by Stewart Lee
And that story of Robert the Bruce and the spider always reminds me of the story of Robert the Bruce and the head louse, I don’t know if you know it. Robert the Bruce was fighting a battle against the English, and he wasn’t getting on so well, so he ran away and he hid in a cave. And while he was there his eye fell on a little head louse, which was trying to jump from one Scottish soldier’s head to another. And Robert the Bruce watched the head louse jump once and it didn’t quite make it and it fell down. And then Robert the Bruce watched the head louse jump a second time and it didn’t quite make it and it fell down again. And then Robert the Bruce watched the head louse a third time, and the third time the head louse attempted the jump, it made it from one Scottish soldier’s head to the other. And Robert the Bruce thought about what he had seen, and he went back to the battle against the English, and remembering the example of the head louse (Pediculus humanus capitis), and when he got there he was able to infest the heads of the English soldiers, causing itching, leading to secondary infections and thus greatly demoralising the army of Edward II, and in that way he won the battle and became king of Scotland.
And that story of Robert the Bruce and the head louse always reminds me of the story of Robert the Bruce and the potato peach aphid, I don’t know if you remember it. Robert the Bruce was fighting a battle against the English, and he wasn’t getting on so well so he ran away and he hid in a cave. And while he was there his eye fell on a little potato peach aphid, which was trying to jump from a potato to a peach. And Robert the Bruce watched the potato peach aphid jump once and it didn’t quite make it and it fell down between the potato and the peach. And then Robert the Bruce watched the potato peach aphid jump a second time and it didn’t quite make it and it fell down again between the potato and the peach. And then Robert the Bruce watched the potato peach aphid a third time, and the third time the potato peach aphid attempted the jump, it made it from the potato to the peach. And Robert the Bruce thought about what he had seen, and he went back to the battle against the English, and remembering the example of the potato peach aphid (Myzus periscae), and when he got there he was able to live both upon the potato and peach reserves of the English army, robbing them initially of their staple food, the potato, and then subsequently of their peach, one of life’s little luxuries which if denied to serving men can make them turn on their overlords, and in that way, Robert the Bruce was able to win the battle and gain the Scottish crown.*
The story of Robert the Bruce and the potato peach aphid there, specially adapted for this evening’s show, and being broadcast by Resonance FM all around the world, all around the world, and we can only hope that, statistically, there is someone, someone out there somewhere in the world who is now thinking, ‘Yes, I always wanted to hear something like that.’
* Then I improvised the following end …
VII: ‘I’ll Only Go If You Throw Glass’
In 2002, I was invited to submit a 5,000-word piece for a book of writing by comedians called Sit Down Comedy. I sent them the following poem, inspired by my time as Jerry Sadowitz’s support act and as a teenage punter in the eighties observing the dying days of the first wave of post-punk standup in Britain. The characters of the two comedians in it, though, are fictional composites. The publishers said they liked it but felt they couldn’t publish a poem as it would put potential buyers off. I knocked out all the commas, didn’t change a word, and resubmitted it as prose, and they ran it. At the time of writing, it has been performed live twice, once at a Lewisham Library literary event, and once at Apples and Snakes Spoken Word Night at Battersea Arts Centre, where it was poorly received.
‘I’LL ONLY GO IF YOU THROW GLASS’
They say you play Bangor University
Student Union twice in your career.
I’ll be there in an hour, for the second time.
I had run out of money.
There was nothing on the horizon,
At least nothing for me, nothing I could call mine.
Respective heads of TV comedy dept’s had played musical chairs again.
The ones that liked me missed their seats, and sighed,
And waited for sackings or suicides.
I grew pallid in Stoke Newington
And bled into the toilet bowl.
After six months lost in the NHS system,
I cashed my last cheque for a consultation
With a showbiz physician.
He prodded my liver and banned me from drinking.
So here was I, sober and dry,
Returning to the standup circuit to die,
Scrabbling for loose change, and at my age.
But I had a trade, see, something to fall back on,
Like a plumber or an electrician,
And I was going again, just a little ashamed,
To Bangor University Student Union.
Bangor was the worst standup gig
On the National Comedy Network.
It took pride in its hostility, and so,
Like the entire city of Glasgow,
Was regarded with suspicion.
‘If you don’t do the required time’,
Explained the Entertainments Officer,
Complicit in the scheme,
‘Your fee will be reduced according
To how short your set has been.’
Yes, last time I was in Bangor
Teenage drunks threw plastic glasses.
Experiences like this had crushed
My last faith in the masses.
‘I’ll only go if you throw glass,’ I said,
Wittily, from the stage,
And security guards dodged the shards
To enter the melee.
