How I Escaped My Certain Fate Read online

  But in a sense Jerry Springer: The Opera made me. Looking at what I’d observed of the strengths and weaknesses of the show as a business proposition, I realised that if I could aim my standup act at a small but loyal audience that would get it, in small and tasteful venues where it would work, raise my game with the raw material and the form of standup in the same way as Richard Thomas had done with musical theatre’s, and somehow find a way of not spending more on promoting shows than I could possibly earn, it ought to be possible to be a commercially and creatively viable – and maybe alternative – standup comedian once again.

  Around that time, my teenage comedy hero John Hegley told me you only need a few thousand fans. And if they all give you ten pounds a year, you’re away. And I thought about all the musicians I like – the folk singers and free jazzers and alternative country cowpokes and persistent punk veterans who all hang in there, on small labels, selling self-released CDs for cash out of suitcases after gigs and operating within viable margins, tour, rest, tour, rest and sell some CDs. They survive.*

  * As an F-list celebrity and amateur arts journalist I have been able to meet many of my favourite musicians, and the way Howe Gelb of Giant Sand, Dave Graney, the former frontman of The Moodists, and the free improviser Derek Bailey all ran their affairs, direct-marketing their work to sustainably farmed fan bases, was something of an inspiration, economically as well as artistically. And the comic-book writer Alan Moore’s refusal to engage with big money’s misappropriation of his work clearly left him free to concentrate on the job in hand.

  However, as well as these three reasonably rational reasons why I wanted to start standup again, I had another, less rational, more disconcerting motive. I had been on nodding terms with Ricky Gervais since he was the Entertainments Officer at the University of London student union in the early nineties, where he was an enthusiastic promoter of standup nights and smitten fan of comedy. The compliments he would pay us were so extravagant that it often made interaction with him awkward and embarrassing, a natural characteristic he was subsequently able to siphon, to great effect, into the brilliantly realised role of David Brent.

  At first I hadn’t made the connection between the former comedy promoter and the man who, in 1999, took on the persona of an ignorant rightwing irritant on Channel 4’s The 11 O’Clock Show. At the time, Ricky was around the circuit occasionally, doing the character of a man with learning difficulties. However, nothing in Ricky’s work to date suggested the consummate and genre-redefining bombshell he was soon to drop, alongside Stephen Merchant, in the form of The Office, one of the all-time great television shows.

  On the back of the success of The Office, Ricky was suddenly able to do his first full-length solo standup shows, to large and enthusiastic audiences. It was drawn to my attention that he always praised me and Sean Lock in interviews, and cited us as his main inspirations. Ricky was preparing his second live tour, 2004’s Politics, when I drifted back onto the circuit. I hadn’t seen any of his standup.

  The first time I was informed that I had copied Ricky Gervais was at The Amused Moose in Soho, sometime in late 2003 or early 2004. A mother and her daughter, who had enjoyed my set but never seen me before, said that I was ‘clearly very influenced by Ricky Gervais’, with the implication that they had rumbled me and I really ought to find my own shtick. Then it happened again two or three times. And then I started to wonder why Ricky was always praising me to the skies in interviews, and so I took up an offer of tickets to his new show at the Bloomsbury Theatre.

  I sat there, dumbfounded. It wasn’t that Ricky was the same as me. He wasn’t. And I’m not saying he had copied me. There wasn’t a single line that exactly duplicated anything I’d ever done. But Ricky had the calmness, and the way of offering up contentious ideas as if they meant nothing and were merely idle thoughts, that I felt was a hallmark of my work, and which had always made it such a difficult fit for mainstream audiences at populist clubs. And there was enough coincidental overlap, in terms of tone and subjects I might cover – Aesop’s fables, a long routine on ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf ’ – to mean that now Ricky was a big name, I could understand why the casual viewer would mistake me for an imitator of his approach. I hadn’t realised how much my standup mattered to me until I considered the possibility of never being able to do it again. I became aware that the two people I had come with, sitting either side of me, were looking at me, concerned, and one of them took my hand in a supportive gesture. My face was frozen in numb shock. All around us people were laughing and clapping. I felt like I had died, or had never been born. Had my friends guessed what I was going through?

