March of the Lemmings Read online

  If your country had been razed by the elective, arguably unnecessary, use of multiple nuclear weapons from a country that thinks of itself as a God, perhaps you would see the fictional radioactive God-named creature destroying your country as representing something more tangible than a clumsy ‘mother nature’ thing. As Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto said of Godzilla in Mothra II – Bora! Bora! Bora!, ‘I fear we have awoken a sleeping giant and filled him with a great and terrible resolve.’ Plantphotonics420

  Poppycock. Ferdinand8

  Typical public school socialist. Kontrol

  ‘Want stories like this in your inbox?’, it reads at the bottom of the article. What? Do I want more stories about giant three headed lizards fighting to the death with giant moths with X Ray eyes that also manage to describe Boris Johnson as an eye eating grub laying vile eggs in the EU membership debate? Are you kidding? Of course I do! Have you actually got any though? Tybo

  Stuart, you are a total arse using ‘pro-Europe’ for ‘pro-EU.’ It occurred to us last night that calling the EU ‘Europe’ is like calling NATO ‘the Atlantic ocean,’ or FIFA ‘Earth.’ Jean Noir

  That was three minutes I will never get back. Mustapha Mondeo

  To become an ‘edgy, funny comedian’ in Guardianista terms you have to say ‘Thatch was evil’ every couple of minutes in the Guardian or on Radio 4. This, apparently, is biting satire at its finest and is, hilariously, deemed to be ‘courageous’ and ‘anti-establishment’. The Guardian seems determined to identify and boost the careers of people striving to achieve the title of ‘the left’s Bernard Manning’. Campbellgoebells

  Stewart Lee – another smug, millionaire Marxist from the well heeled comedy establishment. Henry Clift

  This probably the most ridiculous article I have seen! Can’t the remainers come up with any sensible arguments about the issues? Jemima15

  You too? Underwear turned into dishcloth (by being cut in half)? Trouble is the dishcloth ones often end up back in my underwear drawer, so on a dark winters morning I frequently find myself trying to struggle into tatty half-sized briefs with no leg holes. Cloud9cuckoo

  1 From 1977 onwards, the Midlands television region had a slot called ‘The ATV Thursday Picture Show’, broadcasting innocuous movies from 4.30 p.m. to 6 p.m., after school. In my favourites, the giant monster epics of Japan’s Toho studios, skilled kabuki theatre practitioners in rubber lizard suits battled giant canvas moths and massive stucco lobsters in the beautiful ruins of miniature hand-crafted cityscapes. I was lucky enough to be able to recreate my childhood enthusiasm for the genre in a film item for series two of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, in which I, dressed in a half-Godzilla costume, attacked the physical theatre performer Rob Thirtle (Space Precinct, Brum, Philip Glass’s Satyagraha), who appeared as some kind of crustacean, with a shopping bag. These Japanese monster performances still move me more than any computer-generated artifice because I can see the human hand at work. I would rush home from Widney Junior School every Thursday, let myself in with the flowerpot latchkey and make toast, my mum still at work, ready for the highlight of the week. My favourite Japanese monster movie was Jun Fukuda’s 1967 effort Son of Godzilla, in which Godzilla fights giant web-shooting spiders to save his ugly turnip-faced crying son, Minilla. My own father wasn’t around much when I was young, and Godzilla taught me everything I know about parenting. You basically roar and stomp and everything works out in the end, as long as you love your kids and make sure that they know that. For God’s sake, make sure that they know that. And kill any lobster that threatens them. Burn it! Burn its face off!!

  2 This cat died in mysterious circumstances in 2017. We were all inconsolably distraught, to the point where friends and relatives must have worried that we had lost all sense of perspective. But for the first ten years of our marriage, my wife and I toured our stand-up acts relentlessly, trying to consolidate our appeal before it was too late, one of us away performing, the other at home parenting tiny children, in lonely rotation. And that cat was a constant, the family member you saw when you got in at 4 a.m. from Telford, waiting to greet you and welcome you home. He was a conduit that closed all four of us into a circle. How many substandard spaghetti westerns did I watch in the small hours, with the cat my only companion? How many late nights would I have spent drinking alone to kill the post-show adrenaline, like some sad alcoholic, unless that cat had been sitting up with me, making a legitimate social event of what would otherwise have been evidence of a gradual slide into a terrible addiction? ‘Have you caught any mice today?’ I would ask him. That cat saved our marriage, I suspect, and when he knew we would be OK, he sensed his work was done and took himself away. Anyone who doesn’t like cats must be dead inside.

