March of the Lemmings Read online

  One may as well give the kosovorotka-marinading wazzocks something incomprehensible to feed to their bewildered brainstems. To me, then, Vladimir Putin is a giant, prolapsed female worker bee that sucks hot ridicule out of langoustines’ cephalothoraxes. Let’s see what crunchy, expansionist lavatory honey this notion causes the parthenogenetic Russian keyboard wendigos to inflate for us this week, in the shadow of Paul McGann and his art gnome.

  The problem here was twofold. Firstly, many Observer readers found this nonsense indistinguishable from my usual writing. (As has been pointed out by contributors many times, I am no A. A. Gill. Now that man can write! Bring back Frankie!!) And, secondly, many of the pro-Putin below-the-line comments the incoherence provoked were, I suspect, actually placed by sassy readers attempting to parody the usual Kremlin posts.

  Consider, for example, this convincingly odd submission from General Dreedle: ‘Russia is very well doing without your Opra Winfrey western pornography and youre decadent music. More lies about Ukraine which was only the size of a biscuit before transsexual won.’

  Whether the supposed Observer contributor General Dreedle is real or not, the fact is Putin’s Russia has taken political propaganda to the next level, motherfuckers! Meanwhile, here at home, Jeremy Corbyn is filmed sitting on the floor of a train.

  There is a long tradition of essentially dishonest photo opportunities being used by politicians to cement policy in the public mind. Consider Margaret Thatcher in that tank in 1986; or Michael Dukakis in that tank in 1988; or John Major on that tank in 1991.

  But politicians’ photo opportunities don’t only use tanks. In 2006, David Cameron, who went on to ruin Britain for ever, was photographed in Norway hugging a husky, as he launched the barefaced lie that he was unleashing the ‘greenest government ever’. But within a few years, Theresa May would close the Department of Energy and Climate Change and, post-Piggate, Conservative propagandists would have gone to any lengths to avoid David Cameron being photographed embracing an animal.

  But instead of being photographed in a tank like a normal politician, Jeremy Corbyn last week chose to be filmed sitting on the floor of a train. While clearly intended to highlight the scandal of private rail company ownership, the Labour Party’s release of the footage gives the same two blokes that secretly write all the jokes for the comedians on all those shitty TV comedy panel shows the opportunity to observe, ‘Corbyn should have sat in his own back benches. There’s plenty of room there!’

  Our Left needs to raise its game. If you ever got to see film of Putin sprawled on public transport, every single possible interpretation of the footage would already have been minutely mapped.

  This is very poor journalism, seemingly more interested in amusing the reader than informing them. I suggest that this ‘Stewart Lee’ – if that is his real name – should consider a career in a different field where such flights of fancy might be more welcome. Stand-up comedy, perhaps? Grover Rancid

  What a ridiculous article. More propagandist scaremongering and association with conflated ad hominem arguments with pure partisan, non-objective reporting as usual without balance. On Corbyn, Putin and by contrast our establishment. Geopolitical and national politics rhetoric combined. MSM is not only source, adapt, tell the truth or risk going under, buried by the same failing neoliberalism that gave power. Notice the same trolls are out with their Latin usernames too. Soros basement etc must be getting crowded. Equitable Effigy

  This attempt to somehow associating Corbyn with Putin is despicable. Freeblood3

  Corbyn the evil leftie – oh, how many ways can we smear him and associate him with … my god … the diabolical PUTIN!! EEEk. Laffcadio1944

  This sort of stuff is not going to play in the crucible of Brexit post-intellectualism. Howard Beale

  Sad that many Corbynistas who were previously hanging on every word of these ‘alternative comedians’ like Brand, will now find out the hard way that you don’t get a nice gig on the telly without basically conforming to the neo liberal consensus. Hugodegauche

  Does anyone still pretend to understand Lee’s stuff, or is liking it it just part of being in the Corbyn cult? John Winwin

  It’s as funny as a burning orphanage. Mr Badger1966

  Bring back Frankie. This is shit. Alan Tyndall

  Incisive writing, for once exposing the link between Putin and Corbyn. The Guardian should keep up the Russia and Putin bashing, rather than wasting time delving into meaningless social, environmental and evonomic issues that affect ordinary working people. Icelandicmaiden

  Odd piece of propaganda. Randomly tying in a hated reformer with Putin – pure Democrat playbook. Shtove

  The usual Guardian anti-Corbyn verbiage. Silvertown

  Another pathetically veiled article to bash Corbyn … Really low stuff. Forageforfood

  1 By February 2019, the terrifying conclusions of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee’s eighteen-month investigation into Facebook’s dissemination of ‘fake news’, and the way Russia weaponised it, made me nostalgic for comic exaggerations like this, which now just seem like statements of fact. We know without a doubt that our referendum was rigged, and yet we roll forward with its result.

