March of the Lemmings Read online

  And I’d try to write a show that instead of trying to reinvent the wheel of stand-up and then smash that new wheel into bits, like I had for Comedy Vehicle series four, was just a fun two hours to delight the punters, rather than confuse them and punish them for their imagined crimes. In the end, I did over 240 dates on the tour, playing to nearly a quarter of a million people, with two three-month runs at the lovely Leicester Square Theatre and a week of mopping up the remaining demand at the Royal Festival Hall.

  I had decided to call the new show Content Provider – confusingly, the same title as a collection of columns I had coming out – as a catch-all phrase, as I wasn’t exactly sure what its content was going to be. I had an idea about taking Caspar David Friedrich’s 1818 Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog painting and sort of recreating it, but flipping it, so the subject was posing for a selfie against a backdrop of natural wonder, rather than facing it to contemplate it. This seemed to sum up my attitude to the modern age. It was a start.

  The Brexit referendum was brewing, but like most in the metropolitan liberal elite bubble, I assumed we would stay in the EU and had not predicted the deep divisions it was to create in British society, although I knew loads of shy racists who were excited about it, and it was already compromising my own social and family relationships. Suddenly, it seemed the vague ideas I had had for the show – how social and digital media affect our personal interactions and view of the world – were, like everything else, going to be skewed severely by Brexit.

  Once the show was up and running, the new head of BBC2 came to see it and asked me if I’d meet him. He wanted me to do something for the channel, and had been disappointed to find that Comedy Vehicle had been cancelled when he took over. I couldn’t do anything anyway, as I wanted to spend the next two years cashing in my chips live, not, on this occasion, giving material away at less than its live market value to the BBC. He suggested broadcasting Content Provider. I said it was too long and contained controversial political content and the c-word (cunt). He said leave it, it would be fine.

  The stand-up character of Stewart Lee is different to the self-doubting newspaper columnist character of Stewart Lee. He has a much simpler vocabulary and genuinely believes in himself, thinking he is a great stand-up comedian, and that any of his apparent professional shortcomings are the result of the public’s failure to recognise his genius.

  Some of the things the newspaper columnist Lee writes can be spoken by the stand-up comedian Lee, and some of the things the stand-up comedian Lee says can be written by the columnist Lee, but on the whole they are distinct entities doing different jobs. The columnist Stewart Lee thinks he is not really clever enough to do the job he has been given. The stand-up comedian Stewart Lee thinks he is so clever his job is beneath him. The columnist wears glasses, but the comedian does not, and they would probably dislike each other were they to meet.

  I, the third Stewart Lee, and the one who is writing this introduction (and the footnotes throughout this book), prefer the stand-up comedian Lee to the columnist Lee, whom I find more tragic. If I and the comedian Lee were to meet the columnist Lee, I think we would beat him up and leave him in a ditch with his glasses smashed.

  During the closing previews of Content Provider, in October 2016, I (not the comedian or the columnist) wrote a diary piece for the New Statesman. Extracts from it follow here, some of which find later re-expression in the live show itself, but it sums up the state of mind I was in, trying to get my comedian self to assemble his new stand-up show in the gathering shadow of Brexit.

  Brexit confusion is scuppering my show

  New Statesman, 6 October 2016

  I am a stand-up comedian, and I am in the process of previewing a new live show, which I hope to tour until early 2018. It was supposed to be about how the digital, free-market society is reshaping the idea of the individual, but we are in the pre-Brexit events whirlpool, and there has never been a worse time to try to assemble a show that will still mean anything in eighteen months’ time.

  SATURDAY

  A joke written six weeks ago about deporting eastern Europeans, intended to be an exaggeration for comic effect, suddenly just reads like an Amber Rudd speech – or, as James O’Brien pointed out on LBC, an extract from Mein Kampf.

  A rude riff on Sarah Vine and 2 Girls, 1 Cup runs aground because there are fewer people now who remember Vine than recall the briefly notorious Brazilian video clip. I realise that something that gets a cheer on a Tuesday in Harrogate, or Glasgow, or Oxford, could get me lynched the next night in Lincoln. Perhaps I’ll go into the fruit-picking business. I hear there’s about to be some vacancies.

