Read How I Escaped My Certain Fate Online
Authors: Stewart Lee
How I Escaped My Certain Fate (39 page)
Firstly, I loved the
Celebrity Big Brother
racism scandal ’cause it meant that because of the bad racism, the show’s official sponsors, the Carphone Warehouse, were
contractually
obliged to issue the following genuine press
statement
. This is a genuine press statement from the Carphone Warehouse: ‘Racism is entirely at odds with the values of the Carphone Warehouse.’ Entirely at odds. I don’t know about
you, Glasgow, but I was hugely relieved to read that press statement, because prior to reading that press statement, I had suspected that the [
falsetto Irish
] Carphone Warehouse was in fact a front for a white supremacist organisation.
*
And I have in my hand here a piece of paper bearing the true values of the [
falsetto Irish
] Carphone Warehouse, the true values of the [
falsetto Irish
] Carphone Warehouse.
*
It amused me, privately, to say the words ‘Carphone Warehouse’ in an exaggerated attempt at the voice of Ed Byrne, who advertises the Carphone Warehouse, and is far better a comic than it is necessary for him to be.
- Sell phones.
- Sell more phones.
- Deny the Holocaust.
- Sell more phones.
- Deny the Holocaust again, this time by texting your mates.
- Lobby for the return of the gollywog and the
Black and White Minstrel Show. - Sell phones, sell phones to cars, sell as many phones as … quickly, sell phones, sell the phones, sell …!
The values of the Carphone Warehouse. The sheer
transparent
naked hypocrisy of even imagining for a moment that such things exist as the values of the Carphone
Warehouse
. Do you follow the values of Jesus or Buddha or Marx? No. I follow the values of the Carphone Warehouse, committed as they have been these past twenty years to fighting racism through the unusual medium of discount phone retail, a sure method which for so long eluded the ANC or the Rock Against Racism movement. The values of the Carphone Warehouse.
At what point do you think it was that the [
falsetto Irish
] Carphone Warehouse decided that
Big Brother
was no longer compatible with their values? Was it about three series ago when Channel 4 broadcast live footage of a clearly inebriated twenty-year-old woman inserting the neck of a wine bottle into her vagina? Did the Carphone Warehouse go, ‘Yes, at last, random objects inserted into the vagina of a drunk and the Carphone Warehouse are a brand-profile awareness marketing marriage made in heaven. And what a missed opportunity for product placement.’ The values of the Carphone Warehouse, of which there are none.
And the second great thing about the
Celebrity Big Brother
racism scandal was this. There’s a programme on that you may have seen called
Big Brother’s Big Mouth
or
Big Brother’s Little Brother,
something like that. Anyway, it’s not on Channel 4 normally, it’s on E4. And E4, if anything, is worse than Channel 4, isn’t it? ’Cause Channel 4 is like a flood of sewage that comes unbidden into your home, er, whereas E4 is like you’ve constructed a sluice to let it in. Ah, another potential market has disappeared. Just the Paramount Channel left then. They’ve been good to us in the past.
Um, so …
Big Brother’s Big Mouth
or whatever, it’s on E4. And they have experts on – sociologists, psychologists, psychiatrists – and they provide expert insight into and expert analysis of the phenomena of some twats in a place. And this programme’s hosted by Russell Brand. And what it meant when the bad racism happened, it meant that Russell Brand was contractually obliged to look
meaningfully
into the camera, making a serious face, and condemn racism in the strongest terms possible, whilst dressed as a cartoon pirate, before going back to his ongoing life’s work of thinking up cutesy, diminutive Mr Men names for his
own penis. Mr Winky. Mr Dinky. Mr Dingle-donky-
dinkywinky
-wooky-woo-wa-ner. And the way that Russell Brand thinks up cutesy, diminutive Mr Men names for his own penis makes him sound like a child molester who is trying to convince himself to allow himself to molest himself.
And when Martin Luther King saw racism in
nineteensixties
America, Martin Luther King called it out in the strongest, most visionary, eloquent terms possible. Martin Luther King said, ‘I have a dream that my four little
children
will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character,’ Martin Luther King. And when Russell Brand saw racism in his place of work,
Big Brother,
Russell Brand said, ‘Oooh, there’s been some bad racism and stuff going down today and no mistake, my liege. It’s made Mr Winky go right small, it has. Oh yes it has, oh yeah. And my ball-bag, my old ball-bag, has only gone up my bum. Here’s H from Steps.’
*
*
Russell Brand didn’t actually say this. He said, ‘Racism, it’s such a wank thing, innit? It’s such a pain in the arse that someone would go around being racist. And individually, I think, if people were made culpable for their actions, and were made to look at
themselves
they’d think, “Oh God, I shouldn’t say that.” And yet the way they are behaving collectively is obviously abhorrent,’ which isn’t too bad at all, on the spur of the moment. That said, no matter how good Brand’s handling of the situation, he was still hosting Big Brother’s Little Brother, a programme which clearly contributes to the creeping death of civilisation as we know it, and alters, for the worse, the lives of all those who watch it or participate in it.
