March of the Lemmings Read online

  Just over twelve months ago, I declined a role in a promising new topical satire TV show, which, though green-lit now, still hasn’t made it to our screens. By the time it airs, the government under which it was conceived will have been replaced at least twice. If the news roller-coaster ride of the past twelve months were a real roller-coaster ride, it would long since have been closed down. People like excitement, but no one wants to emerge from every brief perusal of a daily newspaper covered in spilt Diet Coke and the vomit of other people’s children, while a showman makes off with all the change that fell out of their pockets.

  Unfortunately i have seen your show and was the loser, luckily i was given the tickets and was able to escape. Genghis223

  The current political climate calls for Charlie Brooker, not Stewart Lee. Mr Daydream

  There could have been a good article here, with some incisive and valid points. Unfortunately this is a piece of unilluminating shit. Gene Marcus

  I wonder how Mr Lee feels performing as a stand-in stand-up sit-down writer to Frankie Boyle? I don’t know why Mr Boyle is no longer writing for the Guardian but I suspect he wrote something that offended their ‘liberal’ sensibilities and so Mr Lee was brought in off the subs bench to write stuff that will be ‘not too offensive’ while giving off a reek of his ‘intellect’. Mr Lee is extremely clever, talented in many areas, very, very, successful but just not funny most of the time. Minotaur

  1 In the end, despite the promise of a payment from Channel 4 for the finished pilot script, I had to abandon this project. Boris Johnson no longer seemed charming enough to be a plausible anti-hero, and the full horror of the extent of Brexit’s failure overtook the project. I’d had a high blood pressure diagnosis in the week of the Brexit vote and was worried I’d have to quit live work, so it was reassuring to know I was good enough to get a comedy drama commission. Three years and 250 shows later, I’m still alive and well enough to start writing the next tour, so I don’t need to cash that goodwill in yet.

  2 I think that via the conduit of B-movies, this is another golem comparison. V. poor.

  3 An orangutan threw its excrement into my gran’s hair from its moated island in Dudley Zoo in 1972, having been wound up by hundreds of horrible kids making monkey noises at it all day, the cruelty encouraged by their foul parents. My mum cleaned it out and told my gran it was just mud, but later on that night she told me it was orangutan excrement after all, but she didn’t want her old mother to know that, and I wasn’t to tell her. I hope my kids are as kind to me when I am old and covered in the filth of a simian.

  4 Earlier that month the Conservative MP for Newton Abbot, Anne Marie Morris, the founder of the Teignbridge Business Buddies scheme, was suspended for using the phrase ‘nigger in the woodpile’ to describe a no-deal Brexit, for which she subsequently apologised unreservedly, raising a bar for ill-advised public pronouncements which it would take a talent like Liam Neeson to vault. In the interest of full disclosure, I should reveal that I played the butler, Tom Rogers, in our 1983 school production of a dramatisation of Agatha Christie’s novel Ten Little Niggers, in which one of the original members of Napalm Death, Daryl Fideski, played a fisherman called Fred Narracott. Usually now called And Then There Were None or Ten Little Indians, the play of Ten Little Niggers doesn’t appear to have been produced under the name Ten Little Niggers anywhere, apart from my old school, since 1959, though the last publication of the novel under that title was in 1977, only six years prior to our production. There were black and Asian kids in our school. Nobody on the staff gave this any thought, which seems appalling in retrospect. All the female parts were played by fourteen-year-old boys dressed up as women in tights and dresses and false breasts and make-up, all singing a rhyme about niggers. It was insane, transphobic and racist. It was sick karnival of hate. It was showbiz!

  Kim Jong-un’s happiness is just a weekend mini-break away

  10 September 2017

  At the beginning of the current decade I was often mistaken for the then North Korean dictator-in-waiting Kim Jong-un, which led to an embarrassing incident in a pet shop on Dalston High Road in February 2009. Needless to say, I was unable to convince the Polish lady behind the counter that I was merely looking for a canine companion for my elderly aunt and did not in fact regard labradoodle puppies as a ‘superfood’.1

  But it was worse for Kim himself, who once ended up accidentally and uncomfortably appearing in my place on a December 2006 edition of 8 Out of 10 Cats, alongside Sean Lock, Jason Manford, Liza Tarbuck and Nightcrawler from The X-Men. A comment he made about the production company, Endemol, was described during the recording by host Jimmy Carr as the single joke ‘least likely to make the final edit of the show in the programme’s history’.2 Needless to say, due to Kim’s poor performance I was not asked back.3