  3 A few years ago I was with a group of improvised-music practitioners on a train to Bexhill-on-Sea, where we were due to interpret the works of John Cage, when the subject of the East German free-jazz drummer Günter ‘Baby’ Sommer came up. Don’t you wish you lived my life? Some of the group were convinced that because he seemed able to travel regularly from the Eastern Bloc to collaborate with free-jazz musicians in the West before the Wall came down, Baby must have been a Stasi agent, reporting back on the political persuasions of his co-workers. The conversation was speculative, free-flowing and fun, until the spouse of one of the younger musicians used his mobile phone to discover that yes, there was a suspicion that Günter was an undercover jazz drummer, and so the fun ended, another flight of fancy killed by modern technology. It is vagueness that makes the magic happen.

  4 There is no Japanese version of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, though much of my stand-up appears on YouTube with handmade Russian subtitles, and a Russian comedy fan has had a tattoo of one of my jokes, about the ’70s Liverpudlian comedian Tom O’Connor, done on his arm, despite none of my work, or that of Tom O’Connor, being available commercially in Russia. How did I get here?

  5 Last year, I organised a benefit to raise money for a memorial stone for William Blake, my favourite autodidact poet-artist, even though I suspect he would have been a Leave voter. I couldn’t attend the unveiling, which was lucky, as I was frightened of a lot of the people who were going to be there, but the William Blake Society gave me an impressive chunk of the leftover marble, inscribed with a gilded ‘B’ by the engraver, which I was able to pretend was a birthday present I had had specially made for my wife.

  I’m not saying Michael Gove is a bit of an animal but …

  19 June 2016

  The so-called EU referendum debate on so-called ITV (let us not dignify either by naming them) filled me and all my ABC1 liberal friends with despair. Oh! The humanity!! Drunk on Belgian wine, I watched the Barrier Reef of the Britain I know bleach to nothing in the twin glare of Brexit’s burning certainties and Julie Etchingham’s gleaming teeth.

  Leave had no arguments or facts, just pornographically arousing soundbites and lies they knew were lies, but which they calculated might stick to a wall in a depressed town somewhere, if flung with enough force, like compacted pellets of Priti Patel’s shit.

  Even Remain’s Amber Rudd, the Countess Bathory of Energy and Climate, seemed clever by comparison to Boris Johnson, who managed to make the word ‘expert’ a pejorative term. Nonetheless, it was bleakly obvious that the audience’s disillusion led them to favour the Leavers’ lies.

  I wondered how Leave could rationalise their blind stab in the dark and live with the untruths they had told. And my mind turned again to Michael Gove, who, to put their relationship in terms of Gove’s beloved Dennis Wheatley, is the supplicant Simon Aaron to Johnson’s satanic Mocata, their joint prize the mummified phallus of Conservative Party power. ‘Only they who love without desire shall have power granted them in their darkest hour!’

  As I have confessed before, in 1992 I was a gag writer on a doomed Channel 4 show, A Pig in a Poke. The experimental satire programme broke new ground by positioning its performers on balsa ladders in a smoke-filled Bat Cave, while they deliver
ed belligerent journalistic monologues to camera, the stylistic integrity of which I and the comedian Richard Herring were encouraged to compromise with jokes.1

  Lucky Richard was assigned to Poke’s most affable hosts, the restaurant critic Tracey MacLeod and her colleague, the rapper LL Cool J,2 who plied him with fudge and polystyrene3 all day, while I was understandably ignored by my master, a capable young comic newspaper columnist called Michael Andrew Fizzwigg Gove.

  Gove attended one writers’ roundtable meeting a week, where all he did was badger the producers to book the former BBC newsreader Jan Leeming, upon whom he was oddly fixated, before leaving with all the office washroom’s toilet rolls secreted in his satchel.

  Instead of asking me for jokes, Gove would make me wait on the fire escape outside his Notting Hill flat, occasionally emerging to assign me mundane tasks, such as taking his weekly washing – usually just seven white pants, seven white vests, fourteen grey socks and one yellowing sock – to the dry-cleaners.

