March of the Lemmings Read online

  Some misery-gongers and doom-dongers have even suggested that the late Professor Stephen Hawking’s 2017 warning that Earth had only one hundred more years of habitability now looks optimistic. But Hawking was a liar, because if the world really was in trouble like how he said it was, then why wouldn’t he of used his mind to invent a invention to mend it?

  It has proved very convenient for the biased hard Remainiac BBC that this supposed climate emergency emerged this week. It distracts from any positive coverage of their hated Brexit. Indeed, the crisis of democracy in our parliament has barely been talked about since Andrew Neil’s carbohydrate yarmulke combusted on Monday.

  Instead, all we seemed to hear about all week was the imminence of the climate threat to all life on Earth, the inevitability of major environmental disasters, killing billions, and the need to change immediately to a zero-carbon global economy or face mass extinction by the middle of the century.3

  What we should still have been talking about, of course, and at the expense of everything else, for years and years, today and every day, is our membership, or non-membership, of a European trading block, and how this affects the power bases of the principal political parties in the United Kingdom in the short term. Not the death of all life on Earth.

  On Monday night, tiny Jeremy Corbyn shifted his two buttocks slightly on his north London fence, the kitten weight of his coddled egg-nourished frame pivoting slightly towards the possibility of maybe having a second referendum, if Tom Watson and Keir Starmer and the Labour Party membership absolutely insist, but not really, obviously.

  Indeed, the British people’s democratic right to ruin their own country for a generation at least, destroy the livelihoods of their most vulnerable communities and sabotage food and medicine security indefinitely, must be respected without question, like an old-fashioned village policeman or a violent Ape-God.

  Those who tremble at the prospect of shortages of vital supplies just need to think of creative solutions. If each one of the veritable tide of migrants currently swamping British beaches were required to bring with them some plasters and a courgette, we could soon compensate for a ferry service optimistically expected to operate at 8 per cent of the projected required capacity.

  By Wednesday, the biased hard Remainiac BBC had begun looping mobile-phone footage of Andrew Neil’s burning cereal hair, including shocking film of Michael Portillo rescuing the charred remnants from a filthy bin with his bare hands in order to make himself his milky treat, even as Alan Johnson tried to hold him back.

  The scheduling of the controversial hair-inferno clip seemed designed to shunt Brexit down the news pipe, and to distract from the fact that the promise of finally leaving the hated EU seemed to be slipping from the betrayed British public’s grasp. But there is so much more to be said about Brexit. We need to know the exact terms upon which, in the near future, our scorched nation will be exporting the deformed vegetables retched up from its charred soils to other ruined lands; and we need to know the exact levels of violence we are allowed to use to repel economic migrants attempting entry to the UK from soon-to-be-uninhabitable regions of France and Spain.

  Can a hungry Spaniard be shot or merely punched as he makes landfall in Dover? What about a Frenchman, desperate for sparkling mineral water and the grapes that will now grow in newly temperate Scotland? Will it be acceptable, under the terms of our future trading arrangements, to force him back from the beach into the sea with a wooden club? Or to poke him with a poisoned spike?

  Happy about this February summer? It’s like hitting puberty at three years old and getting excited about being able to choose a bra ahead of schedule.

  Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Now the world is burning while Britain fiddles about. What a waste of time!

  Typical biased Guardian article and gery unfanrile and certainly not funny. Patrickrd

  The article above by Andrew Lee tries too hard. It lacks clarity, purpose and it fails to inform. Layng1

  I don’t consider my self a member of the grammar police but this looks like it’s been written by a twelve year old, with poor English. Cheznice

  He’s a comedian is he? Would never have guessed. Russ Clarke

  ‘Shit piss wank’? Is that the best you can do? My six year old can employ more description than that without having to resort to that kind of puerile language. JeffNuttBee

  We used to think the Guardian a serious newspaper. Now it publishes garbage like this. At least we never thought Stewart Lee (who he – ed) a comic. Andrew Neil, Twitter