It was a good line,
And it was funny,
But it wasn’t one of mine,
And he still docked my money.
‘I’ll only go if you throw glass’,
Was an old standard
From an old standup,
Malcolm Tracey.
And Malcolm Tracey was coming.
To Bangor.
With me.
Now he sits in the car un-speaking,
Reading pornography and smoking,
With Scott Walker quietly exploding
On his personal stereo.
He will not shut the window.
And it is starting to snow.
I don’t think you can begin to understand
What Malcy’s presence means to me,
At this strange stage in what I call
My so-called career.
I’ll try and explain.
Five hours earlier, at the top
Of a council block in Finchley,
I rang the bell and waited
To be met by Malcolm’s mother.
The door swung in and there she stood,
Pinch faced, small and shrewish,
An apron tied around her waist
And a rolling pin in hand,
As if assembled to express some absurd ideal
Of everything I’d feared.
‘Who are you and what do you want?’
She hissed through lipstick lips.
‘I’m Tim and I have come,’ I said,
‘To pick up Malcy, your only son.
I am going to Bangor to perform.
And he’s coming too as my support.’
‘You don’t look old enough,’ she said,
And took my hand and stroked my hair.
And studying my sick-thin face,
She laughed and led me in.
From the kitchen she called out,
‘It’s a young man called Tim.’
Malcy grunted from a box room,
A fifty-year-old teenage boy.
I looked over my shoulder
And glimpsed him through a door,
Going about his business,
Crouched upon the floor.
A black suit shape beside the bed,
Scratching at his balding head,
/>
He stuffed debris into a bag
And searched for cigarettes.
Malcy’s mother sat me down
And chattered as she worked.
Something about tranquillisers
And did I want some grub?
Not that Service Station muck,
But something she would rustle up.
We came to an agreement 356
And she made me a packed lunch.
She boxed it up in Tupperware
And sat it next to Malcy’s fare,
Identical in all respects,
A cake, an apple and some crisps.
I drank my tea and looked around.
It had come to this.
Going back to the Bangor
For one hundred and fifty quid.
Thirty-five and finished,
And not allowed to drink.
But I would be accompanied
By my one consolation.
Malcolm Tracey, formerly known
As Mal Co-ordinated.
Malcy was the missing link
Between the perfume and the stink.
Between cheap Channel 5 standup filler,
Between a million sneering panel shows,
Between the alleged death of The Spirit of the Fringe,
Between the stage of the Hackney Empire
And the screen of the Empire Leicester Square,
Between squatted nineteen-seventies gigs in Stepney
And the comedy colonisation of the provinces,
Between the transfiguration of the mainstream,
Between a new generation of prancing nonces,
Between all that and more,
Back to the first time anybody chalked upon a board
The noble phrase,
That presaged change,
And turned the ripple to a wave,
The secret signal to the brave,
‘Alternative Cabaret’.
No one knew how Malcy had begun,
Where he had sprung from and how he had grown.
Nor where he had gone to for most of the nineties,
When he appeared to disown his progeny,
And tied his talent in a sack and drowned it in the sea.
The history, such as it was, was contradictory.
Lisa Appignanesi’s book on Cabaret
Included a photo of him in the final chapter.
He was wild-haired in a leotard and snarling like a panther,
At a venue called the Earth Exchange that the comedy circuit left to rot
Long before my first try-out spot.
A pamphlet I bought at Leicester Art Gallery
Tied Malcy in to 70s Arts Lab anarchy.
Victoria Wood once mentioned him
When asked who had inspired her to begin.
A journalist called John Connor
Wrote a book on the Fringe in Edinburgh.
But he had an ideological axe to grind,
And Malcy’s work got left behind.
Someone told me it was Malcy who
First coined the term ‘Alternative Cabaret’.
Working in South Devon in 1972,
He used it to advertise a Punch & Judy show.
From inside a stripy tent he increased the violence content,
And threw in an act of anal sex between wooden puppets.
In the beer garden of a plush hotel
Malcy found he’d caused offence,
And was compelled to grab his effigies
And flee from the South-West.
Then there were the years of petty crime and drugs,
The years spent dancing naked in Soho in gay clubs,
And rumours of unsavoury acts and criminal convictions,
And of time spent in prison for unspecified actions.
On release Malcy played folk clubs and festivals
Until the Alternative Comedy scene coalesced.
He never had an act as such, it seemed,
But still he stormed the gigs
With only a harmonica, a pack of cards,
A dirty pair of Y-fronts, and a bag of different wigs.
Somehow he could usually hold a crowd.