Legally, when this set was released on DVD, I covered my arse by having a DVD extra where Johnny Vegas challenged me at length about this bit. (Much the same function is performed in this book by the above quote and Appendix V.)
And the third great thing about the
Celebrity Big Brother
racism scandal was this. There was a glamour model in the house, you may remember, Danielle Lloyd, a former Miss UK. And she said the worst racist things, arguably. And as a result of this, for the next three or four months,
Danielle
Lloyd lost a lot of lucrative glamour-modelling work. Now, what this means presumably is that the editors of
Nuts
magazine and
Zoo
magazine and
Loaded
magazine and
FHM
magazine must have sat around and tried to decide whether their readers would feel comfortable
masturbating
over images of a racist. And they decided that they would not, yeah, which I feel is to underestimate the tenacity of the readers of
Nuts
magazine and
Zoo
magazine and
Loaded
magazine, who I think would have given it a good old go. I think they would have tried to find the inner strength to push through whatever ethical barrier the
racism
of the naked woman had presented them with. Um, who knows, who knows? The sheer wrongness of it may even have created an extra sexual frisson. We can’t tell, can we, we can’t be sure. We can never really know without
carrying
out a controlled experiment. And there’s no money for that now, not with, not with the Olympics coming up, it’s all … Those kind of things are all cut. So, um …
So there’s some kind of theoretical objections to
television
, and that’s all well and good, well done to me. But, er … But if I’m honest with you, the real problem I’ve got with television is it’s now coming up to twelve years since they’ve commissioned anything that I’ve written. Um … But it nearly wasn’t the case, um … I’m going to sit down for this bit, ’cause it’s a little story about TV and it gives it the flavour of a … sitting down makes it feel like a sort of Ronnie Corbett monologue, which is good.
*
So, it nearly wasn’t the c– … I’ve been doing this about twenty years, like I said, and I’m on a kind of seven-year cycle of being fashionable, right, and it’s good that it’s so regular ’cause I can plan expensive medical crises around them.
†
*
The show is far too narrative-heavy at this point. There’s way too much plot exposition and not enough jokes. But I found that
sitting
down on a stool at this point, as if admitting failure, let me off the hook, and let the audience relax. It sort of lowered their
expectations
, somehow, and allowed me to take on the role of someone just telling an anecdote at a bar. And if it was at all funny, then that was just a bonus. Perhaps Ronnie Corbett realised this, all those years ago, and that is why he sat down to tell his funny stories? If only Ronnie Corbett could speak, he would have so much to tell us.
†
These phases were, to date: 1990 – City Limits New Act of the Year; 1995–6 – BBC2’s Fist of Fun; 2003–6 – Jerry Springer: The Opera/ Stand-Up Comedian/’90s Comedian.
The last kind of critical peak for good reviews and stuff was about the start of 2006, and we’re just on the
downside
of the curve from that now. Um … But anyway, as a result of being trendy about two years ago, I got asked in to see the head of BBC2, which is really weird because normally we have to petition them to be seen. But he asked me in and he said to me, ‘We’re all very excited about your work, whatever it is. You can do anything you like for the channel. What would you like to do?’ And I thought … So I chanced my arm. I said, ‘I’d like to do six half-hours of stand-up, fairly straightforward, like the old Dave Allen shows.’ He said, ‘You can. You don’t need to do a try-out, get on with it, it won’t be a problem.’ So I left this meeting – I didn’t even know what it was for – and when I left, my whole life had been completely transformed,
professionally
, financially, I suppose, everything.
*
*
This is entirely true, as explained in the introduction to this show.
So I started writing this series, right. And I had this idea
that each week, I’d do a bit where I did a bit of stand-up to a weird group of people in an odd place, right, and I’d film it. So first of all I wrote a set that would work for really little kids, right. And it was about how when I was a kid, my mum said, ‘Eat your greens,’ and I didn’t, and I got smaller and smaller, and then I got carried off by a bird, right. Yeah. Now, it’s not aimed at you, but they like it, don’t they, they like it, the people, yeah … It’s for children really, but you know … Imagine me, being carried off by a bird, it’d be hilarious … ‘Help!’ … So, er … Especially if it was a funny bird, like a budgie or something …
So, I started doing this at kids’ parties and stuff with a view to filming it at some point. And kids are really funny, right, ’cause they don’t heckle. But what they do do is they put their hands up like that and then you have to decide whether to accept the heckle. It’s a good system, you know.