  Fans of unusual celebrity–dictator friendships with long memories will recall the physical comedian Norman Wisdom’s odd 1950s relationship with the totalitarian Albanian leader Enver Hoxha. In between mass executions of dissidents and incarcerations of anti-Communists, Hoxha even found time, in 1951, to accompany Wisdom and his family on a week’s holiday to the Isle of Wight amusement park Blackgang Chine.4

  Beside the English Channel, the curious pair cavorted between the open legs of a giant fibreglass smuggler and frolicked in a fairy glade, all the while crying out, ‘Mr Grimsdale! Mr Grimsdale!!’ and ‘Have you, Albanian peasant brothers, ever sought the reason for the poverty, misery, hunger and gloom which have been your lot for centuries?’5

  In a modern echo of Hoxha–Wisdom, the American basketball player Dennis Rodman sees himself as the unofficial peacebroker between the US and North Korea. Having befriended Kim in 2013, and with whom he claims to go horse-riding, ski, sing karaoke and generally hang out, Rodman claims, ‘I just want to try to straighten things out for everyone to get along together.’6

  Since Kim took power in North Korea in 2011, the stress of the top job has relieved his friendly round face of much of its puppy fat, whereas I have slid into a porcine middle-aged spread of repellent aspect, meaning Kim and I are now rarely confused with each other.

  That said, when one of my critically acclaimed stand-up specials from 2005 aired on Netflix in the US last year, I did notice a tweet from Dennis Rodman which read, ‘Yo! My bro Kim Jong-un on TV right now slaying the Scotch people at the Glasgow Stand! Tell it like it is! Braveheart was a fag!!’

  At the risk of sounding arrogant, I do feel the many occasions upon which I am still addressed as Chairman of the Workers’ Party of Korea, Chairman of the Central Military Commission, Chairman of the State Affairs Commission, Supreme Commander of the Korean People’s Army and Presidium Member of the Politburo Standing Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea by shocked North Korean expats have given me some insight into the dictator’s mindset. Needless to say, Trump’s approach to dealing with Kim Jong-un is entirely the wrong-un.

  I understand Kim, certainly more than Donald Trump, and perhaps even more than his hoop-bothering friend Dennis Rodman, who has all scribbles all on him. I am the most consistently critically acclaimed male British stand-up comedian of the century, while Kim is the most dictatorial dictator in the world today, and let me tell you, like little Kim, I know that it is lonely at the top.

  I wonder if, like Kim, many of my life’s achievements (winning six Chortle Awards and an edition of Celebrity Mastermind7 in my case, developing a nuclear arsenal in his) are simply attempts to gain the attention of an absent father figure. Instead of rattling his atomic sabre and sticking his flaccid orange penis into the heart of the wasps’ nest of south-east Asian geopolitics, Trump could choose to be that father. What Kim needs is love from a big daddy, and Trump could be that big daddy, bear-hugging and play-wrestling us out of the impending apocalypse.

  Donald Trump sees the world as a set of business deals. Business is not moral. It is about results. Trump is alleged to have done alleged financial or publicity deals with people allegedly worse t
han Kim – dodgy Russian oligarchs, Italian-American mafia families and Michael Gove. All Kim wants is Trump’s attention, so why can’t Trump, in the interest of global security, simply invite Kim to the US for the holiday of a lifetime?

  Kim and Trump in Long Beach, Washington, marvelling at the world’s largest chopsticks, laughing as they act out the futile attempts of normal-sized men to use them; Kim and Trump in Topeka, Kansas, at the Evel Knievel Museum, bonding as they hold hands in silent, humble admiration; Kim and Trump in San Luis Obispo, California, comparing notes at the Madonna Inn’s famous waterfall urinal, laughing as their twin torrents cross streams, Ghostbusters-style, in the soft subterranean lighting. You cannot make nuclear threats against a man whom you have urinated alongside in the beautiful waterfall urinal of the Madonna Inn, San Luis Obispo, California.8

  My mentor, the former comedian and failed recluse Roger Mann, recently befriended a goat near his Pyrenean hermitage in an experimental attempt to understand the nature of relationships.9 Were Trump to engage paternally with Kim, he himself may learn something, something that might cure the emptiness inside him that threatens to suck all human history into it like a black hole made of nameless need. For Trump, like Kim, is also lonely.