  At some point during the show I experienced an emotion I rarely feel. It was jealousy. I had honestly never been jealous of another comedian, and after working with musical theatre performers my admiration for standups had reached a point where I loved them all indiscriminately. And there were lots of friends and acquaintances of mine I’d started out with who had been much more successful than me – Al Murray, Steve Coogan, Harry Hill – but I didn’t ever feel like I was in competition with them because they are so different to me, and the choices they have made are theirs and not mine. And there were also people whose talents far outstripped mine, who produced work I thought I’d never be capable of in my life – Daniel Kitson, Simon Munnery, Jerry Sadowitz, Richard Thomas, Johnny Vegas, Kevin McAleer – but I didn’t want to be them, because I could never be them. But watching Ricky I felt myself thinking, ‘This is the kind of thing I used to do. And all these people in this massive room are loving it. Whereas in the dying days of my standup career, I was reviewed as if I didn’t know what I was doing, and found myself playing to fifteen people in Dundee.’ I hadn’t minded not being popular when I’d thought that what I did could never be popular, but seeing something not dissimilar to what I might do being enjoyed by 500 people, already sold on the strangest bits by virtue of Ricky’s celebrity, was bewildering.

  Ricky had invited us backstage, but I felt too shaken up to go. The upshot of that evening at the Bloomsbury was that I realised, somewhere within my dead and defeated hulk, I had an ego. For better or worse, I did not want to be Ted Chippington, a fondly remembered and influential cult back to doing a day job. And I did not want to be a footnote in standup either, cited as the comedian that the famous Ricky Gervais always said he liked. I wanted to get what I did as a standup back in the public eye, even if only on a low level, before whatever had been unique about me became subsumed into the general mass of comedy.

  I also knew that if I did start again and took it seriously, I would have to move what I had done onwards a stage or two, in case the mother and daughter from The Amused Moose were in the room. A few months later, I rang Ricky up and asked him if I could use one of his flattering interview quotes about me – ‘the funniest, most cliché-free comedian on the circuit’ – on a poster. He agreed, glad to help, and I think this single-handedly sold out the show StandUp Comedian on tour and in London and Edinburgh. But I often wonder what happened to Ricky Gervais. He never crops up on London circuit gigs now. I assume that, like all those long-forgotten names of my open-spot days – Two Gorgeous Hunks or The Singing Fireman or The Amazing Mr Smith – Ricky must have just given up.

  As I tentatively crept back into the clubs to assemble my new hour, now brazenly endorsed by Ricky Gervais, in short spots on regular comedy nights, I found the flavour of the London circuit had changed subtly. Sure, there were still lots of packed rooms of lads laughing at jokes about football, and I went to silence before some City types somewhere out east, and died so badly in a room in Hammer smith that a member of the audience took me to task afterwards, refusing to believe that I had ever made a living out of comedy. But the appliquéd surrealist Josie Long was running evenings with an almost arts-and-crafts flavour during which young weirdos read half-formed ideas off crumpled bits of paper, Robin Ince had started his unashamedly pretentious Book Club nights, and pre-TV Miranda Hart was fronting a vibrant women’s
comedy night downstairs at The Albany Arms, where I was allowed to be the monthly guest man.

  There was now an obvious split in the circuit. You could make a living doing your regular twenty minutes at Jongleurs and The Store, with some lucrative Christmas corporate gigs thrown in during the festive season, and never bother to go north to the Fringe. Or you could shuffle about in what seemed to be this new underground scene, and take your show to Edinburgh at a massive loss, and get written about in a broadsheet, and try and get some arts centre gigs, and let nerds all over the land know about your work via these newfangled social networking sites that I, like a nut-hungry ape staring at a nutcracker, was just beginning to see the possibilities of. If the phrase hadn’t lost its meaning once already, you could almost say we were witnessing the birth of a new Alternative Comedy, in opposition to the crowd-pleasing composite that the Alternative Comedy of old had become.

