How I Escaped My Certain Fate (44 page)
Read How I Escaped My Certain Fate Online
Authors: Stewart Lee
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Now that I was a parent, knowing how sad I would feel if my son grew up to twist my actions into the basis of a joke, it seemed very important to me not to misrepresent my mother at the close of the show. I was now also able to empathise with her efforts to meet her child halfway, by going on and on about Tom O’Connor’s sardine joke, however inappropriately. I am sure I will find myself
struggling
similarly with my own son, forty years down the line. This section also enables a gradual softening of tone as I work towards the uncharacteristically sentimental conclusion.
†
I didn’t see this magazine in Smiths. I saw it at my mum’s house. She wasn’t voted 41st best quilt-maker ever – that is just an
exaggeration
placed here to up the callback quota – but her quilt was on the cover. I hadn’t really taken in what a significant quilter she was. She hides her light under a quillow.
So I rang her up, I felt a bit guilty, I said, ‘I’ve written this new show and the main through-line of it is how you always go on at me about Tom O’Connor’s sardine joke, is that all right?’ And she said, ‘That’s fine, Stew, that’s fine. He was hilarious though, Stew, Tom O’Connor. ’Cause he come out, Stew, on the cruise, and he said to this chap, “What do you do for a living?” And the man said, “I’m in oil.”’ And then she went, ‘Oh, hang on a minute, Stew, come to think of it, I don’t think it was Tom O’Connor that said that.’ I said, ‘What are you talking about? I’ve written this whole thing!’ And she went, ‘No.’ She said, ‘Tom O’Connor was on the cruise but there was another comic and he made the sardine joke, and his name was John Smith.’ So it wasn’t even Tom O’Connor that was better than me. It was someone that no one has ever heard of. 41st best, meaningless … meaningless …
*
*
Hilariously, this is entirely true. After years of telling me about Tom O’Connor’s sardine joke, it was only when I rang my mother, having largely completed this show, to check she didn’t mind being mentioned that she remembered it wasn’t Tom O’Connor who had made the sardine joke in the first place but another comedian, apparently called John Smith, who has proven impossible to trace due to his pre-Google name. Tom O’Connor was off the hook, and I was over the moon. Conceptually, my mother’s failure of memory had given the show the perfect end. Thanks, Mum.
But there was one laugh that I got about eleven months ago that did seem to count for something, and um … It was when our little boy was about a month old, and I actually made him laugh for the first time. And the way that I did it was, I put this orange woollen giraffe on my head, like that, yeah?
*
Yeah, it’s good, innit? Er … It’s the
direction
I’m going in. It’s not controversial, is it, it’s just what it is, you know. And the way that you make a one-month-old child laugh by putting an orange woollen giraffe on your head is very simple. You put it on your head and then you stand still, silent and expressionless for as long as possible, as if doing this were the most normal thing in the world, right. Er, like this, I’ll show you.
*
A friend gave us this giraffe when our son was born. We were given a disproportionate amount of lovely soft toys, for which I doubt I ever got round to thanking anyone, and it seemed as if people hoped that I, that we might finally find some peace.
Certainly
, having a child makes all the professional struggles detailed in this book seem somehow irrelevant, and I wanted to end the show as if laying these to rest by standing, still and silent, with a giraffe balanced on my head, over a long pause, daring the audience to sneer at this sincere, if sentimental, gesture. And, God bless them, they usually accepted it in the spirit it was meant.
[
Long pause.
]
MUSIC. EXCERPT FROM THE SOUNDTRACK OF HAL HARTLEY’S
SIMPLE MEN BY
NED RIFLE.
[
Deep sigh.
]
[
Long pause.
