How I Escaped My Certain Fate (33 page)
Read How I Escaped My Certain Fate Online
Authors: Stewart Lee
At some stage around this point, the head of BBC2’s offer of a series without needing to make a pilot was reduced to me being offered a pilot. I can’t remember why, although it is true that I hadn’t approached getting on with writing it with much enthusiasm as I never seriously thought the series would happen anyway. I wanted to concentrate on building up the live audience, a much more practical and achievable aim. Not unreasonably, my manager lost patience with me and told me I had to ‘stop behaving like Jerry Sadowitz or someone and start making some money for the company’, and that I couldn’t just do what I wanted in life. Then the star producer Armando Iannucci was attached to oversee this pilot for the BBC, in house, and I began to take the possibility a bit more seriously.
One of my ideas for the series was to perform stand-up sets of different styles in different places. I decided to try and do a set of observational comedy, from the perspective of an insect, whilst dressed as an insect, in front of an appropriate audience. Then I was approached by an old friend, Bridget Nicholls, an eco-activist with pirate blood who was organising an entomology-based arts event called Pestival at the Barnes Wetlands Centre that May. Would I do the opening-night cabaret in some capacity? I decided to do my proposed insect act there, Armando began to make tentative arrangements to film it on the night, and I investigated costume-makers.
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I think, looking at it now, that like many things in my shows, this insect idea also has its roots in a conversation with Simon Munnery. For one of the Cluub Zarathustra cabaret shows, Simon had come up with the idea of an insect comedian of some sort. There was a precedent for this in his work. During the Edinburgh Fringe in 1990, I had helped Simon experiment in an onstage collaboration with a worm by driving him to Mike’s Tackle Shop in Musselburgh, where all kinds of worms were commercially available in large quantities.
As Simon’s proposed act involved the worm being publicly slain, I overcame my ethical opposition to this by suggesting that rather than being dug up from the Scottish earth, the worm should be purchased from somewhere where it would otherwise have been sold to a fisherman, who would only have impaled it on a hook and fed it to a fish anyway. Normally, I don’t think I could have countenanced assisting someone in slaughtering a worm in the name of entertainment, but I had recently read Hemingway’s persuasive 1929 book on bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon.
In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway convinces the reader that the artistry of the bullfight is so great that we can spare a few bulls and discount their pain. As a toddler I remember being taken to a bullfight in Spain by my mother and amusing the locals by cheering for the bull to kill the man, and I put a load of slides my father had taken of the event down the toilet in protest, but Death in the Afternoon swung me, albeit temporarily. And I was convinced that whatever the comedy genius Simon Munnery had in mind for the worm, it would at least be the match of the artistry of the capering Spanish butchers. And certainly, the tiny hangman’s gibbet that he was constructing out of balsa wood in our flea-infested Edinburgh flat was a work of art in itself.
Simon was booked into the Fringe Club that night, a massive space in the student-union building. Back when the Fringe was run on dole cheques and goodwill, before the money men moved in, the Fringe Club offered free showers, free poster space and free nightly entertainment to masses of ungrateful people drunk on subsidised
booze. Simon took the stage in the persona of The League Against Tedium, a top-hatted dictator character given to highly quotable and unforgettable aphorisms, usually about his superiority to all other living things, and a kind of right-wing mirror image of his earlier Alan Parker Urban Warrior incarnation. I don’t remember it going especially well that night, but by the end of Simon’s allotted time his failure was sealed.
In an attempt to display his superiority to worms, The League Against Tedium took the worm and tied it with cotton to the gibbet, which was set on a table front-lit by a powerful lamp that back-projected the shadow of the worm’s wriggling body thirty feet high onto the rear wall of the venue. Then, to a cacophony of boos and jeers, and the sound of women bursting into tears, The League Against Tedium took a pair of scissors and ceremoniously snipped the worm in two, the half of its body that remained tied to the worm-gibbet jerking spasmodically in confusion and discomfort.
