How I Escaped My Certain Fate Read online

  * This was off the top of my head, in response to the heckle, but one of the advantages of having stolen, as a younger man, the slow and ponderous delivery of Ted Chippington, Arnold Brown and Norman Lovett is that, compared to the average comic, I get extra thinking time between each word, and so really ought to be able to come out with something at least half-coherent.

  But … of course the other major inaccuracy of that film was that in the Middle Ages there was no such country as Scotland. Scotland was actually invented, as you all know, in 1911, by the McGowan sweet company as a way of marketing Highland toffee. Because of course, traditionally, we think toffee’s better if it’s manufactured at a high altitude.*

  * I didn’t bother improvising around the theme of Highland toffee if I was south of the border. In Scotland there might be five minutes in it, but a man has to know his limitations. Readers of these footnotes may find this surprising, but I do not think that everything that occurs to me is worth saying.

  But again, I was making a number of kind of crass generalisations about, about the Scots, about my country there. And I don’t, I don’t believe any of them. Again, I did it for comic effect.

  But you do meet people who have very fixed notions about other groups of people. I’ll give you an example of what I mean. I got in, er, a cab in, in London in December, and about five minutes into the journey, a propos of nothing, early on a Sunday morning, the cab driver turned round to me and he said, ‘I think all homosexuals should be killed.’*

  * This actually happened to me, in the summer of 1999, as I pulled off the Westway towards BBC TV centre in a car that had been booked by the BBC. If you’re driving someone to the liberal bastion of the BBC, it’s reasonable to assume they won’t think all homosexuals should be killed, and of course there’s always the high statistical chance that your passenger will themselves be gay. Where did the comment spring from? Was there something on the radio that I didn’t hear, or a billboard I didn’t see, that provoked it? Also, why say it at all? Even from a business point of view it can’t make sense for a service-provider to risk causing such massive offence. Why are cab drivers not concerned about appearing to fulfil, completely, their standup comedy stereotype? It’s almost as if they enjoy it.

  Now, whatever you think of that, Glasgow, as a statement, you have to admit it’s a bold opening conversational gambit. You know, with a stranger. And I was a bit taken aback. I went, ‘Oh, why do you think that?’ And then there was a pause, ’cause he’d obviously never had to go to the next level of the argument, fraternising mainly with cab drivers, so … where that was just accepted as a point. No …*

  * Yes, I am aware that, paradoxically, I am arguing for more humane attitudes towards the gays while at the same time stereotyping all white, working-class cab drivers as being ignorant bigots. All I can say is that there are times in the act when I deliberately move into a kind of persona of a bigoted, middle-class, über-liberal for comic effect, but even I am not sure exactly where this character begins and I end, especially when I find myself behaving like this in my actual life.

  And he said, ‘Well …’ after a moment, he said, ‘Well, because homosexuality is immoral.’

  And I said – this is honestly true – I said, ‘Um, I’m not sure how much weight you can afford to place on the notion of morality in this argument, because morality’s not a fixed thing. It changes its parameters, culturally, historically, over time.’ I said, ‘For example, look at ancient Greece. To this day, we still take most of our most fundamental principles about ethics, aesthetics, er, philosophy, medicine, science, whatever from ancient Greece. And yet’, I said, ‘in ancient Greece, love between two men, far from being immoral, was actually considered the highest, most ethical, most profound, if you will, most moral form of love that there could be. So all I’m saying’, I said to him, ‘is I’m not sure how useful morality is, given its flexible nature, as a cornerstone of your argument on this subject.’*

  * I did honestly say something along these lines at this point, but even as I was saying it I passed a point where I was aware it had been an absurd decision to try and reason with the man, and so just went for broke, going on and on and on past the point of no return, enjoying the futility of it. These days I have utterly lost patience with cab drivers’ nonsense. Last year, on finding out that I was a comedian, a cab driver started to explain to me how Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown was the best comedian in the world, and where once I might have agreed politely and waited for the encounter to end, I just said, ‘He isn’t, and anyone who likes him must be a moron.’ And that was that. Enough is enough.