  SUNDAY

  I sit and stare at blocks of text, wondering how to knit them into a homogeneous whole. But it’s Sunday afternoon, a time for supervising homework and finding sports kit. My eleven-year-old daughter has a school project on the Victorians, and she has decided to do it on dead nineteenth-century comedians, as we had recently been on a Music Hall Guild tour of their graves at the local cemetery. I wonder if, secretly, she wished I would join them.

  I have found living with the background noise of this project depressing. The headstones that she photographed show that most of the performers – even the well-known Champagne Charlie – barely made it past forty, while the owners of the halls outlived them. The comedian Herbert Campbell’s obelisk is vast and has the word ‘comedian’ written on it in gold leaf, but it’s in the bushes and he is no longer remembered. Neither are many of the alternative comedy acts I loved in the 1980s – Johnny Immaterial, Paul Ramone, the Iceman.

  WEDNESDAY

  I have the second of the final three preview shows at the intimate Leicester Square Theatre in London before the new show, Content Provider, does a week in big rooms around the country. Today, I was supposed to do a BBC Radio 3 show about improvised music, but both of the kids were off school with a bug and I had to stay home mopping up. In between the vomiting, in the psychic shadow of the improvisers, I had something of a break-through. The guitarist Derek Bailey, for example, would embrace his problems and make them part of the performance.

  THURSDAY

  I drank half a bottle of wine before going on stage, to give me the guts to take some risks. It’s not a long-term strategy for creative problem-solving, and that way lies wandering around Southend with a pet chicken.1 But by binning the words that I’d written and trying to repoint them, in the moment, to be about how the Brexit confusion is blocking my route to the show I wanted to write, I can suddenly see a way forward. The designer is in, with samples of a nice coat that she is making for me, intended to replicate the clothing of the figure in Caspar David Friedrich’s 1818 German masterpiece Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog.

  FRIDAY

  Richard Branson is on the Internet and, just as I’d problem-solved my way around writing about it, he’s suggesting that Brexit might not happen. I drop the kids off and sit in a café reading Alan Moore’s new novel, Jerusalem. I am interviewing him about it for the Guardian in two weeks’ time. It’s 1,174 pages long, but what with the show falling apart I have read only 293 pages. Next week is half-term. I’ll nail it. It’s great, by the way, and seems to be about the small lives of undocumented individuals, buffeted by the random events of their times.

  1 This is how the music-hall comedian Fred Barnes, aka the Duke of Solihull, ended his days, having previously paraded along the Strand with a marmoset on a lead.

  Content Provider: Stewart Lee Live

  12–13 April 2018, Palace Theatre, Southend-on-Sea

  AS THE AUDIENCE ENTER THE BEAUTIFUL VICTORIAN THEATRE, THE STAGE IS STREWN WITH THOUSANDS OF OTHER COMEDIANS’ LIVE STAND-UP COMEDY DVDS, ARRANGED IN PILES AND AT RANDOM AROUND A SMALL CENTRAL STAIRCASE MADE OF JUNK, FLANKED BY BROKEN TELEVISIONS AND LEADING UP TO A MONOLITHIC WHITE CANVAS, WHICH HAS THE WORDS ‘CONTENT PROVIDER’ PROJECTED ONTO IT.1 THE LIGHTS FADE. MUSIC – ‘STEW’S BLUES’ BY BLUESWATER2 – PLAYS.

  [Stew, from off stage] People of Southend-on
-Sea.3 It’s time to endure the comedy of the comedian Stewart Lee.

  STEW ENTERS. HE KICKS OVER A PILE OF STAND-UP DVDS BY ACCIDENT4 AS HE APPROACHES CENTRE STAGE. MUSIC FADES. HE DISMISSES THE APPLAUSE AND IMMEDIATELY STARTS TALKING OVER IT.