Hemingway convinced me that bullfighting was worth a few worms. But as he exited through the back entrance of the building, to escape a crowd baying for his blood, Simon Munnery had not convinced me that he was worth even one worm.
For the Cluub Zarathustra insect act, five years later, Simon suggested putting an insect in a tank and pretending it was a comedian, though at no point was killing it in public ever discussed. I thought the insect should be as big an insect as possible, like a stick insect or a praying mantis, and that it should have some kind of
mini-microphone
stand in the case. Simon wanted to get the comedian Jeff Green to voice the insect’s act from offstage, whilst a camera relayed footage of the insect onto a big overhead screen. Jeff ’s act at the time was composed of good-natured laddish bits on everyday experience. I think Simon just wanted Jeff to do his actual act, and for that to be the stand-up act of an insect, whereas I wanted to write something like the act I ended up doing here in 41st Best. But we both agreed that for some reason, Jeff Green’s voice, a high and keening Scouse falsetto which was instantly likeable, would be the ideal voice for the tiny insect comedian.
Well, of course, like so many things, this never came to anything, but there are morphic resonances of it throughout British comedy
ever since, of which my own attempt at observational insect stand-up is but one. My wife Bridget Christie, entirely unaware of the Jeff Green/Stick Insect idea, has recently been appearing around London in a home-made ant costume – not onstage, though – just for her own amusement. And when I was script-editing Harry Hill’s shows for Channel 4 in the late nineties, the floppy-collared loon™ became fascinated by the comic possibilities of flies, filling miniature television studios, sealed inside Perspex tanks, with hundreds of them, specially bred from sacks of maggots which were delivered at the start of shooting.
I contacted Harry through his spokesman to ask him for his memories of the fly skits, and this was the reply I received:
The fly thing is a while ago but I believe it to be my idea. The first one was The Fly Cruise and we also did Play Your Cards Right. I can’t really remember. I think we did about five and that Al Murray did the buzzing noises of the flies. The flies were supplied by an animal wrangler who had to get the maggots at the right stage to hatch in time for the show. Although the mini sets were filmed under Perspex boxes inevitably a lot of the flies got out and then turned up on the set for the recording of the stand-up sections of the show which led to many retakes being needed.
Thanks, Harry!
It was the job of our director, the old-school BBC bow-tie-and-moustache man Robin Nash, to try and film convincing light-entertainment-style footage of the massed flies. Robin was mentioned earlier in this book, as it was he who insisted on splitting Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ into two parts when he produced Top of the Pops because he thought it too long for television. Perhaps Nash was being punished by the ghost of Freddie Mercury, now an actual lord of the flies with power over insect life, by being made to film his unruly subjects.
For the fly sketches it was difficult for Robin, even with many years of experience filming Pan’s People and Legs & Co., to get what we television professionals call ‘singles’, which are shots of performers in isolation from their fellow actors. The flies had proven resistant to direction, and many of them had died and were just lying in a heap. To this day I remember Robin standing in the gallery and
tearing his hair out in rage as he bellowed to the camera operators on the studio floor, ‘No, on his face! On the fly’s face!!’
TV’s Harry Hill takes up the tale:
I too remember Robin shouting ‘No! On the fly’s face!’ And also, one of the first things I ever saw at the Edinburgh Fringe festival was Simon Munnery at the Fringe Club cutting a worm in half and I remember being quite shocked by it. I think he was booed off. That same night I saw one of my future managers heckling an Asian woman in a wheelchair by shouting ‘Sad fuck!’ It was the year of Newman and Baddiel. All the flies are dead now.
Warming to his insect theme, Harry continues:
I recently resurrected the fly thing and did insect EastEnders on TV Burp, my multi-award-winning ITV show. It was a proud moment – an all-insect-acted sketch on ITV prime time. Oh my! If you’d told me that I would be doing that thirty years ago when I originally thought of insect-acted sketches I would have collapsed in a big old heap of laughter.
Dear readers, despite it mentioning Hemingway and describing the execution of a worm, this footnote has been the most showbiz section of this book so far. I bet you liked it.