  2 I thought it was just me that was being systematically trolled by Russians. It now turns out they were doing it to Western democracy in general. It’s possible some of the readers’ comments included at the end of this piece were from fake Russian accounts.

  3 The hysteria of the comments by some Corbyn loyalists here, blind to nuance and overreacting to trigger words without looking at the wider context, is tiresome and dispiriting. If indeed they are genuine Corbyn extremists, not people pretending to be Corbyn extremists to discredit the Labour Party. Who knows any more?

  No more schmoozing with the enemy on TV shows

  20 November 2016

  The danger in meeting politicians is that they seem all right and then, even as a multiple award-winning comedian, it is much harder to summon up the manufactured anger required to despise them for personal commercial gain. I have a mortgage. I can’t afford to find myself thinking things like, ‘You know, Ken Clarke isn’t so bad once you get to know him.’1 Hate is money! And, like a Danish sperm donor, I have to pump it out to a deadline by the bucketful!!

  In the ’00s I had a twenty-five-minute routine about Michael Portillo looking like the Cuprinol wood stain goblin, which was gradually becoming the spine of a new three-hour show. But after I met Portillo on BBC1’s This Week, he seemed belatedly reasonable in that way that ex-Tories often do, and I found I could no longer suggest he was a wood stain goblin with any conviction. Another revenue stream ran dry.

  I don’t like going on TV, but I will make an exception for This Week, of which I am a huge fan. People always ask me what Andrew Neil’s dogs are like in real life. To answer that question once and for all, Scrubber is nice, but Molly stinks and the BBC had to hush it up when she bit Jacob Rees-Mogg in his North East Somerset constituency. Though to be fair, Rees-Mogg had subjected the dog to cruel and sustained floccinaucinihilipilification.2

  Last Sunday morning, I further compromised my embargo and appeared on Peston’s ITV politics niche, Peston’s Weekly Thought Nook™. Peston introduced himself to me while reclining in a make-up chair: ‘Hello, I’m Peston. And today I’ll be talking to ballroom-dancing politico Ed Balls and UKIP’s Suzanne Evans. Stay with me.’

  I thought Peston’s greeting oddly formal and impersonal, and then realised he was being filmed for a trailer and was addressing the British public en masse, not me individually. I felt stupid for not understanding how TV worked, like when I was little and I thought Harold Wilson could see me through the television.3

  Next, I went to the green room, which is showbiz language for the place where the stars wait their turn to go on TV with Peston, or Andrew Neil, or whoever’s show it is. In the old days it could have been Russell Harty, for example. Or Gus Honeybun.4

  The green room doesn’t have to be
green, or even a room. There isn’t a green room on This Week on BBC1 in case the Daily Mail says it’s too luxurious. On This Week there’s just some chairs in a corridor and a table with old fishing magazines on it, like at the proctologist’s. ‘Andrew Neil will see you now.’ Peston is much better.

  I’m aware that writing about what happens in the green room is a betrayal of an unspoken showbiz-politics rule. Like Vegas, what happens in the green room stays in the green room. It’s supposed to be a safe space, in a theatre or at a TV studio, where performers and contributors shouldn’t feel they are being watched. Journalists went into my dressing room at the Leicester Square Theatre and reported that I used Lynx deodorant. I felt violated.

  Nowadays, I find it very difficult being in the green room with younger, newer comedians, as I feel my age and supposed status mean I am permanently required to be in presidential mode. And I mean this in the old sense of ‘presidential’, meaning magnanimous, patient and generous, rather than in the modern sense, meaning being a corrupt, pussy-grabbing racist. How quickly words change their meanings.

  In the Peston green room I sat next to Suzanne Evans from the Ukips. I tried to make small talk. She agreed that when Nigel Farage, earlier that week, had threatened to unleash a pussy-grabbing Trump sex-attack robot on Theresa May, it had been a bit much.5

  Suzanne Evans from the Ukips was wearing a giant Remembrance Day poppy made of cloth. Jeremy Corbyn came on TV wearing a tiny badge of a poppy. I said, ‘Your poppy’s massive, isn’t it, Suzanne? Jeremy Corbyn’s is tiny. He’s a traitor, isn’t he?’