*
*
I did this at the Comedy for Kids Sunday afternoon gigs run by James Campbell, where you have to tweak your material to work for children, some of whom do their own kiddie-comedy before the adult headliner. Detractors say it’s all a bit middle-class and trendy, but I found the experience of trying to think from a child’s point of view very rewarding.
So I was doing this kids party on a Sunday afternoon, I was talking about becoming really small and whatever. And this little girl about seven put her hand up. And I went, ‘What?’ And she said, ‘If you were so small then, why are you so fat again now?’ And that’s funny, isn’t it? So, um … No, it is, you know. So I said to her, ‘Well, I may be fat, but at least I’ve got some pubic hair.’
*
[shouting] ’Cause the old skills kick back in, Glasgow, twenty years, twenty years, night after night after night. I didn’t want to say it but it’s like Pavlov’s dog. Pavlov’s dog! Any seven-year-olds that cross me will be crushed into the ground ’cause they don’t have twenty years of road-hardened skills!
†
*
I didn’t say this at Comedy for Kids. This bit is reworked from an old routine about putting down an intrusive and overcurious child in the showers of a public swimming pool which I hadn’t done for about fifteen years. Of course, the tension and the humour in the
routine relied on the possibility of there being some wrongdoing afoot, before a ‘pull back and reveal’ at the end of the bit revealed that rather than being a paedophile, I was just an overliteral and linguistically zealous parent instructing children in the scientific names of genitalia, which they insisted on calling by their
playground
slang titles.
The last time I performed it was at a comedy and folk club in Manchester (those were the days) in about 1992, opening for a folk singer called Sally Barker, subsequently of The Poozies. The club’s host called himself Agraman the Human Anagram, as there was a fashion for names of that nature in the eighties alternative scene (perhaps the eloquently furious veteran Ian Cognito would have got the recognition he deserved under a different name). The Human Anagram’s act did not, of course, include any elements of wordplay. Before the show the Human Anagram explained to me that he didn’t like swearing, and I explained he didn’t have to worry as I didn’t swear. Then, during this fake-paedo bit, the Human
Anagram
came on and physically removed me from the stage, at the behest of a woman sitting next to him hissing, ‘Get him off. Get him off.’ By removing me from the stage before I had finished the bit, the Human Anagram made the whole situation worse as the
admittedly
uneasy audience were denied the opportunity to see that their assumptions were unfounded, and presumably just thought a man about to advocate some kind of sexual assault had been stopped from doing so.
Often, jokes, stories and words only make sense if they are allowed to be viewed in their completed form. You would have thought that, of all people, a Human Anagram would appreciate this. Before the show, Sally Barker had been quite nice to me, but she never spoke to me again, and has never responded to the
thousands
of letters and drawings of her I have sent over the years since. And the poor and confused Human Anagram was visibly
bewildered
and upset by me, saying that he had told me about not
swearing
. I understand, from the comedian Richard Herring’s amusing parody of them on his Warming Up blog, that the comedian Peter Kay’s books consist largely of him settling scores with people whom he imagines to have wronged him in the past. I have no wish to be parodied in a similar fashion by the merciless sword of justice of
the lawgiver Richard Herring, and hereby forgive the Human
Anagram
for his erroneous assumption, and thank him for the work he has given me since. And I hereby forgive Sally Barker too, who has a new album out, apparently, called Maid in England.
†
In a way, I am glad that I never became a Comedy Store or
Jongleurs
regular, although the money and the camaraderie of the building site would have been nice. In 1991, after my fourth or fifth open spot at The Store, in the old Leicester Square space, the then booker, a Scottish choreographer called Kim Kinney, said he would give me paid gigs, but I reminded him too much of the act he
disliked
the most in the world, Simon Munnery. As you can see from my ongoing Oedipal references to him throughout this book, I had already decided that Simon was, contrary to Kim Kinney’s view, the best comedian in the world at the time, so I more or less gave up on The Comedy Store at that point. There’s still a publicity photo of me from the period, looking like an arrogant, self-obsessed child, on the steps on the way into the new venue.
That said, never doing The Store, or Jongleurs, meant I never really developed those road-hardened skills that you see proper comedians deploy with devastating accuracy to 2 a.m. stag-night crowds, and I was allowed instead to develop a gentler, more
coercive
and admittedly less reliable approach. I hate having to put people down in an audience, and hate it when they force me to do so by going on and on with their unfunny shit. Also, as a lot of my act is about failing, it is difficult to continue to tell stories in which you are the low-status victim when you have been forced to take the upper hand and be high-status to sort out a persistent heckler. Part of my deliberate repositioning of myself when I returned to
standup
full-time in 2004 was about trying to find venues where, and an audience for whom, my failure to have developed the
crowdcontrol
skills of a Comedy Store veteran wouldn’t matter.