The pending Pestival performance aside, I’d already agreed not to do a new stand-up show for the summer of 2006, intending to leave the field fallow for a year, hoping to escape an inevitable critical backlash after two well-reviewed sets. And Roland Keating’s promise of a small BBC fee would create a degree of what we now know as quantitative easing, so I threw myself into some theatre projects: a workshop of something about William Blake I was toying with for the National Theatre Studio, featuring Johnny Vegas and the folk-singer Eliza Carthy, and directing a revival of
Talk Radio
by Eric Bogosian, an American performance artist and comic I used to listen to on the Peel show as a teenager, with Phil Nicol for Underbelly in
Edinburgh. But on Friday 7 April 2006, in a pub across the road from the National Theatre rehearsal studios, my manager told me the BBC had now withdrawn their offer of even a pilot.
A few weeks later, I went in to see my manager for the official line on the withdrawal of the BBC offer. I sat opposite him in his office, and he sat behind a computer, reading out a letter from the head of comedy, Lucy Lumsden, which explained that the work I had done on the proposed show no longer fitted with the BBC executives’ ‘original vision of the programme’. The cancellation blew a minor hole in my finances, knocked my faith in the trustworthiness of TV executives and, more pressingly, left me obliged to do my insect act at Pestival without anyone to foot the bill for the insect costume.
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In the end, I just did Pestival as me, talking about insects, but pretended I did it in the insect gear when I came to retell the story in the subsequent stand-up show, 41st Best Stand-Up Ever. A transcript of this is presented here as Appendix VI.
That summer, in Edinburgh, I realised what the 2007 stand-up show could be about. I wanted to explore the bureaucratic process by which a firm offer of a TV series, with no pilot necessary, could eventually be withdrawn, without any real explanation. Even though the actual story was very specifically about television, there were universally applicable themes, such as the Kafkaesque way our progress in life is impeded or aided by official decisions made for apparently random reasons by pen-pushers we never even meet, that anyone could relate to. I wanted to call it ‘The Decommissioning Process’, and use my decommissioning letter as a starting point for the story. I saw my manager sitting on a bench in the Pleasance Courtyard
with Paul Schlesinger, the head of BBC Radio Comedy. I asked my manager if it would be possible to see a copy of Lucy Lumsden’s email cancelling my pilot. He said I couldn’t, because I would probably do a show about it.
Notwithstanding the truth of his observation, I was shocked to find that I began to wonder if the email ever existed at all. By which I don’t mean that I think the email did not exist. I think it probably did. What shocked me was that I was in a state of such low confidence in the entire infrastructure of the comedy business that it was possible for me to imagine my manager fabricating the contents of a non-existent email for some unknowable purpose. Again, I am not saying he did this. But I sat opposite him when he read it out, and never thought to jump over his desk and look at the computer screen, as that would have been the behaviour of a madman. I realised, in my ongoing state of general paranoia and distrust, I had reached a stage where I was prepared to believe the people who worked
for
me were reading out emails that didn’t even exist. Even though the email and its contents probably were real, the fact that I entertained the possibility that they weren’t meant that in my delusional mind, I had reached a position of total breakdown in trust.
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There were other factors leading up to this. The advertising for the desperate live tour of the opera in 2006, and for the show’s final London dates, had copy along the lines of ‘Can you handle this shocking show?’ and ‘Come and see what all the outrage is about,’ which we had agreed it wouldn’t have; a documentary about the blasphemy laws entitled New Puritans, which I made for a company my manager co-owned, was retitled Stewart Lee Says What’s So Bad About Blasphemy? before broadcast without anyone consulting me, leading to predictably negative comments in the press; and promises to sound out legitimate record-label interest for an audio release of Stand-Up Comedian, which I thought would help build an audience if properly distributed to reviewers, came to nothing. Cumulatively, this sort of stuff makes you paranoid, especially if you know 65,000 people are actively trying to have your work banned.