  I’ll never forget seeing Stewart Lee do his routine about Jeremy Clarkson where he wound himself up so much he basically started crying. Yes, that’s correct, a comedian was so angry about Jeremy Clarkson he basically cried on stage. Unintentionally hilarious. People were like … oh yeah it’s like an act he does. No it isn’t. It wasn’t just acting/showing the fake anger. People started to laugh at him, not with him. Crying over Jeremy Clarkson though is the ultimate beta male SJW thing to cry about. Shall we cry about mass murder and rape … no … we need to cry about Clarkson. Lee’s not an actor though and in later performances of the same routine he didn’t cry. He realised that letting Clarkson get to him like that had us all laughing for the wrong reasons. It was tragic to watch.4 Ben Roberts, Twitter

  There’s a reason why nobody’s heard of Stewart Lee, and that load of tripe is probably it. And he uses ‘of’ instead of ‘have’. Alberto, Twitter

  UKIP have been lied about and called names by the MSM for years. Hang in there Andrew. Right is might. Alison Parr, Twitter

  I’ve always thought Lee should be prosecuted under the Trade Descriptions Act for calling himself a ‘comedian’; he’s the unfunniest man alive. Neil Kirby, Twitter

  As expected Lee is privately educated, on a permanent guilt trip ever since, and filled with self-loathing. Steve Walker, Twitter

  At Oxford with Cameron I believe. Jamessir Bensonmum, Twitter

  They laughed when Stuart Lee said he wanted to become a comedian …………….. Dennis Kearney, Twitter

  He’s just another self-hating establishment Leftist who punctuates the dreary orthodoxy of his politically correct diatribes with swear words in a pitiful attempt to appear edgy. Remain-stream Media, Twitter

  Does Stewart Lee have heart issues I wonder? He always looks like a bloated heart attack in a bag. I can just imagine him all sweaty, red faced, belt cutting him in two, getting his dander up and writing angry pieces like this. Can’t be at all good for the lad. Ant Antonelli, Twitter

  Stewart Lee: a sweaty paunch tottering around Waitrose in high-heeled cowboy boots & pre-worn Pixies t-shirt, mumbling ironic insults at the veg. Cavalcanti, Twitter

  Is the Guardian having a meltdown? Lord Ashcroft, KCMG PC, former deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, International Businessman, philanthropist, author, pollster, Cameron-pig-sex fantasist, toilet-cubicle tax fugitive, Twitter

  You’re quite right, Tom.5 I should not have let my anger at the Guardian get at your excellent Venezuela coverage. I’ve deleted. It’s not a quid pro quo, but could you now get Guardian to delete some of the garbage it’s recently published about me? Andrew Neil, Twitter

  1 It was the hottest February on record. Idiots thought it was brilliant, and dry stuff was catching fire. I thought, ‘What else looks dry? Oh yeah, Andrew Neil’s hair!’

  2 The Brexiteers Letts and Hartley-Brewer had both tweeted during February 2019 that the fact that they could ski over the Swiss border meant the need for a post-Brexit British border in Ireland was exaggerated, their comments betraying such a lack of understanding of the Schengen Agreement, and the fact that goods aren’t being transported by skiers through alpine passes, that it didn’t seem worth even trying to explain. Hence ‘blah blah blah shit piss wank’, which was what most pro-Brexit arguments sounded like to me by February 2019.

  3 There was very little coverage of this catastrophic news in the media. Only ten government MPs turned up to discuss it in Parli
ament on Wednesday 27 February, even after thousands of concerned children had staged a mass walkout from lessons in protest the previous week. Meanwhile the Brexit bus trundled on.

  4 Beyond a certain point, applying proper performance skills to stand-up is pointless. People have such low expectations of a stand-up’s ability to do anything that if you attempt to portray a feeling, the assumption is just that you have had some kind of mental breakdown. I tried to cry most nights in this bit if I could, during the section about Gordon Brown being blind in one eye, but I’m not a good enough actor to turn on the face-taps at will for every performance. When I was in Dublin, performing a routine about being haunted by the ghosts of dead comedians, a journalist from the Sunday Times ran out of the show to live-tweet to the world that she was watching Stewart Lee having an actual psychotic episode on stage. Idiot. And such tender journalistic concern for a man with mental-health problems. Poke the freak and laugh!