  Suzanne Evans from the Ukips didn’t say much, and I worried that she had my card marked for being one of the liberal comedians that dominate all comedy now, to little or no effect in real terms. Perhaps she thought I was trying to generate material for a funny column. Which I wasn’t. At the time.

  Later on, when Marine Le Pen came on the BBC news being really, really racist, Suzanne Evans from the Ukips shook her head disapprovingly, as if Le Pen had crossed a racist line in the racist sand. I started wondering about gradations of tolerance, about how our relationship with someone, however minimal, affects our attitude towards them.

  On Christmas morning 1995, I came down to our kitchen, hungover, and the first sentence that was said to me, on Christmas morning, apropos of nothing, was: ‘You can say what you like about Hitler, but he had some good ideas. He just went about them the wrong way.’ It was Auntie Hattie, on seasonal secondment from the old people’s home, praising Hitler, on Christmas Day! On Christmas Day!! On Christmas Day in the morning!!! Sieg Heil!!!!6

  But we make allowances for the madness of our relatives, because they are little old ladies, and little old men, and are a bit confused probably; but we must not allow ourselves to make allowances for far-right politicians and their followers. Because the American woman with mixed-race kids I talk to at swimming lessons every Tuesday is afraid to go home; and the day after Brexit, in our cosy comedy community, an Asian comedian was told to go back where he came from by an emboldened heckler at the Comedy Store, historic home of politically correct alternative comedy, the sort of incident I haven’t seen since the ’80s.7

  And that’s why, after next week’s This Week, I’m not meeting any more TV politicians. These aren’t the times for self-loathing liberals to seek to understand the leaders of the global far right, or their supporters. That ship sailed when Trump put Breitbart into the White House.8 We should be in crisis-management mode.

  It’s time to reassert a fundamental principle, namely that there’s no excuse for bigotry, whichever alt-right buzzword you get Boris or Steve Bannon to rebrand it with. And if that means no more free green-room bacon sandwiches on Sunday morning for me, then so be it. We are all going to have to make sacrifices.

  The role of a comedian is to entertain with humour, not to preach his politics in the misguided belief that they are anything other than a professional entertainer. ID44390070

  This Week is a horror show of how far to the right any politics on the beeb has gone. In the run up to the 2015 election. Anyone, Lee included, happy to go on any be best chums with Neill & Portillo should be openly ridiculed and shamed for hob-nobbing with the enemy. Alfiehisself

  UKIP isn’t spelt with an ‘s’, who is this guy? Lukefisher

  Stewart, it’s ‘Ukip’ no ‘s’. Simples. DefendantK

  I want to hear what frankie Boyle thinks about our current predicament. Tdlx

  Give up and go home, you lost, you’re on the wrong side of history and your ‘comedy’ is not sufficiently mitigating. Notguilt

  Does anyone actually have a clue what this article is about? I know there are a lot of Lee groupies on here who will clam they enjoyed it enormously, and laughed their heads off, and saw a coruscating critique of the debased times in which we live. But did they actually have a clue what this article is about? JohnWinWin

  I have just realised that it is only Lee’s physical persona & delivery I dislike, as I quite enjoyed reading that piece. Mysteron

  Needless to say Mr Lee attended public school followed by Oxford. I am shocked I tell you, shocked. Observer1951

  Steward said he’s had enough of meeting politicians, now he has to make money a different way. Stewart needs more money so he can pay his bank-rent. Stewart used to do stand-up like a proper comedian, now he demands Viner lets him write lefty click-bait. Stewart sits at home in the dark, underwhelmed and drifting through the abyss. Stewart wakes up at 3am to gorge on disgusting, delicious food. Stewart hopes he can fill this void one way or another. Shame those green room bacon sarnies are over. HPCMini

  A middle-class lad, out of touch with anything contrary to his own experience, seeking to characterise people who don’t agree with him as troglodytes. Reminiscent of early 19th century Tory attitudes in the face of the clamour for democracy. The aristocracy and land owners used to know what was best for the rest of us, now it’s the well-educated, middle-class liberal. Mouthymike

  Unfortunately for Stewart Lee’s mortgage it may also be time to stop allowing self-loathing liberal comedians sate our sense of horror with clever, circular rhetoric. Alexlydiate

  Do people believe the ‘aunt Hattie’ Hitler story actually happened?! Quingurzula

  Firstly, are these luvvies allowed to mention bacon butties in case it upsets the peaceful religion? Secondly, it is advisable for a comedian to actually be funny … rather than the bland ‘right on’ wallahs these days. Kloppite

  1 Ken Clarke once presented a very sympathetic radio documentary on the heroin addict jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan.

