How I Escaped My Certain Fate Read online

  Despite this obvious lack of exploitable teen fans, throughout the second part of the decade Richard and I were put on the road, rock-and-roll style, in a tour van, for heavily and expensively advertised tours. We usually played to largely empty rooms in unloved council-run theatres, where disillusioned programmers booked whatever was pushed at them, regardless. The overheads prevented us from seeing a significant share of any profits. Comedy was the new rock and roll, perhaps, and as in the early days of rock and roll the cash rarely trickled down to the acts. Our second series, This Morning with Richard not Judy, was ignominiously cancelled by the then BBC2 controller Jane Root in 1999; our final tour as Lee and Herring, in 1998, actually appeared to have lost money. Most of what we’d earned from the first television series was eaten up by debts from Edinburgh, as we insisted on going back every year with more and more new shows, sometimes doing three or four performances of different things every day, trying to remain loyal to the egalitarian ethics of the Fringe that had formed us as teenagers, and thus losing more money and sinking deeper into debt.

  We ceased trading as Lee and Herring in 1999. People still ask me why we split up the double act, but we never really did. I remember when I was a teenager I loved The Moodists, a gang of beatnik Australian blues punks based in London which dissolved in 1987. The following year, I saw their guitarist, Steve Miller, loading gear into a venue for The Triffids, another expat Australian band. ‘Why did you split up The Moodists?’ I asked. ‘We didn’t split up,’ he said, wearily, presumably remembering a decade of struggling to make ends meet in the face of indifference and mismanagement. ‘We just stopped.’ At the time I was confused. The Moodists were brilliant. Literally dozens of people loved them. How could they just stop? But Lee and Herring didn’t split up either. We just stopped.

  Even while we were touring the double act and writing television, I’d always had other projects on the go. Regrettably, Cluub Zarathustra, a Dadaist live show initiated by Simon Munnery and featuring a brilliant revolving-door cast including the likes of Kevin Eldon, Sally Phillips, Richard Thomas, the future Mighty Boosh mover Julian Barratt and Roger Mann,* came to nothing. Perhaps ending the rather short pilot we submitted to Channel 4 in 1997 with the words ‘Insert More Money’ flashing across the screen didn’t help.

  * Roger Mann was a superbly strange comic whom I first saw at Marco’s Leisure Centre in Edinburgh in 1989, when he was known as Paul Ramone. His ability to make a sudden mid-stream switch from genial rambling into a kind of highfalutin Regency fop register, complete with the appropriately constipated face and pursed lips, was certainly an influence on his friend Frank Skinner’s subsequent use of the same tic. Roger, who resembled Herman Munster’s rakish younger brother, combined off-the-wall surrealism and coquettish whimsy with a kind of threatening suppressed rage, and we all loved him. His timeless party piece, the role of the decadent storyteller Edgar Allan Poo, began with the superbly portentous sentence, ‘I had been called upon to invent a new kind of pig.’ Roger and Kevin Eldon’s 1992 Channel 4 sitcom Packing Them In, while roundly panned at the time, would probably stand up rather better than most recent offerings, and included the line, ‘Look. It appears that, all along, Alan was a mechanical eagle.’ Roger retired early, destitute and disillusioned, to veg out somewhere in the Pyrenees foothills on a bottle of red a day and a baguette a week. Nevertheless, the Swindon Advertiser recently voted him Swindon’s twenty-ninth most famous person, beating XTC’s Dave Gregory at number 34. Roger gave me loads of gigs early on in tiny clubs he ran in south London, and I am eternally in his debt. Not financially though, if I could just make that clear, as I understand his paltry savings largely disappeared in the 2009 crash.