  Right, er, just wanna crack on and tell you what’s happening. So there’s a number of problems with this show. The main one, right, is that I – I started writing this about eighteen months ago, and the idea was it was gonna be two hours on the notion of the individual in a digitised free-market economy. OK. And I was gonna base it all around this painting …

  STEW REVEALS A LARGE PRINT OF THE GERMAN ROMANTIC MASTERPIECE WANDERER ABOVE THE SEA OF FOG, BY CASPAR DAVID FRIEDRICH,5 WHICH DEPICTS A MAN LOOKING OUT ACROSS A MOUNTAIN RANGE, WITH HIS BACK TO US. STEW CROSSES THE STAGE WITH IT AND LEANS IT AGAINST A PILLAR, FACING OUTWARDS.

  … which is Caspar David Friedrich’s 1818 German Romantic masterpiece Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. Now, hopefully you’ve all had the emails, and you’ve done the reading you’ll need to have done. Then I did about a month’s work on that, and then the Brexit vote happened, right, and there seemed to be an assumption everywhere that I should’ve written some jokes about Brexit.

  Now I haven’t written any jokes about Brexit, ’cos I was trying to write a show that I could keep on the road for eighteen months, and as I didn’t know how Brexit was going to pan out, I didn’t write any jokes about it in case I couldn’t use them in the show and monetise the work I’ve done. Right. So I haven’t written any jokes about Brexit, ’cos I didn’t see the point of committing to a course of action for which there’s no logical or financial justification. [Whoops and applause follow.]

  That’s right, clap the things you agree with. Clap, clap, clap. Agree, agree, agree. ‘Did you see Stewart Lee in Southend?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Was it funny?’ ‘No, but I agreed the fuck out of it. It was almost as if it was targeted at my exact social demographic. In a cynical attempt to maintain a future-proof audience for longterm mortgage-repayment purposes.’6

  Can it be, Southend, that the future of Britain, Europe, Southend, the world has been altered for ever, as a result, it would appear, of the ongoing competitive rivalry of a small group of competitive posh men? Right? It looks like that’s, that’s what’s happened.

  When he was a student, David Cameron put his penis into a dead pig’s face, didn’t he?7 And then to outdo him, to do something even more bizarre and obscene, Michael Gove put his penis into a Daily Mail journalist.8 Imagine doing that. Urgh. Urgh. Uh! That’s ‘caustic wit’ that, like Toby Young. Do you like it?9

  And then to outdo him, to do something even more sick-making and wrong, Boris Johnson put himself into the role of foreign secretary. And if you think it’s funny that Boris Johnson is foreign secretary – and it is, arguably – I guarantee you he’s gonna be prime minister at some point. Theresa May has been put in place, it’s now clear, by the steering committee as a sort of a palate cleanser, kind of a nasty-tasting mouthwash that you swill around your gums before being forced to eat actual human shit.10 11

  A lot of casualties, weren’t there, in the Brexit shake-up? A lot of people, you know. Michael Gove and Sarah Vine, they sort of disappeared initially, but they’re back now aren’t they, Michael Gove and Sarah Vine, and they’re currently trying to reinvent themselves as the amusing celebrity political couple for young millennials so jaded they no longer find Neil and Christine Hamilton quite sickening enough. Michael Gove and Sarah Vine are the Neil and Christine Hamilton for the 2 Girls, 1 Cup generation.12 [This joke does not go as well as he appeared to expect it would and Stew is momentarily thrown.]13

  Don’t – yeah. Well, that’s a shame. So, OK, here’s what’s happened, right. This is – this is two nights in Southend, and I am aware that Southend’s not really my target sort of town, but this had a nice Victorian theatre, the theatre was available and the – well, it’s just that’s normally the first big laugh of the night, that joke there with a – but we’ve got a lot of people in. We’ve got the sort of – you’ve got the target audience here, sort of comedy fans and people that know about, about politics and stuff, and then it’s – I’ve put on too many dates on in Southend ’cos it’s very – this – look at these people, this isn’t my crowd, is it? Look at that. Essex – Essex filth, people that have – market traders on the run from London, aren’t they? Lost their nerve and come to live in the white supremacist theme park.14