  The same trend was evident beyond the M25. Most major cities now had a branch of one of the big chains of comedy clubs, a Comedy Store or a Jongleurs, showcasing simple man-and-a-mic standup to audiences of stag and hen nights. But the ubiquity of these big chains meant that in every city that had a Franchised Laff Retail Outlet™, at least one alternative venue seemed to be thriving in opposition to it, such as XS Mallarkey in Manchester, or The Glee Club in Birmingham, or The Comedy Box in Bristol, none of which had much crossover with the franchises in terms of acts or audiences. It was the same sort of schism that, thirty years ago, pitched the non-sexist and non-racist Comic Strip against Bernard Manning’s old-school Embassy Club.

  These counter-Jongleurs were the places where I needed to be playing. Instead of going on for guaranteed fees in empty council venues and failing to build an audience, or boring the shit out of Friday night punters who just wanted to have some fun between work and the disco, I needed to be in the dedicated comedy clubs that had flourished in my absence from the circuit, playing for smaller fees to smaller crowds composed of people that would get it and would come back next time with a friend. Could I have a second chance at building the following I had failed to find in the previous decade?

  My management had a new live booker, Charlie Briggs, a young woman whose favourite act was the sentimental misanthropist Daniel Kitson, as everyone’s should be, and who had thought, in the light of watching how this fiercely independent comic conducts his business affairs, that there may be a live model that suited me better than my management’s usual telesales approach to booking dates. Charlie knew all these small and sussed venues, and she travelled the country to check them out on her own time, without any encouragement from her employers, even though these places weren’t all going to pay the kind of big fees that the telesales-style bookers needed to bump up their turnovers. With Charlie happy to eschew the larger fees I might have made by selling me on underwritten guarantees to big empty spaces, and booking me instead at this sustainable lower level, I thought I could get on the road after an Edinburgh Fringe run and maybe, before it was too late, claw myself out the beginnings of an audience that might stay with me for life. That was, if the August shows went well.

  So in early 2004, I began to scrape together a show from the few bits of my vast back catalogue that I could still stand to repeat and some ideas I’d had during my time off. I called it Stewart Lee – StandUp Comedian as a blunt statement of intent and a method of sidestepping the fact that I had no idea what it would be about as the Fringe listings deadline approached. My management winkled out an offer from a relatively new venue on the Edinburgh Fringe, the hip subterranean firetrap called The Underbelly, which was keen to have what it viewed as a big name, and the deal was weighted favourably enough to mean I wouldn’t actually lose money on an Edinburgh show they promoted for the first time in fifteen years.

  StandUp Comedian hit the ground running, in the corrugated silo of The Underbelly’s White Belly room. I was thrilled to be away from negotiating the needs of the massive cast of the opera and to be back on my own. Now that I had been ladled with theatrical accolades, previously puzzled critics had to assume that my apparent inability to write and perform standup properly was in fact the result of positive artistic choices, rather than an indication of a basic lack of ability, and they adjusted their star ratings accordingly. Plus in my absence I had been fêted by their new favourite, the mid-noughties sensation Ricky Gervais.

  I took every small-hours Fringe festival club set going, revelling in my freedom, choked ecstatically on a million fags, long after midnight, in steamy attics and dripping cellars, turning comedy fat back into tentative muscle. And I saw dozens of superb new acts I’d never seen before, like the disarmingly honest Chippenham skinhead Will Hodgson and the brilliantly realised character comedy of Will Adamsdale in Jackson’s Way, which I attended half a dozen times at least, and which was to alter the whole way I thought about performance. Watching Will, an un categorisable Etonian performance-art eccentric who never blinked in the face of audience disbelief, maintaining the most improbable and engaging of conceits in the face of mass irritation and total audience boredom proved to me that one man on a stage in a room could be anything at all, go anywhere, say anything, suggest anything, do anything. This was what I needed to see.