  In between commitments to the double act I did hundreds of standup gigs a year on the circuit, which was always my principal creative outlet, and usually knocked out a new solo show for Edinburgh and in theory beyond, although the low-level, solo comedy show touring network of today didn’t exist. But there were other problems too. By the late nineties, my management company had grown from a two-man operation into a massive conglomerate, with dozens of subdivisions staffed by hopeful serfs. It was hard to feel the same sense of all being in it together. The days of acts and management out in the van behind enemy lines on flyposting missions were long gone. And now, the live department was run like a telesales desk, with hungry young operatives trying to place acts around the country for maximum fees, to ensure a healthy turnover, often irrespective of the suitability of the venue. This meant we tended to be sent to councilfunded places anxious to tick boxes by showing they’d had some comedy, unaware that the event wasn’t going to fly. And because I gave each subsequent solo show a new title, rather than just being billed as ‘Stewart Lee’, and a theme, and a poster that tried to reflect that, all the information would get jumbled up by my bookers and I’d arrive at some regional arts centre somewhere with a show totally different to the one advertised, a two-year-old poster and press pack having been sent out. And all the while, audiences dwindled away.

  In the early part of 2000, the big manager booked me a one-off gig at Dundee Rep. I paid the 15 per cent commission. I paid the support act. I paid for travel. I paid for accommodation. And then there was almost nothing left of the fee. The audience barely reached double figures. I arrived and left in darkness, with little to show for my trouble either financially or creatively. It seemed like a metaphor for my career. Creatively, I was in Dundee. By now, I’d hoped at least to be in St Andrews. I’d been on television to two million viewers less than a year ago, but now it seemed there was no one out there interested in what I did. I sold out a new standup show called Stewart Lee’s Badly Mapped World for a month in a 150-seater in Edinburgh in August 2000, but lost money as usual. The show received dreary middling reviews, saying I was boring or monotonous or drunk. I performed it a few times subsequently, but the momentum soon petered out.

  In the spring of 2001, I was supposed to be doing a minitour of Scotland and the friendlier parts of the North, supported by the clown-haired satirist Andy Zaltzman, but the venues showed me contracts that proved his presence on the bill had never been confirmed, and because they’d already booked their own opening acts, they refused to pay him or allow him to go on. Thus, Andy accompanied me on a strange holiday, a bizarre and unwanted chaperone figure visiting random and largely empty rooms in faraway towns where his contribution was not required, watching me lose my way emotionally, creatively, geographically, while I paid all his hotel bills and made him tramp across Scottish moors in search of uncharted stone circles during the long dead days off.

  At some stage during this downward spiral of a tour, I found myself onstage at the Rawhide club in Liverpool, going mechanically through the motions of material I knew inside out, hoping that something would happen to wake me from my torpor and invest these stale riffs with some spontaneity. And it did. A drunken young man in a suit in the front row kept shouting that he didn’t want to hear about anything I had to say – admittedly voicing the feelings of most of the room – and that I should talk about illegal immigrants. ‘Talk about illegal immigrants,’ he grunted, ‘talk about fucking illegal immigrants.’ I decided to take a bold course of action and get him onstage and hand him the mic, probably having just read a biography of the erratically inspired American comic Andy Kaufman or some other dangerous piece of literature, to see what he came up with on the subject of illegal immigrants, while I watched from his now vacant seat. I knew it would be incoherent and awful, which it was, as he slurred and stammered about asylum-seekers and how they should be sent back, but my plan was to let the room boil in irritation and fade away, before flipping the mood with a perfectly chosen bon mot. But as the crowd turned, security came and got the man offstage and told me, in no uncertain terms, that I had to go back on, utterly undermining any status I had left. There I was in a cellar in Liverpool, standing in front of a drunk racist, but somehow in the wrong. And what was a man like that even doing in one of our comedy
clubs, being all racist, in his suit and tie? Did Tony Allen, the Godfather of Alternative Comedy, die onstage, repeatedly, night after night, for this?

  Suddenly everything was clear. It was the twenty-first century and I was a mumbling relic from an earlier age. The crowds had changed. The rules were different. The management weren’t out flyposting with the acts, and Alternative Comedy was dead. I was spent. I was trapped. I listened to the material as I was saying it. I watched it float out of my mouth over the bored faces of the Rawhide regulars like a brown tongue of acrid smoke, stinking the place out. Arch, cynical, tired, fake, conceited, formulaic and flat. I was no longer the person that wrote it, and the audience that it was written for weren’t to be found at any of the places I was playing. I didn’t believe in it any more; even people that liked me had seen through it. And for the racists at the Rawhide, everything I was saying was irrelevant anyway. So, quietly and without any fuss, I decided, then and there, to stop. Not that anyone noticed.