You could almost hear them thinking aloud,
‘Can this be it? It’s fucking shit.’
They sat bewildered and entranced,
Waiting for Mal, as if by chance,
To achieve something recognisable,
Something tangible and definable.
But he never did.
A harmonica solo, a poem,
A song and then a joke.
A magic trick, a puppet show,
And then a puff of smoke.
A purple wig, an inflatable pig,
A visceral torrent of abuse,
A shambling dance in a tight red suit.
And then the climax, the coup de grâce.
Malcy turned round and dropped his pants.
I first saw him in ’84,
At a club in Birmingham supporting The Fall.
The disgruntled fans showed their disdain
For Malcy’s refusal to entertain.
Leaning drunk upon the mike stand
With a beer bottle in each hand,
He told the same joke again and again,
Until they tried to shift him with polystyrene
Cups and empty cans.
Acknowledging defeat he said,
‘I’ll only go if you throw glass,’
The immortal line, that would one day be mine.
But a shoe connected with his head,
And he died upon his arse.
The performance was recorded and released as a seven-inch single.
I knew every shout and jeer and each embarrassed giggle.
But I did not know what I had seen.
Had Malcy failed, or did he succeed?
All I knew was that somewhere,
Beyond the suburbs where I went to school,
It seemed there were heroic deeds,
Irrational acts and holy fools.
I next saw Malcy in Edinburgh
In 1987,
Falling drunk down the Fringe club stairs
At a quarter past eleven,
Raising his glass and cursing heaven,
Dressed as Vladimir Lenin.
And two years later at the Glastonbury Festival,
Punching an inflatable woman in the face
At the other end of the cabaret tent.
My girlfriend called it a disgrace.
She had a point I must confess.
Three months later, I moved to London.
My fledgling career had begun.
I won five hundred pounds
In a new acts competition,
Got signed up to an agency
With a handshake and no conditions.
They took me to the top floor
Of a tiny West End office
And pointed out across the land,
Beyond the upstairs rooms of pubs,
At the uncharted territories
Of student union premises
That they promised would collapse
And fall into our waiting laps.
And soon I was out on the road,
Only twenty-one years old,
And support act to none other
Than Mal Co-ordinated.
Or, as he was currently billed,
Malcolm Tracey,
formerly Mal Co-ordinated.
Times had changed,
for the better in that respect at least.
Malcy didn’t drive. So I chauffeured
Him hundreds of miles
Between bizarrely scheduled dates.
Aberdeen to Derby in a day.
Malcy was paid a thousand pounds a show,
Of which he gave me sixty.
Some days he was convivial,
Other days withdrawn.
Some days he was charming,
Other days a bore.
Once in Leeds, or Bra
dford,
He made me give him thirty pounds.
I had run into an ex-girlfriend
And slept at her house.
Malcy had booked me a hotel room
And felt I should pay.
I couldn’t tell if he was joking.
But he kept my money anyway.
Each night, I did my fifteen minutes
Then watched him work,
Knocking back the drinks rider,
Smoking in the dark.
Nearly two decades since he first
Wrote ‘Alternative Cabaret’,
Malcy’s act, such as it was,
Had reached its apogee.
After ten minutes’ faff with harmonicas
And cards and wigs and coats,
Malcy held up a massive picture
Of four small brown stoats.
Then he began an hour’s speculation
On their interconnected relationships,
Occasionally gesturing at individual stoats
With a pointed wooden stick.
Sometimes it worked,
And the students were spellbound.
But Malcy seemed to be seeing
How he could confound
Expectations, amusing himself
At the punters’ expense,
As if holding them in contempt.
And in the closing ten minutes,
When the space had thinned
And the crowd was sparse,
Malcy could always win them back
By dropping his trousers
And showing his arse.
But even this traditional display,
With which he had all but made his name,
Seemed to be dispatched in a perfunctory way.
In short, Malcy’s heart wasn’t in it.
As we travelled the country, it became clear to me
Malcy wasn’t that concerned about his comedy career.
It was of secondary importance to a social network he maintained,
Which indulged his other interests up and down the land.
In Aberdeen a small fat man met Malcy after the show,
And they retired to practise card tricks in a hotel room,
Sharing junk food from the garage and a can of Irn Bru,
Lamenting Malcy’s conflict with the Magic Circle crew.
In Nottingham he was ensnared
By the executive committee
Of the Robert Silverberg Appreciation Society,
For whose newsletter Malcy had appraised
The overrated science-fiction writer.
In Sheffield, Malcy was the sometime beau
Of a seventeen-stone widow,
Who had needs that only he could satisfy,