  And then he said to me – this is honestly true – he said to me, ‘Well, you can prove anything with facts, can’t you?’*

  * The cab driver actually said this. I think it is one of the single funniest sentences of all time. Its implications are endlessly terrifying, and endlessly hilarious. I wish it had been meant as a joke, but it wasn’t.

  For a minute, I went, ‘Yeah.’ And then I thought, ‘Hang on! That’s the most fantastic way of winning an argument I’ve ever heard! “You can … I’m not interested in facts. I find they tend to cloud my judgement. I prefer to rely on instinct and blind prejudice.”’

  And I came of age, for want of a better phrase, in the, in the nineteen-eighties when we had political correctness.* And people look back at that and they go, ‘Oh, political correctness was shit, wasn’t it? Being fair to people.’ And I think, ‘Maybe it was good, ’cause people wouldn’t have said that, and you wouldn’t have had happen what happened in May last year, right.’ If you remember, er, Ron Atkinson, the football manager, he got in trouble for calling a black footballer a lazy, thick nigger.† Right? And loads of people complained about it, understandably. And then on May the 17th, Jimmy Hill, the BBC-employed football commentator, came out in Ron Atkinson’s defence. And he said that, in his opinion, it was a load of fuss about nothing. He said, ‘What you have to understand’, Jimmy Hill said in the papers, 17th of May, ‘is that in the culture of football, calling a black man a nigger is just a bit of harmless fun.’‡

  * The twisting of the idea of ‘political correctness’ into a soft, one-size-fits-all punchbag for the rightwing media and your nan is a personal bugbear of mine which I return to time and time again onstage, most specifically in the 2007 show, 41st Best StandUp Ever. In 2008, Edward Stourton published It’s a PC World, which explained everything I ever wanted to say on the subject far more eloquently than I ever could have, and used actual hard statistical facts to back it up. Because no one can imagine a remotely propolitical correctness book, Stourton’s balanced account was, tellingly, misfiled by bookshops in the humour section, alongside Richard Littlejohn’s Hell in a Handcart, those crappy politically correct fairy tales books and Al Murray’s Pub Landlord annuals. Pundits on the Right like to imagine we live in a PC dictatorship, but the fact remains that in a high-street bookshop it is assumed that any book with PC in the title must be a hilarious attack on PC, rather than a book in its defence, because the only time you ever see PC mentioned is when people are complaining about PC. For money. And usually on the very publicly funded radio stations that these dicks believe are involved in a politically correct conspiracy to silence them.

  † Even when you are using the word in inverted commas, quoting someone else unfavourably, there is an electric charge to saying ‘nigger’ onstage in front of hundreds of people. It feels utterly forbidden and wrong, as one would hope it would. Lenny Bruce, in his fantastic fifties routine ‘Are There Any Niggers in Here Tonight?’, argues that repeated use of the word robs it of its power. I don’t know if this is the case, and it’s certainly unlikely that this is a motivation that Ron Atkinson had in mind when using it in this context. Though in a world where the London Evening Standard has described Russell Brand as ‘the closest thing we have to Lenny Bruce’, I suppose it’s possible that Ron Atkinson too may have been using offensive language and semantic shock tactics to expose our own inner hypocrisy. Or som
ething. Anyway, here’s hoping he dies face down in a toilet too.

  ‡ ‘The culture of football’. What a ludicrous phrase! Listen to yourself, Hill.

  And I thought, ‘Call me old-fashioned … I mean, I know the culture of football has a very broad definition of harmless fun, broad enough to include carrying out a racial assault and still getting in the England team, er, gang-raping a teenage girl in a London hotel room, and yet perversely allowing Jimmy Hill to carry on living. But surely that can’t be the case.’*

  * I hate football. And anyone that likes it.

  But Jimmy Hill went on to qualify his statement. He said that in his opinion, calling a black man a nigger was no more offensive than calling him, Jimmy Hill, ‘Chinny’, because he had a big chin.