  I spent a long time wondering how best to explain to you, dear readers, what I was doing in the period I disappeared from view. Then I was sent the text of a blog by The Spirit, the silver-haired member of the multi-billionaire Brixton country hip-hop group Alabama Three, who had spoken to me when I was signing DVDs after a recent live show. The Spirit, who is in fact a fully corporeal human, summed up my career post-Lee and Herring at the beginning of a piece called, unpleasantly, ‘I Bum Stewart Lee’.

  Stewart Lee. He was the edgy, handsome half of the duo that did ‘Fist of Fun’ in the nineties. For four years he was very hot. Then he wasn’t. He spent a decade getting fat and doing increasingly bitter and surreal sets to uncomfortable social workers in provincial arts centres, before suddenly bouncing back into the public eye by accidentally co-writing ‘Jerry Springer – The Opera’.

  The timescale is a little out of whack, but I don’t feel I can really better The Spirit’s brutal and unsentimental assessment of my career from 2000 to 2004. Nonetheless, here goes.

  In the spring of 2001, Richard Thomas, a composer and former member of the musical comedy double act Miles and Millner, asked me to contribute some storylines to, and effectively direct, a new idea he was working on. I had directed Richard’s opera shorts for Simon Munnery’s BBC2 series Attention Scum, and he’d been happy with them. Now Richard had begun a project called How to Write an Opera about Jerry Springer, which featured him alone at a piano, playing snatches of tunes and talking about how you could write an opera about the American talk-show host Jerry Springer. His initial explanation of the genesis of the idea remains perfect: ‘One night I was watching The Jerry Springer Show, drunk, and there were all these fat people shouting at one another and you couldn’t understand what they were saying, and I thought, “That’s an opera.”’

  But Richard’s keen ear for a musical motif, and his keen eye for human suffering, found tragedy and comedy in Springer Show dialogue, which had previously just sounded profane, and his experiment played to a packed forty-seater room at Battersea Arts Centre. BAC’s genius move of the noughties was the introduction of Scratch Nights. You could use their facilities for free to develop new pieces, as long as you showed the work in progress to the public and appeared to entertain their inane suggestions in the bar afterwards. In the light of the now punitive costs of road-testing new ideas at the Edinburgh Fringe through my management, it was a real lifeline, and I doubt I would ever have written or performed anything new ever again without BAC’s encouragement.

  There was no money in the opera at this stage, and no obvious future. I didn’t give up standup to work on Richard’s opera, which I wasn’t being paid anything for in any case. I just gave up standup anyway, because I was sick of it and no one came to see me outside London and the Fringe. Instead, I was scraping by through writing weekly record reviews for my default arts patron at the Sunday Times Culture section, Rupert Murdoch. The mortgage on my flat was £500 a month, I wasn’t on drugs and got lots of free records. I managed on very little.

  On paper, the story of the opera’s success looks like a showbiz dream. Every few months we’d add another scene to the piece, expand the cast of enthusiastic operatic volunteers, and restage it during another little run of Battersea Scratch Nights, under the auspices of their dramaturge Tom Morris, who quietly changed our lives, and will doubtless do so again. And the audience, and the buzz, would grow.

  In August 2001, I declined to go to the Edinburgh Fringe for the first time since 1987. Instead, we staged a lengthy run of all the Jerry Springer material we had in the big, 200-seater room at Battersea. The great and the good all pitched up. Nick Hytner, the future director of the National Theatre, sniffed around like a funny little cat. We were written about in American newspapers by critics whose names excited people. We headed off a writ from the Springer Show’s production company. And our manager, now the producer of Richard’s opera as well, began to try and find investors who would take the show forward commercially.

  By the following summer, we’d sold out the 600-seater room at the Assembly Rooms for the month of the Edinburgh Fringe, and Nick Hytner wanted to open his tenure at the National Theatre with Jerry Springer: The Opera the next year. Amazing. Our manager’s hustling had worked. Maybe we’d even get paid. That same summer, I wrote and performed a little theatre piece I’d also ‘scratched’ at BAC, Pea Green Boat, at the Traverse in Edinburgh, dealing directly with the theatre via the promoter Hils Jago. I made £600. It was the first money I’d earned in Edinburgh in twelve years, since the £450 I got as one of the four acts in Comedy Zone in 1991. Things were looking up.