  5 Tom Phillips, the Guardian’s Latin American correspondent. God knows what is going on here.

  Possessed by Brexit? Time to call an exorcist

  10 March 2019

  A newly discovered birth relative of mine, a Catholic priest, is an exorcist, from County Cork.1 The Exorcist came to stay on Wednesday. The next evening, he was doing what he called ‘a fairly straightforward overnight identify, isolate, subdue and expel job’ in Angel. He wasn’t allowed to talk about it and knows I’m an atheist, so avoids putting us in situations where we’d argue. The Exorcist displays a natural diplomacy my Brexit-voting relatives could learn from.

  But with his boisterous sense of humour, four-pints-a-night Guinness habit and lifelong addiction to Viz comic, my Exorcist cousin isn’t anyone’s idea of a spiritual warrior. I introduced him to Sandi Toksvig, whom he loves, at a radio-comedy recording, when he’d come straight from an especially distressing Solemn Exorcism. Toksvig took one look at the portly Irishman, assumed I was joking about his line of work and let loose that hysterical laugh she does on Bake Off when a poor old man ruins his pie.

  Because he was still wound up from fighting what he believed had been a servant of Hell, the Exorcist and Toksvig nearly came to blows and had to be separated by Nicholas Parsons. I think that after thirty years in the game, this is still probably my best showbiz anecdote by some distance, and is the only reason I still get invited anywhere for Christmas dinner.

  I was glad of the Exorcist’s company on Wednesday, as I myself had felt possessed, if only by a sense of confusion, all week. Last Sunday, I had written a deliberately silly article, comparing burning Yorkshire brushfires to the apparently combustible Shredded Wheat hair of Andrew Neil, which somehow went viral, Neil’s own indignant tweet about the column driving a further 24,000 people through to it.

  Googling ‘This Week’, ‘Andrew Neil’ and ‘Stewart Lee’ to try and find out what was going on only brought me further stress. I had enjoyed appearing on Neil’s show in February 2014 with the Scottish nationalist, and former Kane Gang frontman, Pat Kane. And yet now I saw that afterwards Kane had tweeted his followers to say, ‘Jolly end-of-term feel backstage. Got to meet (somewhat odiferous) hero Stewart Lee.’

  To be fair, I had just come straight from doing three hours on stage at the Leicester Square Theatre, but it is a disturbing comment to read about yourself. One of the great things about Google, I think, is that years after a social interaction which you felt had been a success, you find that all the while the other people involved were fighting back their urge to vomit because you stank.

  By the end of last Sunday, even the Cameron-pig-sex fantasist, tax toilet fugitive and former Conservative Party deputy chairman Lord Ashcroft had accused me of having a ‘meltdown’, while Neil was tweeting some guy called Tom, apologising for ‘Venezuela’, and pleading, ‘Could you now get Guardian to delete some of the garbage it’s recently published about me?’

  Something I didn’t understand was kicking off, and I was out of my depth. So you’ll forgive me if today, instead of inadvertently bringing down the wrath of the online ‘alt-right’, I share with you a true story that has been bothering me that I can’t quite make sense of. There’ll be nothing so divisive as Andrew Neil’s smouldering Shredded Wheat hair this week.

  Ridiculously, the Exorcist is another person with an impossible job who, when the subject of stand-up comes up, says to me, ‘I don’t know how you do what you do. I’d go to pieces. You must have some balls.’ He still won’t accept that what he does for a living, even though I think it’s all a delusion, is harder than talking about farts to strangers.

  We watched a news report together saying that since the Brexit vote, British people’s mental health has deteriorated rapidly compared to their European counterparts’. This came as no surprise to the Exorcist. ‘People who think they are possessed are canaries in the mine,’ he told me.

  ‘I know there’s a national mental crisis brewing when I have to order extra bottles of Holy,’ the Exorcist continued, pouring himself another Guinness. ‘I’m getting through gallons of the stuff! Brexit has brought people down and weakened their spiritual defences. There’s folk thrashing about, foaming at the mouth, and some of them spouting Tourette’s level 1970s racist bollocks on top of it all. The lads in my department are run off their feckin’ feet.’

  ‘Are you saying Brexit has let the Devil in?’ I asked the Exorcist, smirking. ‘You realise people will say that is the most extreme manifestation of “Project Fear” to date.’