  And again, I read that and I thought, ‘Call me a square from the past, but surely the word “nigger” is more offensive than the word “chinny”?’ Because the word ‘nigger’ comes with a whole weight of cultural and historical significance that is not really there for the word ‘chinny’. You know, there are not, um, there are not people standing for election now on the grounds that ‘People with big chins should be sent back to wherever they come from – Chinland probably, I don’t know, I haven’t done any research into it, obviously.’ And there were not vast swathes of humanity historically enslaved on the grounds that they had big chins. If there had been, all popular culture as we know it would be entirely different. There would not be a blues root underpinning all the late-twentieth-century popular music that you love if the Mississippi delta had been populated exclusively by disenfranchised ex-slaves with big chins …

  ‘Woke up this morning,

  Got a big chin.

  It’s not that much of a problem to be honest.

  I won’t base an entire musical genre on it.’

  And you don’t hear news reports saying, ‘A man was beaten to death in Hull last night. The violence is thought to be chin-motivated.’ Although in Jimmy Hill’s case I’d be happy to see an exception made. Kill him! Kill Jimmy Hill! But kill him in an ironic way! Break into the Natural History Museum, steal the jawbone of a blue whale, the largest chin currently known to science, and beat Jimmy Hill to death with it, in an example of what sociologists are already calling chin-on-chin violence.

  But we shouldn’t be surprised, Glasgow, to find out that Jimmy Hill is evil and mad, right, because all people that are involved in the business of football or play football or go and support it or watch it on television, or even know anything about it, are filthy, reactionary scum, right. Er …*

  * It was great fun taking a more or less arbitrary position against a whole bunch of people here, using football fans to stand for the new, post-Alternative Comedy consumer, and saying this show isn’t for you, so go and watch something else.

  Take Gary Lineker for example, right. Gary Lineker is a twisted, evil man. You’re going, ‘No, he isn’t, Stew. He’s nice. He’s like a velvet owl.’* He isn’t, right? Gary Lineker is evil. Gary Lineker chooses to advertise crisps, right, and with the benefit of early-twenty-first-century super-science, we now know that crisps, rather than being a life-giving health food as we previously thought, make little children fat, and then they die. Right?

  * Each night I would change what Gary Lineker was like, but it usually involved fabric and some kind of living thing. Oddly, ‘velvet owl’, the one that got recorded here, seems the most appropriate that I remember coming up with. If you were to see Lineker captioned ‘Gary “The Velvet Owl” Lineker’ on a sports show, you would probably assume it was a real football nickname. During the 1990 football tournament – I don’t remember if it was the World Cup or the FA Cup as I don’t like football – there was a goalkeeper called Peter Shilton, who my football-fan flatmates randomly christened Peter ‘The Bee’ Shilton. I know nothing about football, but I did find this funny.

  Now, about six years ago, due to a tragic chain of events, I didn’t live anywhere for about four months. I had to sleep on the floor of an office in West London. And I ate mainly … I couldn’t cook anything, so I ate mainly crisps from the garage. And during that period, I put on about four stone. And someone said to me, ‘Do you not know that a single packet of crisps contains your full daily allowance of saturated fats?’ And I just thought that represented good value.* It was Gary Lineker looking out for me. I trusted his velvet-owl face to look after me. And …

  * My former manager’s personal trainer said this to me during a period when he was tasked to try and save my fat life, but my understanding of health issues was so low that I didn’t immediately realise he considered the concentrated and convenient presence of the full daily allowance of saturated fats to be a bad thing. I just thought the crisps meant that all the saturated fats we needed were being delivered in a handy condensed form. Subsequently, I went running three times a week for five years, until my knees gave in, but went through a brief period of actual genuine fitness around 2005/6. That said, periodic bouts of the stomach illness that inspired the ’90s Comedian set, coupled with months on the road eating Ginsters and drinking, have conspired to give me the fluctuating weight that means hostile posters on internet message boards are unable to decide if I am merely tubby or actually obese. As I write this, in 2010, I am approaching the weight where I will soon need to lose it, or change my act into one of those ‘a cheery fat man looks at the world’-type turns.