  2 I gave up appearing on This Week in 2018, about the same time as they stopped asking me to appear, like someone trying to seem victorious by quitting a job before they are sacked. Andrew Neil started firing off weird 2 a.m. tweets about left-wing bias in BBC TV comedy, while simultaneously being chairman of the Spectator. The last few times I did the show, a researcher would keep me on the phone for three hours, telling me what Andrew Neil was going to ask me, and asking me how I would respond, and then on the actual show at midnight, Neil would just ask me something mildly, and yet also impossibly, different to what was agreed, which threw the whole thing off. (I think this also annoyed Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream, whose silent protest during the show’s closing dance number went viral.) And by the end, Michael Portillo used to just sit there with his arms folded, making a condescending face and waiting for an opportunity to interrupt, as if everything you said was beneath his consideration. Big nose! Watching the show during the Brexit era, its once invigorating levity seemed inappropriate, and most of its apparently unaccountable co-presenters were part of the problem that brought us to disaster. Its cancellation appeared to be announced on 14 February 2019, but perhaps wasn’t, and Neil began that night’s programme with a heavily editorialised speech about Churchill, clearly designed to discredit the Labour Party for perceived unpatriotic attitudes towards the war hero, before he, Portillo and The Mod Postman all ganged up on Stella Creasy
, the Talulah Gosh of British politics, like rats. Both incidents revealed how the once mighty show had run its course anyway, and it had become difficult for anyone to defend it. I did used to enjoy This Week, though, and once appeared on it with the delightfully surly Scottish nationalist Pat Kane, formerly of ’80s band The Kane Gang. But I was disappointed to read on Twitter subsequently that he thought I was smelly, as he wrote, ‘Jolly end-of-term feel backstage. Got to meet (somewhat odiferous) hero Stewart Lee.’ Paddy Ashdown’s former press secretary Miranda Green was on the show too, and kept vomiting into a bin, which I now worry was something to do with me. Come to think of it, when I went with the actor Paul Putner to see the German progressive-rock band Faust at the Southbank Centre sometime in the late ’90s, he said I smelt so bad people were moving away from me. And in 1983, my mum told me I smelt of stale urine when I sat next to her once in the front seat of her Mini Metro on Whitefields Road, and that I had to go home and wash. Have I been stinking the place out my whole life? Does that explain everything?

  3 Our cat used to run round the back of the television searching for the tiny men during the widescreen gunfight sections of Sergio Leone westerns. He was twenty-eight years old. Which is fucking old for a cat. (Without the word ‘fucking’ here, this joke wouldn’t be good enough to work. It’s just a rhythmical thing, really. Nonetheless, I apologise.)

  4 Today’s digitally connected children, with all media at their fingertips, will never understand the dimension-shattering thrill of travelling to a different television region and realising they had an entirely bespoke pantheon of local television presenters and magazine programmes. It was like visiting a parallel reality, where, instead of Birmingham’s Chris Phipps talking about punk rock on Look! Hear!, there was Manchester’s Tony Wilson talking about punk rock on So It Goes. The pod-lord Richard Herring has spoken at length of the trauma of moving, as a child, from Yorkshire, where Tiswas was broadcast, to Somerset, where it wasn’t. Gus Honeybun was a birthday-announcing rabbit who once ruled the south-western television region, and who could only be seen by other children when they were on holiday there, lending him a magical air. Rumoured to be obsessed with his co-star Fern Britton, Honeybun died from auto-asphyxiation in a Honiton hotel room on New Year’s Eve 1992 after she rejected his advances, though children were told he had returned to live in the countryside like a wild rabbit. I first became aware of his work while I was in a caravan near Tenby, circa 1978, where my grandparents would take me in the school holidays, when my mum was working. Now, my middle-class son has middle-class friends who go on skiing trips at half-term. They will never know the pleasure of chips at sunset on a windswept rainy beach, with the promise of a pocket of 2ps to try and tip over an amusement arcade waterfall. But my kids will. I deny them luxurious holidays and take them to Prestatyn out of season so they will understand.