How I Escaped My Certain Fate (3 page)

In February 1990, after six months in London, I got through the heats of the Hackney Empire and
City Limits
magazine New Act of the Year competition, and won the final, beating Simon Munnery’s Security Guard character, which was much funnier than my act. (‘I went to work today. Nothing happened. That’s what I get paid for.’)
*

Even the host of the event, the hypnotically
lugubrious
Jewish veteran Ivor Dembina, knew I’d been lucky. ‘You were the best on the night, fair play,’ he said, in a tone
typically laden with world-weary wisdom and an
indefinable
regret. ‘Well done,’ said John Connor, the head judge, who was also the comedy critic of
City Limits
and the
producer
of The Comedy Store’s Cutting Edge night, ‘we’ll show these Oxbridge wankers like Rob Newman and David Baddiel what real comedy is.’ ‘Oh,’ I answered, not thinking, as we walked into the backstage darkness, ‘I went to Oxford.’ ‘Did you?’ said Connor. ‘But you’re not like those wankers, are you?’ he added with all the desperation of a disappointed sex tourist who has just discovered his
beautiful
Thai prostitute has a penis, and is wondering whether just to try and make the best of it. ‘I like David Baddiel. I think he’s good,’ I said. I’d seen Baddiel in Edinburgh the previous summer. He was the first stand-up who seemed to speak in an idiom that was recognisably aimed at our generation. His distinctive tone of voice was soon to be imitated across all media for the next decade.

My prize for winning the Hackney Empire and
City
Limits
magazine’s New Act of the Year competition was £500, a booking at the Hackney Empire, a booking at The
Comedy
Store and a slot on a TV show I can’t remember the name of. I received the money on the night, but the
Hackney
Empire slot took a decade to materialise, The Comedy Store hasn’t booked me to this day, and the TV show never called. And the winner’s certificate was made out to ‘
Steward
’ Lee.

Ivor Dembina told me that because of the sort of act I was, stiff and still, I should always have the
microphonestand
boom set in a vertical position. ‘Who is this guy?’ I thought. Well, he was Ivor Dembina, the Obi-Wan Kenobi of comedy, and he was right. Learning that I needed a
vertical
boom stand, which I now call Dembina’s Upright Position, was the best thing I got out of being The Hackney
Empire New Act of the Year. That, and an upsurge in
circuit
bookings, which meant I soon gave up my temping jobs. Since November 1990, I can honestly say, with some degree of pride, I have never done a decent day’s work in my life.

In 1990, I was taken on by a newly moulded stand-up comedy management agency for Alternative Comedians, run by a failed impresario, the thwarting of whose
theatrical
ambitions had forced him to apply his enormous brain and Cheshire Cat charm to the blossoming standup scene. There were only two other similar outfits: Off the Kerb, which specialised in the sort of gay, transsexual, animal-based, drag and novelty acts beloved by its
flamboyant
founder Addison Cresswell; and Stage Left, which managed and booked more overtly hard-line
performers
such as Jeremy Hardy and a young Mark Thomas. My new agency’s roster made them seem like the future and they did the deal on a handshake, in the days before
binding
contracts, promising that they were about to set up a national network of money-spinning student gigs. ‘I’ll just pass you to our live department,’ the big manager would say, cupping his hand over the phone and passing it along the sofa he shared with the little manager, then the
company’s
only other employee and a vocal fan of the hardcore anarcho-punk band Conflict. ‘You cannot win a nuclear war!’ ran the spoken-word sample at the beginning of
The Ungovernable Force
, played full blast as he drove me to my undeserved Jerry Sadowitz support slots in a Ford Fiesta.

The new agency’s client list was already impressive: the aforementioned Sadowitz, a comic I remain quietly in awe of, who was then involved in a complex, controversial and hilarious reaction against the politically correct
orthodoxies
of the day; Simon Munnery, who was now pushing his
Alan Parker Urban Warrior character, a satirical love-letter to the punk revolutionaries he’d worshipped as a teenager; and David Baddiel and Rob Newman, whose sassy
pop-literate
acts and shoe-gazers’ haircuts were about to
create
a whole new audience for Alternative Comedy – girls. Today, I and all those other acts are long gone from the agency. Only David Baddiel remains, a once proud raven, his head now bowed, pecking the dry earth and tethered to the ground by the heavy chains of history, for fear that he too should fly away.

When I went back to the Edinburgh Fringe for my fourth visit in 1990, no longer a student comedian, my
management
company introduced bold new ideas to the stand-up comedy scene, such as advertising and two-colour
posters
. (The innovative idea of insurmountable
performers
’ debts, paid off piecemeal by working for the
management
company’s other departments, was yet to come.) The photo copied bits of paper everyone else pinned up in Edinburgh newsagents’ windows suddenly seemed so drab. The eighties were over. The bright new dawn of nineties comedy was rising, and we drove around Edinburgh under cover of darkness in a panel van, flyposting illegally with pots of paste and brushes, like the A-Team with jokes. The romance of it! Me, Simon Munnery, the comedy musician Jim Tavare, our brave two-man management team and a German crusty they had press-ganged into joining them, all of us pasting over Jeremy Hardy’s face again and again and again and again, like pathetic and ungrateful
schoolboys
vandalising a photo of the headmaster. Nobody on the Fringe had ever seen anything like it. Advertising! It was outrageous, and flew in the face of all eighties ideals. But in retrospect, the Stage Left acts, smoking rollies in their Red Wedge T-shirts and supping pints of Special Brew in the
Pleasance courtyard, were right to be annoyed. It was the beginning of the end, and I was an accessory.