  One week, the old Greek couple in Dryee-Fast seemed unduly amused by Gove’s unusually bulky package. ‘Tell Michael we try and try but can’t get the stains outta the crotch this time!’ they laughed, unravelling a full-size fur suit, the reasonably realistic costume of an unidentified Gove-size rodent. I rolled up the outfit and returned it to Gove without comment. I needed this job. I couldn’t afford to rock the boat. Scruples were a luxury I didn’t have.

  Later that day, Gove suddenly appeared beside me on the fire escape, high above the Notting Hill street. He had a habit of sneaking up on you. ‘Ah, Lee,’ he said, ‘contemplating the incalculable, I see?’ ‘Mr Gove?’ I asked, as I felt his hand upon the small of my back, applying gentle pressure.

  ‘The leap, Lee. If you were to leap now, Leapy Lee, from this fire escape, what would happen?’ ‘I’d die, I think, Mr Gove,’ I answered, unsure where this line of questioning was going. ‘Perhaps,’ Gove countered, ‘and experts would agree with you, I am sure. But would it not be thrilling to find out if one could profit from such a bold leap?’ ‘There’s nothing to find out, Mr Gove,’ I replied. ‘No one could survive that leap. This is the seventh floor.’ ‘Was it not our lord Christ’, Gove hissed, returning inside, ‘who urged us to consider the lemming?’ I don’t think Christ did say that, did he? Wasn’t it ‘consider the lily’? What did Gove mean?

  The next day, Gove suddenly emerged from his room, carrying a brown parcel, and told me he was going for a walk on Wormwood Scrubs common. ‘Carry on, Lee,’ he called, ‘with whatever it is A Pig in a Poke pay you for.’ I availed myself of my absent master’s sofa and tried in vain to think of a funny introduction for Jan Leeming, should Gove’s ambition of grilling her ever find favour with the producers.

  Gove had a crackpot idea that he and Leeming should appear together, both dressed as some kind of rat, and jump off a high diving board into a swimming pool, and he had offered me a bonus, out of his own pocket, if I could contrive a scenario – somehow related to the week’s news – that would convince the producers this would be a good idea.

  In Gove’s office, his phone rang persistently, and in the end I thought it best to enter, against his strict orders, and answer it. The producer of Pig in a Poke was saying something about how Gove was needed immediately for an urgent overdub of haughty snorting, but my eyes were adjusting to the dark. Gove’s previously unseen office slowly revealed itself to me in the full depth of its demented insanity.

  Tiny, tiny … rodents – some soft and grey, some brown with black stripes, in paintings, posters, wallcharts, thumb-tacked magazine clippings and poorly executed crayon drawings, hurling themselves fatally in their thousands over the cliff of their island home; or crudely taxidermied and mounted, eyes glazed and little paws frozen stiff – on every available surface.

  Lemmings. Hundreds and hundreds of lemmings. Michael Gove was obsessed with lemmings. And I wasn’t about to let him hurl himself to his death on my watch, although had I known what he would become, to do so would have been the most moral course of action. I ran to Wormwood Scrubs common.

  On a patch of waste ground, upon a filthy mattress, prostrate beneath the abandoned silo from which he had jumped, lay Michael Gove, winded but alive, and dressed in the lemming costume – for that is what it was – that the dry-cleaners had laughed at, the crotch dark once more.

  Gove’s eyes flashed open inside the circle of fake fur that surrounded his excited face. ‘Am I dead?’ he bellowed. ‘Am I dead, Lee?’ ‘No, Michael,’ I said, ‘you’re not dead.’ ‘Experts,’ he said, ‘what do they know? Help me up, boy! Help me up!!’

