Read How I Escaped My Certain Fate Online
Authors: Stewart Lee
How I Escaped My Certain Fate (15 page)
AUDIENCE
: Yes!
Who likes Osama bin Laden? Yeah! Who likes Ben Elton?
Oh, it’s no one again.
*
*
I would change the exact detail of these questions every night, but it was always fairly easy to get the crowd to do what I wanted, namely to cheer Osama bin Laden and offer up nothing for Ben Elton, simply by varying the pitch and velocity of the sentences. And yet we still wonder how Hitler succeeded.
It’s fucking weird, it’s weird. That is weird, ’cause I must have done that thirty or forty times, right, and every time, without any element of manipulation, more people like Osama bin Laden, a multiple murderer, than Ben Elton. I think why, why would more people like Osama bin Laden than Ben Elton? And I think it’s ’cause when you compare the two of them, compared to Ben Elton, Osama bin Laden has at least lived his life to a consistent set of ethical
principles
. ’Cause … Yeah, clap, let him hear you. So, er …
’Cause people hate Ben Elton, and every now and again a journalist has the courage to ask him why this is. I’ve seen it happen twice in print and once on Parkinson.
Parkinson
said to him, he said to Ben Elton, ‘Ben Elton, why do you think everyone hates you?’ And Ben Elton said – he did – and Ben Elton said, ‘Well, Michael, it’s ’cause in this
country
, people don’t like success.’ But he was wrong about that. The real answer is much more simple. It’s just that in this country, people don’t like Ben Elton.
*
*
Why don’t people like Ben Elton? Admittedly, I was writing this material in the light of seeing Elton’s Queen musical We Will Rock You. I was obliged to see it professionally, as the director of another musical, Jerry Springer: The Opera, but I found it profoundly depressing, even as an example of the largely futile genre of
musical
theatre (see Appendix I). It made me despair of humanity, but having seen it, Ben Elton’s Queen musical is one of those things you can’t unsee, like animal pornography or some especially horrible vomit in a gutter, and it haunts you for days, every time you close your eyes. There’s bad art, and then there’s corrupt art,
dishonest
art, art that lies and is made with nothing but contempt for its audience; We Will Rock You is all those. It is currently celebrating its eighth year in the West End. A film adaptation is in pre-production and a sequel is on the way.
I think the nature of my despair in Ben Elton is also generationally specific. Unless you can remember comedy before the Alternative Comedy boom of 1979/80, when for many people it seemed like no one was writing comedy that was relevant to them in any way, you probably can’t imagine how much Ben Elton, The Young Ones, Alexei Sayle and co. meant. Of course, all of them have on some level betrayed the principles they espoused, or else the hopes that we plastered onto them, in the last thirty years. It’s
inevitable
. Political and artistic ideals wither in the face of real-world choices. But few of Alternative Comedy’s first wave have sold out with such spectacular glee and disregard for what they once stood for as Ben Elton, to the point where even watching his old material now he just seems like an opportunistic charlatan, working the
system
. Find the YouTube clip of Ben introducing the brilliant Kevin McAleer on Saturday Live in the mid-eighties and look how
carefully
the slippery snake chooses his words to disassociate himself from the risk of McAleer’s brilliantly bizarre performance failing.
And they don’t hate him through the kind of conduit of the notion of success. They hate him entirely on his own terms, because of who he is and the bad things that he’s done. And I think if you’re my age, you can kind of understand why it is. ’Cause if you’re, if you’re over
thirty-five
, you’ll remember before Alternative Comedy, when you’d watch comedians, and it had no kind of relevance to you and you didn’t understand what they were talking about and who they were. And then
The Young Ones
came along, and all that, with Ben Elton, and you thought, ‘At last, something for us.’
*
*
This idea that a writer-performer would only criticise another because they are jealous of them is extremely irritating. In the last few years, I have been accused of being jealous of Ben Elton, Chris Moyles, Richard Hammond, Adrian Chiles … the list goes on and on, and no one on it is a source of jealousy for me. I have written material making fun of them because I dislike what they stand for, or what they are perceived to embody, or because they don’t really stand for anything and so it’s funny to be so furious with, or about, them.
That said, I wouldn’t do ten minutes on hating Ben Elton today. When I wrote this, I was at a low ebb; I hadn’t been getting
audiences
or good reviews. So there was almost something heroic about a pesky little outsider cocking his leg on the emperor’s naked ankle. Six years later, Ben Elton has little critical standing left, but remains enormously wealthy and successful. Six years later, I have no
obvious
future, my DVDs sell poorly, the money for this book is less than Ben Elton makes from one night of We Will Rock You, but, wrongly or rightly, I’m accepted as a fixture of the fringes of the comedy establishment and there’d be nothing heroic today about me having a go at someone as obviously in slow creative decline as Ben Elton. The balance is all wrong.
Then, of course, over the years, Ben Elton’s changed. He’s worked with Queen, who were one of the British bands that broke the, er, cultural embargo on South Africa under apartheid.
*
He’s worked with Andrew Lloyd Webber, who’s worse than that. And, er … And a song that they co-wrote was performed at the inauguration of George Bush. And when questioned about it, Ben Elton said he didn’t see it so much as a celebration of George Bush as a celebration of the President of the United States of America. But of course, they’re the same thing. That’s why that argument doesn’t work.
*
Of all the bands for Elton to work with he chooses the apartheid embargo-busters Queen, and then decides to impose onto their unwieldy frame the notion that they represent a political revolt. You couldn’t make it up, as Richard Littlejohn will say later in this book.
But the problem is he’s kind of been compromised by proximity to, to success. And, and if you think about it, all the great comedians are kind of outsider figures,
commenting
on society from outside. Kind of holy fools, shaman clowns, outsiders. Spike Milligan was able to remain an outsider by virtue of having long-term mental-illness
problems
. Um … Bill Hicks has been able to remain an outsider because he died of cancer at the age of thirty-two. Michael Barrymore has been able to remain an outsider by becoming the subject of a murder investigation after a man was found dead in his pool. I admire Barrymore’s commitment to this abstract notion of the outsider shaman-clown figure. And I think it’s good … I think it’s great to be on this late at night in Glasgow talking about this idea. But um …
But lately I have more sympathy for what we in the trade call Elton’s compromise. And … ’Cause … In the last few years I, I directed a, a show and it was, it was kind of a hit in the West End. And I had to meet loads of famous people on, on press nights and, um, and opening nights. I met, er,
Bonnie
Langford. Yeah. I met her twice. I met, er, the tall one from the Three Degrees, Sheila … something, her name is. And one night, I found myself shaking hands before I
realised
who it was, with Michael Portillo, right? I looked up. I thought it was the little wooden goblin from the Cuprinol advert. But it was Michael Portillo, someone whose policies I had marched against as a student, or would have done if I hadn’t been drunk. But theoretically …
*
*
The years pass. This meeting with Portillo was in 2003. Since then I’ve been on various TV shows with him and he seems nice enough. There are worse people, many of them members of the Labour Party. But again here, and throughout the Ben Elton-bashing bit, I am sort of in character as a smug, stuck-up, politically correct, holier than thou leftie, a character I have researched so fully I often feel obliged actually to behave like it in my own spare time,
sometimes
for years on end.
There was worse to come than Portillo. On June the 16th last year, I heard a rumour that Cherie Blair was going to come and see the show, right? And I thought, ‘Well, I hope that’s not the case.’ You know, I don’t want to have to meet her. ’Cause I’m one of two million Britons that marched against her husband’s war. I think it’s unethical. I think it’s going to come back and bite us in the arse and we’ll be in trouble about it for decades, once the dust settles. And I, I don’t want to have to be like some E-list celebrity New Labour apologist. I don’t want to meet her, no way.