With regard to earning a living week to week, there weren’t the nationwide opportunities for comics to play all over the country at arts centres and provincial theatres and local comedy clubs that there are today. But my new management were as good as their word and established an almost viable network of student comedy gigs at
polytechnics
and universities nationwide. No one had really thought to do this before. It seemed like Simon Munnery and I were always the advance party, sent out to colonise uncharted educational territories. We would find ourselves required to perform in the corner of a bar, with no stage, no lighting, no microphone, no seating and no posters advertising the show or its start time, booked by a
forgetful
Entertainments Officer who seemed disgruntled that our presence might mean he would have to turn off MTV, the jukebox, the fruit machines and the Space Invaders. In the end, to try and explain to the students how to set up a comedy gig, we sent out a drawing of a stick man holding a microphone with lights pointed at him.

Comics would head off in twos and threes and split £300 or so a show, after commission and before tax. We slept in dodgy DSS bed and breakfasts for as little as six pounds a night, or else saved the money and crashed on strangers’ sofas. Although I did tours of these universities and
polytechnics
, in various combinations of different acts, on and off for the next decade, they were often a struggle.
*

But these shows paid the bills. And we were young, and I loved riding the motorway network in second-hand cars, especially with Simon, hopped up on fags and lager,
listening
to tapes of The Fall and pissing in hedges, all the way from Peckham Rye to Jerusalem.

During the same period, 1990 to 1995, I’d been chipping away at writing for radio with Richard Herring, who had gone as far as buying an Amstrad word processor the size of a Mini Clubman, while I still clung to my electric
typewriter
, with its futuristic correction-ribbon facility.
Richard
had given up on stand-up after a string of frustrating try-out spots, though lots of the material people baulked at in 1990 has proved a perfect fit for twenty-first-century audiences who love the fine line he now walks between hilarious obscenity and criminally prosecutable
obscenity
. Instead, Rich approached the puzzle of trying to write for radio with a tenacity, enthusiasm and originality that dragged me along in its wake.

In those days, BBC Radio discovered new comedy writers by simply inviting anyone who wanted to write for Radio 4’s long-running weekly shit satire show,
Weekending
, to just come into the building, without even the most basic identity check, and meet with the producer of that week’s show. He or she would tell the assembled mass of stinking eccentrics what sort of sketches the show was still short of.
These wannabe writers, smelly and covered in food, shaggy of beard and baggy of trouser, sockless often, sometimes howling drunk and without a clean shirt between them, then sat in an airless room for the next twenty-four hours, tapping away at typewriters, as no one had laptops back then, before finally submitting some formulaic sketch in which John Major was Robin Hood or Darth Vader or a cat or something.

Some of the non-coms, as ‘non-commissioned’ writers were known, would sleep under desks overnight, curled up in their beards. The nightwatchman would always turn a blind eye when his torch flickered across their dreaming faces, for he could see the non-coms for what they were: spirits come to earth, voodoo children, faerie folk adrift in the world, gnomes and leprechauns in human form,
harmless
as flies, but with less hope of careers in radio. But if you could get stuff used regularly by
Weekending
, you might get a contracted commission for a minute of material every week worth £25.
*

Even though I was often away doing gigs, and my main interest remained stand-up, Richard’s enthusiasm for
writing
for radio pushed us through the process fairly quickly, and after getting a commission to write for
Weekending
we then wrote for
On the Hour
, the Steve Coogan and Chris
Morris vehicle that became TV’s
The Day Today
, though it transferred without us due to a petty argument and our delusional and insolent sense of entitlement. Throughout the mid-nineties we did various shows as Lee and Herring for Radio 4 and even Radio 1, which back then had many spoken-word and specialist shows, and developed the rudimentary chemistry of a viable double act. I was
thinner
than Richard at the time, and as some kind of contrast between the two players is all that is required in a double act really, we were soon able to elaborate our minimal weight differential into a fully formed comic relationship and take the act to BBC2 with the series of
Fist of Fun
.

In 1993, Newman and Baddiel played Wembley Arena, where Rob Newman flew high up into the air on a wire whilst talking about how he liked Crass as a child. Janet Street-Porter saw a picture of this in
The Face
and declared ‘comedy is the new rock and roll’. But when Rob Newman flew up in the air at Wembley it changed comedy in Britain for ever, probably for the worse. Suddenly stand-up looked like a career option for ambitious young people, and a cash cow for unscrupulous promoters. Could ye olde eighties Alternative Comedy still be ‘alternative’ when there were T-shirts of its latest stars on sale in skinny-fit sizes at
stadiums
? Rich and I had the same management as Newman and Baddiel, and perhaps they had hoped for the same stadium-filling results when we did TV, but we just didn’t have that kind of fan base. Knickers were rarely thrown at us, and if they had been, we would have worn them as hats, or just as knickers, our own having been cast away, filthy, in the lane.