  But he chooses to advertise crisps. Why does Gary Lineker advertise crisps? He can’t need the money. He’s on television all the time, isn’t he, amusing us. His family run a fresh fruit and vegetable stand in Leicester market, Lineker’s Fresh Fruit and Veg. He could advertise that. He could help save human lives. But instead he chooses to advertise crisps. Why does Gary Lineker advertise crisps? It can only be that Gary Lineker is sexually aroused by the idea of obese children dying.

  Now … There’s one person clapping over there. Of course, remember, for a comedian, the only thing worse than no one clapping is the sound of one person clapping, ’cause it suggests you’re out on a kind of a limb.*

  * I love the sound of one person clapping, and inevitably use a rejigged version of this line pretty much every time I am onstage.

  But to try and find out more about people who like football, I went on your internet, on your World Wide Web. And um … I went on Jimmy Hill’s website, which is real. It’s called, er, jimmyhill.co.uk, and there’s a guestbook there where you the public, that’s you, can leave your opinions. And, er, a bloke called Scott had been on it. Um. And um … I’m not allowed to read out what his actual email address is, but if you go there, you can find it. Erm, so, you know, do that. Anyway, he said … um, Scott says, in the guestbook of Jimmy Hill’s website, he says, ‘I agree with Jimmy’s views that Britain is rapidly becoming no more a land which is populated by genuine British people born here. Please don’t get me wrong,’ writes Scott, ‘I am no Nazi or xenophobe as the pressure groups or government would have you believe. I’m just someone who was born in this country and hates to see it going to pot now.’ And it would be easier to take Scott’s views seriously if he hadn’t spelt the word ‘xenophobe’ Z-E-N-A-P-H-O-B, which of course just means someone who has an irrational hatred of Japanese Buddhism.*

  * I don’t know if I’d do this material now. I am so politically correct these days that picking on someone because they couldn’t spell properly would seem wrong. Mocking the uneducated, disenfranchised white working class for being uneducated probably isn’t the best way to get them to feel less isolated and to stop being so racist. What is? I don’t know, but I look back on bits of these routines from half a decade ago and sometimes I wonder who the person doing them was.

  But it is easy, Glasgow, right, in the current climate of paranoia to make a kind of race-based error, right. I’ve done it myself. Er, I’ll tell you how it happened. I haven’t been doing this for a few years, and one of the jobs I’ve been doing is working as a kind of arts journalist, writing about stuff. And last year I was really
excited, ’cause I, I got to interview Ang Lee, the Taiwanese film director, um, about the Incredible Hulk film that he’d directed.* And I was really excited, ’cause I’ve read the Incredible Hulk comics since I was about, er, six years old and I still read them now. And I will take … To prove that, I will take any question on the Hulk from you now, to prove that. Any question …

  * I did do this. I did interview Ang Lee on the phone, but due to a bad line, my tinnitus and his accent I was barely able to understand a single word he said, and ended up having to cobble together the feature from nothing. That’s the basis of truth in this story.

  I have written two record reviews a week and the odd feature for the Sunday Times Culture section since 1995, and during the majority of my multi-award-winning Jerry Springer: The Opera years this was my only dependable source of income, and kept me afloat.

  AUDIENCE MEMBER: What colour is he?

  What colour is he? Have you asked me that because you know that’s … there’s a more complicated answer, than you …

  AUDIENCE MEMBER: Er … no.

  No. OK, well … Bad luck, because he was, er … You want me to say he was green and everyone will go, ‘Aha, that’s funny.’ But actually, for the first, er, six issues of Astounding Stories in 1960 – there’s a man nodding there, with a T-shirt saying KILL EVERYONE NOW on it, the kind of person who knows these facts – um, for the first six issues, he was of course grey. Of course. Um … But because of the dot-printing thing, the colours all used to run together, so it came out a blur. So they made him green after the sixth issue. And he’s been green [sic] twice since then. Erm … once in a six-issue mini-series written by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale called Hulk: Gray. He was grey in that. That came out last … year before last. Available in hardback now. And um … he was also grey in the comic strip between about 1989 and ’94, when Peter David was writing it and he made him go in a nutrient bath and that made him grey.