  You can own New York, but you can’t make it love you; you can execute hundreds of North Koreans, but you can’t make North Korea love you. To be feared is not the same as to be respected. A father whose children obey him only through fear is a failed father. When we think of fathers, they paint Airfix models with us and wrestle in the summer meadow of memory. They do not threaten us with warheads.

  Kim Jong-un pleads to be disciplined. Donald Trump is desperate for love. If diplomatic channels could be opened to enable the gaping maws of these two desperate needs to meet, they would engulf each other with a flood of unrequited love, and we would all sleep easy again.

  Kim is a mass murderer whose state run concentration camps trade in child sex slaves and whose government have eliminated all forms of free expression. This jokey equivalence between him and Trump is an indirect apology for Kim’s fascist regime. Making out that they are both as bad as each other shows a remarkable ignorance about what is happening in the North and the danger Kim represents. Midland

  North Korea is in North-East Asia, Stew! Okayama Man

  When is Frankie Boyle coming back? Wintermute99

  ‘The North Korean leader needs discipline; Donald Trump needs love.’ Please, tell us the author is kidding us? Comic book psychoanalysis. Fred Budtz

  So your view of the ethnic world is that all Poles think all Koreans eat dogs. How very modern. Sisterraysays

  1 My father, who at home mainly ate pork scratchings, frogs’ legs and Maltesers, would come home from visits to the Far East boasting about the foods he had consumed there. He claimed to have eaten dogs, lizards, handfuls of fried beetles hot off street-market woks and, incredibly, monkeys’ brains direct from the animals’ skulls with a spoon. In this last instance I suspect he may have been confusing his own life with that of Indiana Jones. The last time I saw him, all he would eat was Indian food and digestives. Is it any wonder I struggle with my diet?

  2 This is true. I think Jimmy was genuinely trying to help me, and the show, out of a hole when he said it.

  3 Appearing on 8 Out of 10 Cats in the autumn of 2006 was probably one of my worst, and most misjudged, professional experiences. I was pretty broke and needed the £600 fee, and even though I had never seen the show, I thought, ‘How hard can it be?’ I assumed that you just sat on the panel and riffed in a supportive atmosphere, but it gradually dawned on me at the studio in the afternoon that the other panellists were working all day on prepared material with their own paid writers. Within moments of the show starting I realised it absolutely wasn’t going to work for me. I gritted my teeth, got my head down and waited for it to end. In his autobiography, They Called Me the Grocer and I Wore It Like a Hat, the comedian Lee Mack disparages comics who can’t ‘cut the mustard’ on panel shows, and it is true that their regulars develop special skills to survive them. But imagine if they had used that time instead to do something of value or worth?

  4 Britain’s oldest, and perhaps most bizarre, amusement park, as featured in the psycho-geographic travel book Bollocks to Alton Towers, by Robin Halstead, Jason Hazeley, Alex Morris and Joel Morris, which is a far more thoughtful work than the stupid cover of its paperback edition would suggest. Seek out the hardback on eBay.

  5 Hoxha was a huge fan of Norman Wisdom, who became an unlikely star in post-war Albania, where, like the Czech mole, he was viewed as a symbol of the ordinary worker lost in the faceless machine of society. I held a door open for Wisdom in Liverpool in 1991. As a five-year-old, off sick from school and watching daytime television at my gran’s, I was very taken with the unnamed band that appeared in the 1969 comedy What’s Good for the Goose, in which Wisdom goes on a road trip with some young hippy chicks. Skiving off school in the ’70s you would see the weirdest films on afternoon television, so strange that you would think you had imagined them. I have a memory of seeing a Spanish film about a man getting trapped in a phone box and then being taken to a cave full of dead men in phone boxes, and it turns out it was real (La Cabina, Antonio Mercero, 1972). Years later, after I had become a Pretty Things fan and seen them live, I found out that the band in Wisdom’s psychedelic sex comedy was The Pretty Things, appearing under their soundtrack pseudonym of The Electric Banana. The German version of What’s Good for the Goose is twenty-seven minutes shorter than the British original, but the sex scenes in it are considerably longer and more explicit, with topless shots inserted into them. Is it any wonder we voted to leave the EU?

