story. I saw my manager sitting on a bench in the Pleasance Courtyard with Paul Schlesinger, the head of BBC Radio Comedy. I asked my manager if it would be possible to see a copy of Lucy Lumsden’s email cancelling my pilot. He said I couldn’t, because I would probably do a show about it.

  Notwithstanding the truth of his observation, I was shocked to find that I began to wonder if the email ever existed at all. By which I don’t mean that I think the email did not exist. I think it probably did. What shocked me was that I was in a state of such low confidence in the entire infrastructure of the comedy business that it was possible for me to imagine my manager fabricating the contents of a non-existent email for some unknowable purpose. Again, I am not saying he did this. But I sat opposite him when he read it out, and never thought to jump over his desk and look at the computer screen, as that would have been the behaviour of a madman. I realised, in my ongoing state of general paranoia and distrust, I had reached a stage where I was prepared to believe the people who worked for me were reading out emails that didn’t even exist. Even though the email and its contents probably were real, the fact that I entertained the possibility that they weren’t meant that in my delusional mind, I had reached a position of total breakdown in trust.*

  * There were other factors leading up to this. The advertising for the desperate live tour of the opera in 2006, and for the show’s final London dates, had copy along the lines of ‘Can you handle this shocking show?’ and ‘Come and see what all the outrage is about,’ which we had agreed it wouldn’t have; a documentary about the blasphemy laws entitled New Puritans, which I made for a company my manager co-owned, was retitled Stewart Lee Says What’s So Bad About Blasphemy? before broadcast without anyone consulting me, leading to predictably negative comments in the press; and promises to sound out legitimate record-label interest for an audio release of StandUp Comedian, which I thought would help build an audience if properly distributed to reviewers, came to nothing. Cumulatively, this sort of stuff makes you paranoid, especially if you know 65,000 people are actively trying to have your work banned.

  At the start of the nineties, being with my management had seemed like the alternative. They represented Jerry Sadowitz and Simon Munnery and Newman and Baddiel, who, whatever detractors might tell you, at the time were in the process of forging a new vocabulary for standup in Br
itain. And when the management took on Frank Skinner in 1991, they brought a unique working-class voice into an otherwise largely middle-class comedy community that paid lip service to the idea of social equity, but could sometimes be quite uncomfortable with the reality of what that might mean. And they operated out of one room just off Charing Cross Road and the Christmas parties were in the bar downstairs. The first year I was with them, the little manager gave me Nick Cave’s Kicking Against the Pricks LP for Christmas, and the handful of acts, the two managers and a nice woman who’d been taken on to answer the phone, whom I later lived with, all got drunk together and then went home. Ten years later, the Christmas party was in a club in Fulham, we all got miniature tellies or some other shit, and there were dwarves, yes dwarves, dressed as Christmas elves in green tights and hats with bells on handing out canapés to fat executives and skimpily clad media women. I asked one of the dwarves if he liked being a Christmas elf. He said he thought of himself as a ‘seasonal worker’. I never went to my own management’s Christmas party ever again. When I saw Ted Chippington opening for The Fall in 1984 and decided to be an Alternative Comedian, at no point did I envisage that decision might one day implicate me in being handed a vol-au-vent by a Christmas dwarf, whose probably dismal fee I had partially subsidised. The unknowable email was the last straw, but I’m surprised I survived as long as I did.

  So I wrote nice, and genuinely heartfelt, letters to all the people who had looked after me at my management over nearly two decades, recalling all the good times, and quit, for the vaguest reasons I could think of. And there were good times, despite the dwarves and the debt and the disillusionment. My management had pulled off some spectacular moves over the past seventeen years. They had hospitalised me when I was sick, and even housed me when I was homeless, and it was sometimes a heady experience to be in their orbit when their daring schemes bore fruit. One day in particular stands out, but it didn’t involve business or bullshit or brinkmanship. In the summer of 1991, my manager had accompanied me to St Andrews, where I had a show with Frank Skinner, Jim Tavare and Richard Thomas’s double act, Miles and Milner. His father had been a famous scientist, and as we walked along the beach in the sun, he picked up various specimens and explained the biological complexities of the little shellfish stranded on the sand. But that was a long time ago now.

  On my arrival home from Edinburgh, I tore up any documentation relating to Jerry Springer: The Opera, which was represented as a ‘property’ by my management, who also produced it, and which I was entitled to ‘further exploit’. (Such ugly language!) In the event of it ever turning a profit, I did not want to be tempted to engage in a costly legal battle to clarify my position regarding any rights I might have over the work. Instead, I prepared to sit out the six-month period during which it was legally advisable for me to remain unrepresented. I expected to be sued, or at least shouted at, or threatened with legal action and a gagging order like other former deserters, but nothing happened. Harry Hill took me out for a farewell drink, where he and many of the acts I’d known for years who were still represented by the company sat around as another prop in their collective act of faith fell away. Somebody was complaining about how the management had fucked up booking one of his regular corporate gigs for him. The fee he had lost was more than I would hope to earn in a year.*

  * Six months later I was in Nottingham, doing a benefit to raise funds for Daryl Martin, an enterprising local promoter whom all comedians feel duty-bound to come together and help whenever possible. I went out for a curry afterwards with Daniel Kitson and Sean Lock. Kitson managed to escape the Death Star Light Ent tractor beam of the Perrier Award he inadvertently won in 2001 by leaving his management, doing all his own admin through his own company and systematically carving out the cleverest and coolest audience in comedy, without ever doing interviews or television appearances of any kind. I asked him if he would consider being my manager, as my future plans consisted of just trying to copy his business practices anyway. He declined. Sean Lock, listening in mounting disbelief as he nibbled his naan, became furious with both of us, describing us as ‘two idiots wasting their time’. But I think he was irked anyway because I kept going on about his vaginashaped-shit routine from 1990 all night, and asking him when he was going to do it again.