  Comedians’ memoirs, about how they got back on the road after a lay-off, or their fully approved fly-on-the-wall documentaries on the same subject, tend towards the sentimental journeys of thoroughly made millionaires, peeping out from their Chelsea penthouses and Hollywood Hills adobe ranches to try and recapture their youth. Understand this: it was not nostalgia that drew me back to standup. I was pushing forty. Nothing had worked out, not even the theatrical hit of the decade. For the middle part of my thirties I’d been barely earning a living. I was like a punch-drunk prizefighter with no other viable skills who thought maybe there still might be a battle to be won. And I realised that standup was just one man on a stage in a room. And so standup was infinite. And I had been a fool to doubt it. I might never be a proper comedian, like friends and acquaintances who had achieved fame and wealth and mass acclaim, but perhaps I could still be an Alternative Comedian, which, I gradually remembered, was what I had wanted to be in the first place.

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  StandUp Comedian

  A transcript of the show recorded on 10 March 2005 at The Stand, Glasgow

  PRE-SHOW MUSIC: ‘THE BREATH OF COLDNESS’*

  * ‘The Breath of Coldness’ is a ten-minute saxophone solo, using the circular breathing technique, from the album America 2003 by the British free-jazz saxophonist Evan Parker, with whom I share a birthday. During the missing years of being an award-winning opera director who once shook hands with Michael Portillo at a buffet at the National Theatre, I’d moved to Stoke Newington in Hackney. Stoke Newington is the spiritual home and elephants’ graveyard of British free improvised music. In Stoke Newington, the streets are littered with puzzled musical mavericks still trying to figure out how to improvise non-idiomatically within a now established idiom.

  I was first exposed to this kind of music by my flatmate, the guitarist Michael Cosgrave, in 1992, when he was briefly press-ganged into the musique concrète noodlers Morphogenesis, who described themselves, with hopefully knowing humour, as ‘Britain’s most theoretically rigorous group’, an epithet I subsequently cannibalised into my own late-nineties poster strapline ‘Britain’s most theoretically rigorous comedian’. I’d attended the Red Rose Club’s out-there Momposo evenings when I lived in Finsbury Park in the mid-to late nineties, and I’d seen the ever open-minded Sonic Youth jam with representatives from the scene at various events in the nineties, and made curious trips to London Musicians’ Collective events at the ICA and the South Bank. But in Stoke Newington, gigs at The Vortex and improvised music club nights at The Red Lion and Ryan’s Bar meant I was now regularly immersed in splurge and skronk. Evan Parker was a monthly fixture at The Vortex, a listed building a few hundred yards from my new flat that was eventually demolished under mysterious circumstances to make way for a
Nando’s, and I saw him dozens of times in the first few years I lived there. And this stuff got under my skin.

  I do appreciate it’s always dangerous, and potentially shaming, for comedians to claim inspiration from great musicians, or indeed any other legitimate artists. When TV’s Russell Howard cites, in an interview, Bob Dylan’s mantra ‘every great artist needs to be in a permanent state of becoming’ as an influence, one wonders what relationship this profound phrase has with appearing on Mock the Week and making fun of Susan Boyle for having a hairy face?

  But I feel that the sheer bloody-mindedness of the free-jazzers was something of an example, as was their take-it-or-leave-it attitude to critical and public approval. One felt, romantically I am sure, this music had to be made, and would somehow issue forth whatever, out of sheer necessity, irrespective of people’s response. Listeners had to come to it on its own terms, suspend their expectations and forget what they had learned. I’ll never be one of those comics who genuinely jam a whole set off the top of their heads, like the mighty Phil Kaye or the fiery and fluid Ross Noble, but I admired the musicians’ fearlessness in the face of apparently perilous artistic precipices.

  Thus it was a very deliberate and selfconscious decision to use the Evan Parker solo, on a loop, as the pre-show music for StandUp Comedian. The normal pre-show procedure for standup is to play something upbeat and jaunty, slightly too loud, through the PA. (The Amused Moose Club’s endless repeat plays of that Supergrass song about something pumping on the stereo to introduce every act is a case in point, and I am always inwardly amused, whenever I do gigs there, to slouch on as non-triumphally as I am able.) But in the small and stifling space of The Underbelly’s soggy dungeon, The White Belly, in August 2004, the Evan Parker solo was a warning, before the show began, that this was not intended to be like other standup shows.