  6 Rodman really said this, and is genuinely Kim’s friend.

  7 I answered questions on the improviser guitarist Derek Bailey.

  8 I used this urinal alongside the writer and performance artist Ben Moor and the actor Kevin Eldon in September 1995, soon after we visited Pea Soup Andersen’s Inn. We are all still friends today.

  9 It’s perhaps worth pointing out that since the time of writing, Roger has even given up on the goats.

  My futile attempt to sell satire to the Daily Mail

  26 November 2017

  Pasting together doctored drawings of the Daily Mail’s long-running cartoon dog, Fred Basset, I’m creating the mother of all monetisable Christmas cash-in books.1

  In the first of a typical three-frame strip, Fred defecates insolently on a pavement. Then Fred’s owner scoops up the excrement before – and this is the twist – popping it through the letterbox of an immigrant family and saying, ‘Merry Winterval, my coloured friends! You’re in England now!!’ It’s hilarious, no?2

  Was it possible to work the lucrative adult Ladybird book market, using a similar level of ironic self-awareness of the Daily Mail brand, across a range of self-parodying Daily Mail products, without necessarily undermining the integrity of the loathing-ridden opinion sluice itself?3 After all, Lego’s funny children’s Batman, Adam West’s liberal gay Batman and Christian Bale’s fascist asthmatic Batman all coexist commercially. And Paperchase were already interested in an exclusive stockist deal.

  But now the whole thing is ruined! And all thanks to that Political Correctness Gone Mad brigade that they have now!!

  As a proud member of the ‘metropolitan liberal elite’™, I would normally have been delighted that a tiny minority of ‘left-wing bullies’© had forced the high-street card shop Paperchase to dump an advertising deal with the Daily Mail, fearing the negative association of Paperchase’s wholesome family-card retail values with the Mail’s conduit of poisonous hate, sudoku and Sarah Vine.4

  Usually, I am the sort of person who thinks that anyone who has ever worked for the Daily Mail is worse than Adolf Hitler, even the temps and the tea lady.5 And I’m not alone. So disgusted are youth voters by the repellent newspaper, it’s now clear that the Daily Mail’s increasingly hysterical attacks on Jeremy Corbyn, the coddled egg of British politic
s,6 may even have helped secure his triumphant loss in the last general election.

  I find that a damning Daily Mail review can attract hundreds of thousands of paying punters, precisely because they assume that anything hated by the hated Daily Mail must be worth seeing, while anything it likes must be awful.

  My current tour poster proudly boasts the following Daily Mail quote from the 2001 Bad Sex Award-winning novelist and Daily Mail columnist Christopher Hart: ‘Clever-clever, oh-so-fashionable and deeply unfunny “anti-populist” comedian Stewart Lee is an exceptionally well-trained lapdog of the Brexit-hating establishment.’7

  Ker-ching!!!! Thanks, Christopher! The ticket-buying public’s hands are, as you might once have written, ‘moving away from my knee and heading north. Heading unnervingly and with a steely will towards the pole. And, like Sir Ranulph Fiennes … will not easily be discouraged’ (Rescue Me, Christopher Hart, 2001).8

  I understand, from a purely business point of view, Paperchase’s need to disassociate itself from the elderly and expiring racists that read the Daily Mail, to court instead the affections of the growing market of tomorrow’s mixed-race, polyamorous avocado-coveters. But on this occasion, I was on the verge of sealing a three-way creative partnership with both Paperchase and the Daily Mail that would have made me millions.9

  Sitting across the desk from the editor, Paul Dacre, last week, I gave him my pitch. ‘The Daily Mail is already adept at working contradictory markets simultaneously,’ I flattered the hate magnate, as he sucked hard on his fourth Calippo of the morning. ‘The print edition pretends to despise the very ephebophiliac swimwear sleaze that the Daily Mail website thrives on, for example.

  ‘But imagine if, Paul baby, as well as profiteering from the hateful scaremongering that is your vile newspaper’s raison d’être, you could also empty the pockets of those who claim to despise your organ, by selling them irresistible satires of your own sickening values.’ I emptied my sample sack. Dacre’s two eyes exploded in hot greed. Greetings cards. Christmas cash-in books. Sex novelties. And all with an ironically arch Daily Mail flavour.