  On the train home from Edinburgh, I had been called on my mobile by a radio producer called Alison Vernon Smith, who ran an independent company from a desk in an alcove in her Brighton bungalow. She had been negotiating for some years to get Radio 4 to stump up for the two of us to fly to New Mexico and make two half-hour documentaries about the sacred clowns of the pueblos, which had been an ambition of mine since I first read about them in Howard Jacobson’s book Seriously Funny in 1997. Finally, everything was in place, and we were due to go to Taos later that month, me speaking and Alison recording on a little portable unit. But with audible unhappiness, Alison explained that we would now not be able to go. The plug was to be pulled by her superiors as my management were insisting I flew business class, a cost equal to half the tiny budget of the programme.

  There was a showbiz legend that my manager used to ring a bell and make everyone in his office stand up and applaud whenever he made a TV or radio producer cry on the phone. Of course, it was not true. But it was with some relief that I was able to tell this particular distressed producer, one of many over the years, that the resignation letters were already in the post. We’d both fly economy, for God’s sake, and I’d get to do the job of a lifetime. My nineties comedy rock-and-roll management were standing between me and the shaman clowns. Was some unseen hand organising events for maximum dramatic effect? If this were a novel, this would be exactly the sort of contrived symbolic incident a good editor would delete. But it was real. In the end, seeing the sacred clowns of the Tewa people at work was to renew my faith in the point of comedy itself, just when it was in danger of being buried by the brutal business practices surrounding it. Making the radio documentary, and getting my thoughts on the Pueblo clowns in order for a Guardian article, filleted below, helped me enormously as I looked around for reasons to go on.

  As planned, Alison and I attended the St Geronimo feast-day celebrations at Taos Pueblo, New Mexico, one of the few events where outsiders get to see the sacred clowns perform. For a long time I had fondly imagined that the clowns of the Pueblo Indians, who take over the village for the afternoon on the second day of the festival, might be a key to understanding, on some essential level, what comedy is and what it is for. In 2000, I had stayed on the Hopi reservation in Arizona and seen the pueblos and plazas where their clowns would have performed, while researching a novel set in the region. Writing the book was side-lined for two years by a fascination with the Pueblo clowns, part holy men, part fools.

  The Hopi clown’s function was to manufacture inappropriate behaviour. The clowns would spend months studying the social tensions of their pueblo before, on special feast days, exploding them with carefully considered transgressive acts – simulated sexual assaults, absurd interruptions to sacred ceremonials, parodies of their oppressors’ Christian services, incoherent reinterpretations of the life of Christ, and obscene scatological acts. The American army officer John G. Bourke’s 1881 pamphlet The Urine Dance of the Zuni Indians of New Mexico was one of many texts that led to the invading powers’ active suppression of the pagan comedians of the pueblos, driving the clowns literally underground, into kivas, the sacred ceremonial chambers used by the Pueblo clowns and other secret societies of the community. In those close-knit communities, perched on the high mesas, the Pueblo clowns pushed at the limits of socially acceptable behaviour and showed the people, for better or worse, what lay beyond. Could comedy act as both a social barometer and a social pressure valve? Was there a purpose in it?

  The drama-student recreation of the medieval fools’ day I’d seen five years previously near Béziers in Languedoc was a construct, but the performance Alison and I were about to see was the real thing, and research suggest
ed the Pueblo clowns seemed to have a more pronounced philosophical dimension. Just after lunch, ten figures appeared, silhouetted against the blue sky on the roof of a stack of brown adobe buildings. They were naked but for loincloths, their bodies painted in rings of concentric black and white stripes, their hair decorated with jagged stalks of corn. They screamed and bellowed. Children ran away, afraid. After a while, the clowns made their way down into the plaza, where they spent the next three hours running between the stalls and houses, intimidating and entertaining, overturning every social norm at hand and reshaping the rules of Pueblo life. Babies were snatched from their parents and thrown into the river for clown baptisms. Food was stolen from stallholders and redistributed. We were shouted at, shoved and shocked. Our drinks were flung on the floor.

  We followed the clowns into the chief ’s house, where an absurd tourist-type Indian dance was performed at the dinner table for the benefit of his white guests. Back outside, white men were forced to face off in mock cowboy gun-fights, and white teenage girls were forcibly press-ganged into ungainly Britney Spears dance routines. Beautiful Pueblo women were mocked and made to wear different-sized shoes, so they struggled and stumbled as they walked. Handsome young men were clad in dresses and forced to skip. Elderly women were gracefully wooed or crudely propositioned. And when confronted with someone in a wheelchair or a mentally handicapped onlooker, the clowns would fall before them on their knees in worship.