  ‘I’m not saying any more to you, Stewart Lee,’ the Exorcist said, and suggested we agree on our usual compromise. And with that the Exorcist leant forward and did a fairly convincing impression of my own supercilious English tones. ‘People who think they are possessed are just displaying symptoms of mental-health problems, and if Brexit is exacerbating them, then there’s going to be more of these supposed “possessions”.’

  I agreed, laughing, that yes, that was exactly the sort of thing I would say. ‘Well, you’re wrong,’ the Exorcist said, shaking now, ‘and let me tell you, once Brexit kicks in, not being able to get fresh mozzarella is going to be the least of your feckin’ worries. Don’t you see? This is what He wants. The Lord of the Flies. The Lie Father. Division. Social breakdown. Brother against Brother. That Mrs May. Your man Neil with his hair. People like them. They could have stopped this. They’re His servants, and they don’t even know! And you just think it’s funny, you smug bastard!’

  I’m not surprised about Pat Kane’s revelation. I was working as a cleaner at the local theatre when Stewart passed through a few years back and you could tell by the unholy whiff coming off the seat in his dressing room that he wears his trousers with no underwear underneath – that horrible sort of belly button on steroids/acid scent. When I finished my shift that night I went shopping and found myself in a lift with the man himself. For ninety seconds he stood there burping swear words, a real volley of them like a 12-year-old would do, with the scent of rider crisps. As he stepped off the lift before my floor he put his hand into his shirt and began doing armpit trumps at a rate of two a second. I suppose it’s a kind of release. Anorobime

  Stewart Lee proving that Nish Kumar isn’t the only one who can be really unfunny about Brexit. Owlface

  A much better article than the last one. Spotthelemon

  1 My ancient Irish ancestors, the Hurleys, left County Cork – specifically, Clonakilty, Ireland’s black-pudding capital – in the potato famine. Weirdly, I love black pudding.

  PART II:

  BREXIT IN PERFORMANCE

  2016–2018

  Introduction

  After what was to be the final series of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle was broadcast in January 2016, I had a number of meetings with various BBC types who clearly wanted to keep some kind of version of it on air. This suited me, as I was hoping to change the thirty-minute small-room format to hour-long shows, filmed in larger venues, anyway. The material developed on the last two tours was calibrated to reach the sort of hysteria tip
ping points found in audiences of one to three thousand, but once it was scaled down to one hundred people in a room, fifteen of whom were confused BBC executives, and a further twenty of whom were fans’ resentful spouses, material that had caused collective madness on the road seemed deliberately obtuse instead.

  But I think the head of comedy, Shane Allen, wanted to spend the money on something else and give other people a crack of the state-subsidised comedy whip, which was fair enough, really. I don’t have any of the anger about these kinds of decisions that I had twenty years ago, when I took the cancellation of some half-baked project as a personal insult. I view the process by which broadcasters choose to favour certain projects over others as essentially meaningless, and ascribe no value to it, and am thus not mentally vulnerable to it. I would have preferred it, though, if I could have nominated a successor, like some kind of abdicating king, but this wasn’t the case.

  In the end, it was clear things were going to fizzle out just through sheer neglect and bureaucratic inertia, as they usually do in TV land, so I got on with getting a new live show together. I don’t hang around waiting for TV people to make decisions. Years pass, and suddenly you’ve put your life on hold and have nothing to show for it. I wrote and toured 41st Best Stand-Up and Carpet Remnant World in the gaps between series one and series two, and series two and series three, when no one at the BBC was able to commit to recommissioning Comedy Vehicle, despite its BAFTAs, British Comedy Awards and Chortle statuettes.

  After four series of the show, I doubted that I would ever be this popular again. So, as a mid-life mortgage-clearing cash-in, I resolved to write a show that would hang together for eighteen months or so – twice as long as I usually toured – and which I could take back to everywhere that had sold out first time on a second pass. I would monetise the fuck out of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity I doubted I’d ever be physically or mentally fit enough to exploit again. This was my hit-single tour, like when Fountains of Wayne went on the road with a rock’n’roll light show after ‘Stacey’s Mom’, with its Rachel Hunter-in-swimwear video, peaked at number eleven in 2003.