  The acceptable face of bigotry. Finnrkn

  A dreadful piece of writing, absolute rubbish. John Gibbons

  I can’t think of a single thing likeable about Michael Gove – from his obnoxious face to his obnoxious wife. Except that he’s funnier than Stewart Lee. Even his wife’s funnier than Stewart Lee. Offshoretomorrow

  What a pathetic article. It’s obviously deeply unfunny but more than that – is this part of the new culture of respect we are all supposed to be adopting at the behest of the Guardian? Linking one of our foremost Asian female polticians to sh*t seems less than tolerant to me. Joking about the death of a leading Leave politician seems a little of keeping with the national mood as well, following recent events. Pretty sick all round. Does Stewart Lee consider, on reflection, whether he made a mistake in describing Priti Patel in relation to pieces of faeces? Is that really a tolerant approach in relation to the foremost Asian woman in the Leave campaign? And how come did this article get published? Did no one read it beforehand? Progresstoleave

  Did anyone read this from start to finish? If you did you’ll never get that time back you know. Garyh001

  Latest in the line of ‘big in the nineties’ has-beens trying to make their points. Natalieben10

  1 In 1992 I was a gag writer on a short-lived Channel 4 show called Stab in the Dark. The football comedian David Baddiel, the critic Tracey MacLeod and the columnist, and soon-to-be Conservative politician, Michael Gove walked around a dimly lit industrial unit reciting televisually unfriendly monologues about the week’s news to a shifty crowd. Future podcast king Richard Herring and I, hot from Radio 4’s weekly shit satire show Weekending, were pimped to MacLeod, to insert our own leftover topical jokes into her prose. MacLeod showed us undreamed-of kindnesses, letting us write in her Battersea flat, making us lovely lunches, telling us funny showbiz anecdotes about Loudon Wainwright III and The Brinsley Schwarz, and bequeathing me her unwanted promo CDs, including my future favourite, Girlfriend by Matthew Sweet, the first of the then newfangled silver discs I ever owned. And she got Sid Griffin of the LA country-rock band The Long Ryders to sign their State of Our Union sleeve for me, albeit with such gusto and violence that he rather spoiled it. I was twenty-four years old and living the provincial-boy-loose-in-London dream. Could life get any better?

  2 I can only assume my subconscious plucked LL Cool J out of the air here to replace David Baddiel in the Stab team because in the early ’90s David Baddiel had a funny routine about LL Cool J.

  3 Richard Herring hated the sound of polystyrene, which both terrified and enraged him, so Tracey MacLeod used to hide behind parked cars in her street at the time he said he would arrive, squeaking polystyrene as he approached to scare him.

  Where was Putin when Corbyn needed him?

  28 August 2016

  In Edinburgh, where I write this, there is concern that the city’s newly opened branch of the Kremlin-backed news agency Sputnik is intended specifically to destabilise post-Brexit English–Scottish relations. Message to Putin: ‘Don’t worry, Vladimir baby! We can handle this one ourselves!!’

  Nonetheless, let us compare the contrasting media-manipulation strategies of Putin’s Russia and, for example, the Labour Party, both of them organisations that have, at times, abandoned their left-wing core beliefs in an attempt to adapt to a shifting geopolitical landscape.

  In the autumn of 2015,
it was suggested that Putin’s deliberately penis-shaped submarines, designed specifically to subconsciously exaggerate our perceptions of Russian genitalia, are poking around the transatlantic data cables to ensure the maverick anarcho-superpower’s ability to cut continental Europe off from America. Two campaigns working in opposition might then mean American media were full of phallic Russian propaganda that we in Europe weren’t actually able to view.

  On the other hand, this kind of strategy would be typical of Putin’s confusion guru Vladislav Surkov, a surrealist artist who, despite dressing like a disgraced Top Gear presenter, uses creatively chaotic double-think to sculpt our perceptions of Russia as determinedly as Richard Dreyfuss mushes mashed potato into mountains in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

  On the one hand, dope-fiend Russian athletes’ disqualification from the Rio feelgood festival was embarrassing; on the other, it creates the impression of a country of unpredictable law-defying crazies so convincingly Surkov himself may have masterminded it. There’s no way of knowing any more. Surkov may even have written this. I may actually be him without my even knowing it.1

  In March 2015, I wrote, for this paper, a silly fantasy about a giant statue of a naked Putin landing in my garden. Reading the below-the-line Internet comments later, I realised how thorough Russia’s determination to muddy the waters of opinion was: many of them were clearly generated by almost-literate Kremlin cyber-slaves, rather than by the usual alt-right trolls taking time off from masturbating over old videos of Toby Young on a rowing reality TV show.2

  Briefly, I adopted a strategy of writing borderline meaningless gibberish about Russia to try and provoke weird responses from the full-time Kremlin-backed commenters. Indeed, in a column about the Eurovision Song Contest three months later I discreetly included the following irrelevant paragraph: