How I Escaped My Certain Fate (16 page)
Read How I Escaped My Certain Fate Online
Authors: Stewart Lee
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I am saying this as if to convince both myself and the audience that it is fine to do this routine about someone who has been dead now for the best part of a decade.
†
I did not do this. I watched it on TV. Phelim O’Neil, a friend of my then girlfriend who is now a film critic, told me he saw an E.T. in the flowers.
And I imagined a household somewhere on that awful autumn Sunday morning, where perhaps the wife had woken up first, and she’d watched the news and she went through to her still-sleeping husband, and she said …
*
*
This was the first routine I ever wrote, I think, where I began to stretch the silences, the lack of laughs, the tension, to the point where I’d be worried about ever winning back the room. Since doing this routine a lot in the late nineties, and on the 2004/5 Stand-Up Comedian tour, it now seems easily manageable. There’s always a clear end in sight, and lots of little handrails to grab onto in the midst of all the uncertainty, but at the time it felt like a nightly leap into the void, acting out the grief of the people in the story to the silent onlookers. Today, I’d go much further away from the shallow end.
I used to like doing this bit in theatres and bigger venues where there was a stage, so I could roll around the lip in imagined woe here, and even allow myself to fall a few feet on hearing the tragic news if the drop didn’t look too great to risk, though I remember hurting myself quite badly dropping off the stage of the Hi-Ficlub in Melbourne in 2000. Today, I love counter-weighting the apparent measured monotony of my routines with sudden bursts of possible physical jeopardy, and on the If You Prefer a Milder Comedian tour of 2009/10 I found myself in loads of nineteenth-century theatres full of ledges and empty audience boxes I could drape myself out of during moments of feigned mental collapse, to the distress of the panicked ushers.
‘Please. Please wake u– … I need you to wake up and be with me now. There’s been a t– … Some terrible news. I need you to get up, come in the front room and watch it on the television with me, ’cause I can’t be alone. So please wake up.’
But you know, he’s asleep, he’s asleep. He’s going …
[
lying down, as though half-awake
]
‘What? It’s fucking … It’s half past six on a Sunday morning. I am asleep. I know I’m speaking but I am asleep. I don’t want to get up. I’m asleep. So … just … I know you’re upset but just say what it is. What is it?’
And she’d have gone …
[
stands up
]
‘Please. If you … If you love me, just this one time, just get up. And … Because it’s an awful thing and I need … I can’t be alone. I need someone to comfort me and share. Just … please. Get up.’
[
lying down
]
And he’d have gone …
‘Look, I was out late last night. I’ve got, I’ve got work at seven … tomorrow. This is my … this is my one day for sleeping in. I don’t want to get up till about half past eleven, to be honest. And even then I’m not going to get dressed. I’m just going to be, like, in my pants and stuff, just sitting around. I kind of … I don’t know what you … If you were just to say what it is … You know … What is it?’
[
stands up
]
She’d have gone …
‘Princess Diana, Lady Di, has … she … has been killed.’
[
lying down
]
And he’d have gone …
‘No! [
pounding fist on floor
] Not the Queen of Hearts!
The Rose of England … and Scotland, and Wales, and bits of Ireland, no! How did it … There’s no God! How did it … why? How did it happen?’
*
*
There’s another Lee and Herring echo here, as we would often write characters whose dialogue consisted mainly of them shouting ‘Why?’
[
standing up
]
And she’d have gone …
‘It was in a car crash in Paris last night. They don’t know the exact details yet. But she’s dead.’
So presumably at that point, he’d have got up, got out of bed, tried to get dressed, you know, get some kind of grip on his emotions and his feelings. Calm down his grief. And then he’d have said …
‘I’d better go out and get a life-size inflatable model of E.T. You know, for the gates of her home.’
And his wife would have said …
‘Yes. But you’d better hurry, ’cause there’ll be a rush on those now. We don’t want to be the only people not putting one there.’
And I was talking about this onstage in Croydon at the time it happened, and a bloke shouted out, ‘I was there! And I saw that! And it wasn’t a life-size inflatable model of E.T., it was a life-size inflatable model of ALF!’
*
*
This actually happened. I think one of the things I have consciously copied from Greg Fleet is to embrace talking in a routine about times that routine hasn’t worked, and I think there’s a direct relationship here to his bit about accidentally doing a routine about shark attacks to an audience that includes a couple who lost their son to a shark. We’re comedians. Why do we pretend to be like you and do routines about everyday life? This is my everyday life, being heckled about an inflatable alien in Croydon, so I will talk about it, and it will be fascinating to you, because it is so different to your everyday life. Yes. You. In your suit and tie.
I didn’t even know what an ALF was, I had to ask him. He said, ‘Oh, it’s an American kids’ TV thing. It’s an alien – A-L-F, Alien Life Form. It’s like a cross between a pig and an aardvark, from space. And it sometimes wears a nappy, and it says kind of wise-ass things.’ And he said he’d seen one of those there. I didn’t see an ALF outside Kensington Palace, before the … And I’m not saying there wasn’t one there, maybe there was at some stage. But by the time I arrived, it had got covered up under flowers or carried away on a river of infants’ tears. I don’t know, I didn’t see it.
*
*
Sometimes people complained to me about this routine after shows, but very rarely, and I could usually defuse the situation by showing how it was about the public response to the princess’s death, and not simply personal mockery of her. But once, at the club on The Tattershall Castle boat on the River Thames, a woman came up to me crying about it, and I began my usual explanation. She stopped me and said she was upset because an AIDS ward named after her father had been renamed after Princess Diana when she died, and she was just sick of hearing about her everywhere. It’s impossible to guess what will upset people.
It never goes away, it’s back in the news now, the Princess Diana Memorial Fountain.
*
Last year, people went, ‘Oh, it’s great, it’s, it’s what she would have wanted. It’s a place where families can hang out, children can play. It’s what Princess Diana would have wanted.’ It isn’t. What Princess Diana would have wanted would have been to have not been killed. And then in death, not to have become the unwitting receptacle of the hysterical, overemotional, shrieking grief of twats. That’s what she would have wanted.
†
*
How convenient for me.
†
The material from here on in isn’t really a good enough end to a show, but as the show didn’t appear to me at the time to have a defi-nite theme or through-line, it was hard to know how to end it. So I do what you’ll see most comics do, when you watch the hour-long DVD of the unrelated series of gags they’re touring off the back of a regular slot on a TV quiz show – I speed up and shout to give the impression that some kind of conclusion is being reached and then quit the stage on a roll, hopefully before anyone realises that choosing the material to close on was a largely arbitrary decision.
But in retrospect, the show did have a theme: extraordinary popu lar delusions and the madness of crowds. It was all there in undercurrents, but I never realised. One simple sentence could have tied everything together. But you can’t go back.
It didn’t even work! It didn’t even work, Glasgow! Children were supposed to be able to play in it. They kept falling over, breaking their arms and legs. They made it out of slate, or sheets of ice, or something. They were getting dogshit-eye-blindness disease from the water. In the end, they had to close it down, fence it off, put warning signs on it like a decommissioned Chernobyl nuclear reactor. ‘Don’t go near the Princess Diana Memorial Fountain! It’s dangerous! Don’t even look at it! You’ll get cancer and die! Run away!’
But it’s ridiculous. There should be a memorial to her, there should be a memorial to her, because she did some amazing things. She worked, worked with charity and landmines. And she got one GCSE in domestic science. And to achieve that, and only that, when born into such a position of privilege and wealth, requires a steely determination of focus. You’ve got to know from an early age that you want to achieve next to nothing, and work hard at it, when all the odds are in your favour.
*
*
Irony
.
And that’s why there should be a memorial to her, the People’s Princess, right. That’s why I’m going to make my own, I’m going to make my own memorial fountain to the Princess Diana Memorial Fountain. It’s going to be called the Princess Diana Memorial Fountain Memorial
Fountain
Fountain. But it’s not going to be some state-approved, Viscount Althorp-subsidised architectural carbuncle. It’s going to be simple, like she would have wanted. It’s going to be me, lying on my back in Hyde Park, near the Princess Diana Memorial Fountain, naked, with a colander over my penis. Every hour, on the hour, I’ll piss up through that. Children can come and play in it if they want, families can gather round, I don’t mind. You can do it yourselves, Glasgow, do it yourselves. You don’t even need a colander. That’s gilding the lily, to be honest. Just do a piss anywhere you want. In the street, in your house, in a library, in an antenatal unit, in the face of a treasured family pet or an elderly relative.
And if a policeman says to you, ‘What are you doing? What on earth do you think you’re doing … madam?’ just say, ‘I’m paying tribute in the only way I understand to the memory of Princess Diana, Princess of Wales.’
*
*
Is this an end? No. Pathetic.
I’ve been Stewart Lee. Thanks a lot for bearing with us tonight, thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.
Now go.
EXIT MUSIC: ‘QUEEN OF THE WORLD’ BY LLOYD AND CLAUDETTE
.
*
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I chose this jaunty blue-beat number because it seems, subliminally, to tie in with Princess Diana. And because I liked dancing around to it backstage.
Critical response to
Stand-Up Comedian
’s Edinburgh run was largely favourable, with the three major comedy reviewers establishing typically personal positions that they were to deviate little from over the next five years. The scholarly, but qualified, enthusiasm of
The Times
’s Dominic Maxwell: ‘Lee’s wilful sophistication will not strike
everyone
’s funny bones. Like the avant-jazz that’s playing as you file in, it relies on your knowledge of the rules it’s toying with. But the self-reflexive playfulness never descends into onanism, because it’s tethered to Lee’s attack on a world dominated by half-truths. Form matches content. A
stunning
return’; the cautious, reluctant praise of the
Guardian
’s
Brian Logan: ‘Lee’s technical excellence is driving him in directions I find easier to admire than enjoy. I appreciated his control while longing for the joke(s) to end. There are brilliant pay-offs, but he makes you work for them’; and the indecisive bafflement of the
Independent
’s Julian Hall, who reviews me suspiciously, as if he thinks some kind of trick is being played on him: ‘Surly, arrogant and laboured, you either love or hate his on-stage persona … hit and miss.’
*
*
When I had returned to stand-up in 2004, it was not as a former and failed TV comic from the ‘comedy is the new rock and roll’ era, but as the Olivier award-nominated director and co-librettist of an opera routinely described as the greatest piece of musical theatre for thirty years. I benefited enormously from this change in the way I was perceived by broadsheet newspapers, and I think my then management deliberately exaggerated my role in Richard Thomas’s idea with this aim in sight. I got highbrow credibility on the back of someone else’s unassuming genius.
Word of mouth was good, and two weeks in the 180-seater room at London’s Soho Theatre followed in November, with a budget fixed at a level where I could not only break even, but actually make money. Then I got sick during the shows, shaky, feeble and hot, and my bright orange wee burned my shrivelled urethra on exit. I couldn’t sleep or stand or eat. I’d get to the venue early and lie flat in the dressing room for hours to gather enough strength to hobble about for the length of the set. My GP agreed that my urine was a disturbing colour, but the
sample
I gave her got lost in the system, and eventually my
girlfriend
hassled my manager about my condition. He got his connected Notting Hill doctor, who knew which strings to pull, to check me out, and I was immediately admitted to the Whittington hospital in Archway. Between the three of them, they probably saved me from something more serious.