  Should’ve been a bigger laugh, honestly, for that Michael Gove joke. It’s a good – it’s a good joke. There’s a – have people brought friends with them? ’Cos that often makes it go worse, if people … I know what’s happened: people that used to come and see me in the little cellar at the – at the Pavilion15 like thirty years ago, you’ve gone, ‘Oh he’ll never fill the Palace Theatre, Southend, for two nights. Let’s help him out and we’ll buy four tickets and we’ll bring Alan and Claire.’ And they’re, they’re sitting next to you, your mates, nudging you and going, ‘Is this him? Is he the main one? Is it just this all night, just a man complaining about things?’ ‘Yes, it is, until at least ten o’clock.’16

  Don’t bring your friends, ’cos it’s filled it up with the wrong people, hasn’t it, so perfectly serviceable stuff is floundering. It’s not the … I don’t need your help to fill up – this is all sold out. If you’re going, ‘No, it isn’t, Stew, there’s two seats there for starters,’ like they’re … All these seats are sold, right. Everything’s sold. What’s happened to me in the last few years, and I don’t really understand why, right, but I’ve become popular enough that the ticket touts buy these seats, StubHub and that, and they try and resell them online, but I’m not popular enough for anyone in Southend to pay six times over the odds to …17

  Don’t imagine that disheartens me, those empty seats. That’s – someone’s bought them, right, so I’ve got the money, it’s fine. And it’s actually better ’cos it means I’ve got the money, but there isn’t one of your stupid friends sitting in them going, ‘What are these nouns? How do words work?’ You know. That’s my dream, an entirely sold-out empty room. Which would eliminate the main problem with all my work, which is the public’s ongoing inability to recognise its genius.

  It’s a – this is a very difficult time in history to do stand-up, and I would appreciate your blanket support, to be honest. It’s very – it’s very – Look, look, I went back on the road in September. I did a week in Oxford, right, and that’s Remain. Then I did Doncaster, and that’s Leave. And I did Glasgow – Remain. Dartford – Leave. This is about sixty–forty in favour of – of Leave, wasn’t it? And the Remain-voting cities now, they loom out of the map, don’t they, like fantasy citadels in a Tolkienesque landscape; wondrous walled cities full of wizards and poets, and people who can understand data, in the middle of a vast swampy fen with ‘Here there be trolls’ written over it.18

  Yeah, down here, laughter. People there, people going, ‘Hang on. Trolls, Stew? That’s not a very fair way to, you know … We are in Leave-voting Southend-on-Sea.19 Trolls. That’s not a very fair way to describe the English and Welsh majority that exercised their democratic right to vote to leave the EU.’

  And it isn’t, to be fair, you know, and I think – look, we’re gonna leave the EU, that is happening, and I think people have gotta put their differences behind them now and try and make it work. And I – and I don’t know if you can make massive generalisations about people that voted to leave Europe anyway, because people voted to leave Europe for all sorts of different reasons, you know, and it wasn’t just racists that voted to leave Europe. Cunts did as well, didn’t they? Stupid fucking cunts. Racists, and cunts, and people with legitimate anxieties about ever-closer political ties to Europe.20

  ‘Dear Palace Theatre, Southend, please inform the “comedian”, and I use that word advisedly,21 Stewart Lee, who I had the misfortune of being taken along to see by friends last night, that I actually voted to leave Europe and I am neither a racist nor a cunt. Merel
y someone with genuine anxieties about ever-closer political ties to Europe. Yours, A. Cunt, Burnham-on-Crouch.’

  It’s where they live, isn’t it? Yeah, Burnham-on-Crouch. D’you know what? I don’t know anything about Burnham-on-Crouch. I just drove through it, I thought, ‘That’ll do for that joke.’ It’s the first time it’s got a laugh. So yes, welcome to the music hall,22 so, er, no, it’s difficult – you know, it’s e— … I don’t … you can’t make massive ge— … to be fair you can’t make massive generalisations about – about people who voted to leave Europe.

  People did vote to leave Europe for all sorts of different – they did, don’t snigger away down there – they voted for all, you know, not everyone that voted to leave Europe wanted to see Britain immediately descend into being an unaccountable single-party state exploiting people’s worst prejudices to maintain power indefinitely.23 Some people just wanted bendy bananas, didn’t they? ‘Oh no, I only wanted bendy bananas, and now there’s this chaotic inferno of hate.’ ‘Oh well, never mind, at least the bananas are all bendy again, aren’t they?’ Like they always fucking were.24