  But three years later, after all the awards, and after steering a cast of now nearly fifty through the ever-expanding show and moving it from the cocoon of the National Theatre to the bloody commercial reality of its West End run, there were things I realised about the production, and by implication the wider world, that thrust me back towards standup.

  First of all, it was clear to me, even with the costly firepower of our management’s marketing department and all the goodwill of the critics behind it, that Jerry Springer: The Opera was a piece of art. It was essentially confusing and opaque, whereas commercial musical theatre hits, and commercial hits generally, tend to be about comforting certainties (see Appendix I). No matter what production values and lush orchestration and full-colour posters you threw at it, it was at base a genuine piece of work, created by artists, initially without a commercial end product in sight. Once you stuck it in the West End at £50 a ticket, you’d already priced a significant proportion of discerning arts consumers out of the market, and located it somewhere they didn’t particularly want to go.

  Secondly, having spent my twilight years as a standup complaining about the limitations of the art form and the low expectations of its audiences, it now seemed wonderfully adaptable. Richard Thomas hadn’t let the fact that all people who like musical theatre are divs frighten him away from trying to expand the limits of the genre. And the simplicity of standup, the fact that you can think of an idea in the afternoon, after a long lie in, and implement it in the evening, suddenly seemed very attractive to me, now that I was a commercial theatre director whose attempts to make even the slightest change to the work required separate sets of instructions to literally dozens of people. Nor did you need an elaborate and literal stage set, though Julian Crouch’s tasteful and minimal design for Jerry had grappled subversively with commercial theatre’s institutionalised insistence on extravagance. But onstage, alone, as a standup, you could suggest anything with a few wellchosen words.

  And thirdly, from an economic perspective, standup suddenly didn’t seem such a bad bet. With Jerry, I was in the midst of a palpable hit, but I still didn’t have anything much to show for it. Our manager, who was also the producer of the show, had narrowly missed out on a lucrative deal for the publishing rights to the opera’s critically acclaimed songs, but as he explained to his loyal client Frank Skinner, who recalled a conversation with him in a Guardian interv
iew, ‘When you give someone the job of manager, you are basically giving them the right to play poker on your behalf.’*

  * Discussions with Sony about an album of songs from the show initially approved Lee Perry, Scott Walker and John Zorn as contributors, but eventually the head of Sony, Rob Stringer, started floating Ronan Keating from Boyzone, so I stopped attending the meetings or going to the studio. An awful house mix of one of the songs slunk unnoticed into the gay clubs as a white label, with the classical section in the middle that redeemed it snipped out. I was hugely relieved when the whole deal finally died.

  We worked on the show from spring 2000 to the autumn of 2001 for nothing, before getting a salary at the National, but we ended up waiving our royalties towards the end of the West End run to cover a legal battle with the Daily Mail. I used up all my savings to work on the show. From an economic perspective, I’d have been better spending the Opera years doing standup in rooms above pubs every night than swanning around the West End, drunk, brandishing a financially worthless Olivier award.*

  * But I wouldn’t have traded the experience of collaborating with Richard, Rob Thirtle and Julian Crouch from Improbable Theatre, David Soul, who played our final London Jerry, and the rest of the cast and creative team for a lifetime’s worth of tickets to We Will Rock You.

  In early 2010, I arranged to meet one of the stars of Jerry Springer: The Opera, Wills Morgan, in a West End pub. Wills had made the role of Jesus his own, and Richard essentially wrote it for him, but he had been through a rough patch and had recently become a minor human-interest news story. The idea of a homeless opera singer was too good for journalists to resist. Wills was back on his feet again, and housed, and had enough of a sense of perspective to find the humour in his recent woes. He also had a headless Olivier award in his rucksack, Sir Larry cleanly decapitated at his replica bronze neck. I declined to ask Wills how this accident had befallen the great knight of the theatre, but thought the image the final coda to my relationship with Jerry Springer: The Opera.