And then the next day, the woman from the
public-relations
company for the show rang me up. And she said, ‘I’ve got some great news, Cherie Blair is coming to see the show, and she wants to meet the cast and the creative team afterwards.’
*
*
This is another true story. On the rare occasions when I have been involved with anything that famous people want to come to, it does genuinely amaze me that the supporting PR people think you will want to meet them, especially when meeting them, as is the case with Cherie Blair, has political or ethical dimensions.
And I went, ‘I’m sorry. I can’t do it. I’ve got … This is where I draw a line. You know. You d–,’ I said. ‘You don’t even want me in the building. If I’m there, I’m going to get kind of political Tourette’s syndrome and just do something like fly an anti-war banner off the stage, or make a speech at the end, or just do something to Cherie Blair that’ll wipe that … whatever that is … on her face. You know, make it go.’
And she said, ‘Well, that’s a shame, because … Does this change your mind?’ she said. ‘She’s not coming on her own. She’s coming with her guest, who is the president of Scope, the Spastics Society.’ Right, and this honestly happened. I was put in this weird position where you want to make some ineffectual gesture against Cherie Blair, but you don’t want to snub a person from a worthwhile charity, Scope. You know, so …
*
*
Modern dilemmas. By snubbing the warmonger’s wife I would also be snubbing the Scope woman. And yes, I know the Spastics Society is now called Scope, and that they frown on the use of the word ‘
spastic
’, but I needed to use it here to give the moral choice involved more weight, to really hammer home what Scope is all about.
I thought, ‘Well, I know what I’ll do. I’ll go down, and after the show I’ll say to Cherie Blair, “I hope you’re happy, Cherie. I hope when you look across at Tony every
morning
, you think of all those thousands of people killed in his war, and I hope you’re happy when you think of all those little kids in Baghdad and Basra with their arms and legs blown off, maimed, crippled for life.” Then I’ll turn to the woman from Scope, and I’ll go, “Maybe you can have a rummage around in one of your charity shops. See if you can find them some cardigans.”’
*
*
This often didn’t get a laugh. I don’t really understand why. It’s black humour, but it’s not against the Scope beneficiaries or the victims of war.
But in the end, I didn’t do that. What I did was, I said that I would go, and then I just didn’t. Yeah.
*
*
I just didn’t go. Hurrah for me.
But … We’re back talking about the war again. Last, last bit. And er … Like I say, there’s this kind of assumption I think from us here in Europe, where we look at, particularly in Britain, where we look at America’s hysterical reaction to the 9th of November, and we think, ‘Well, you know, that wouldn’t happen here. We wouldn’t do that, ’cause we’re reasonable, sensible people here in Britain.’ But we don’t have to look very far back in our own cultural history to see an example of us losing the plot as a, as a nation. And I’m talking of course about the death of Princess Diana, the late Princess of Wales.
*
It was in the news again last summer because of the Princess Diana Memorial Fountain, which you’ll remember was a rubbish fountain. And fulfilled very few of the job-description criteria of fountains.
*
Going over this show again it does seem like a bit of a ragbag of unrelated stuff. This must be the most contrived segue of the lot, as I limp into the Princess Diana routine, which I initially wrote in 1997, having elaborated on it over the years but never performing in a solo stand-up show. The new Princess Diana fountain was in the news, which was sufficient excuse to shoehorn it in.
But it’s ongoing, it’s ongoing. The story never goes away.
*
I remember when she died, um, ’cause about two days before the state funeral, I went down to Kensington Palace where Princess Diana had lived to, to look at all the tributes left outside, you know. And in amongst all the bunches of flowers and sympathy cards, and poems little kids had written, and drawings and paintings people had done, whatever … in amongst all that, I honestly saw, and this is true, I saw a life-size inflatable model of E.T.
†
It was honestly there, outside Kensington Palace, two days before the state funeral. And I stood there looking at the inflatable E.T. for some forty or fifty minutes. And I thought to myself, ‘How did that get there? Who would have thought that that was an appropriate gesture?’