]
*
*
Then the techs faded up a snatch of the soundtrack from Hal Hartley’s Simple Men and faded down the lights, while I and the giraffe bowed and waved to the crowd, and closed the whole thing on a heart-stopping hanging cadence that usually brought gasps of admiration for its theatrical audacity, and even the occasional stifled sob. Apart from in Derby, where the guy forgot everything I’d asked him to do and just left me standing there, brightly lit, for ages and ages, while I waited to see if he would ever cue the music and the sound, until I eventually just had to walk off to silence, the cumulative emotional effects of the previous ninety minutes lost for ever, the audience confused and lost, the moment entirely wasted, the whole show ruined.
Ah well. That’s showbiz.
THE END.
Thanks very much, thanks for having us, cheers, good night, thank you …
EXIT MUSIC: ‘STIFLED MAN CASINO’ BY AIRPORT
5.
In the summer of 2007, before I did
41st Best
in Edinburgh, my new manager suggested I went to see Roland Keating of BBC2 about my long-forgotten and cancelled pilot. I couldn’t see what the point was, as nothing had changed, and I only wanted to do the same show, which, as the email I was read by my old manager made clear, the BBC were not interested in. But I went to see him anyway.
It was a strange meeting. I could never really work out why the original pilot had been withdrawn, and lots of areas of discussion were hurried through, but by the end of the short session, the pilot was back on the slate again. I didn’t think for a moment it would happen, this being the crazy world of TV, where yes means no and up is down. But eventually a week of filming, followed by a live
recording
of some stand-up material, was scheduled for
December
2007.
I was on the
41st Best
tour in Birmingham, in February 2008, with my Australian inspiration Greg Fleet, who had ludicrously agreed to open for me – probably on the run from the Melbourne vagrant who wanted his clothes back – when I heard that a series had been commissioned. We had just had breakfast in the world-famous Mr Egg cafe in Chinatown (advertised with the slogan ‘Eat like a King for under a pound’), opposite the old Powerhaus, where I had
seen Ted Chippington in 1984, when the mobile rang and my manager told me of the BBC’s decision. It was while I was looking in the window of the Nostalgia and Comics shop opposite that I broke the news to Greg.
Greg couldn’t understand why I wasn’t more excited, and seemed annoyed that I had remained relatively placid. I suppose everyone thinks a deal like that would be the answer to all their worries, but I’d had this series
commissioned
and decommissioned once before. I think I was numb with the apprehension that it could all just fade away again, afraid of what it might mean to be recognised in the street and shouted at out of vans again, and worried about alienating the sustainable and supportive audience I was cultivating.
But that night we were on in Salford Quays, and we went to a Chinese restaurant before the show to celebrate. I felt I ought to. I felt it was what people would expect me to do. I ordered a bottle of champagne, but Greg spent most of the meal outside on his mobile, smoking and gesticulating, and so I finished it alone.
Eight years previously, I’d been sitting in the audience of the Rawhide Club in Liverpool, looking at a drunk man trying to formulate a coherent opinion about the shortcomings of British immigration policy, when, in an effort to seize control of my own destiny, I decided I had to stop being a stand-up comedian. Now, I was drinking champagne on my own in an empty Chinese restaurant in the antiseptic retail park of Salford docks, while my friend, who seemed disappointed in me, stood in the street shouting at someone far away. Tonight I was playing the 400-seater room at the Lowry, having successfully, over five years, built up a crowd in tiny rooms. We were
performing
to nice people who knew, at least partly, what to expect from the evening. I no longer lost money on live work. There were three DVDs available of stand-up sets of which I was not the least bit ashamed. And, it slowly dawned on me, it looked as if I was about to do the television series I thought I’d been offered four years ago, but on my own terms.
If my younger self could see me now, he would have said, ‘If that Australian bloke’s not going to eat that special fried rice, can I have it?’
Is it too much of a cliché to end the book with the phrase: ‘And that’s how I escaped my certain fate’?
No?
In that case …
And that’s how I escaped my certain fate.
Music Theatre, the genre which gave us Andrew Lloyd Webber and the tribute show, combines the worst aspects of music with the worst aspects of theatre to create a mutant hybrid that is the worst form of live art that exists. There are few aspects of human artistic endeavour that are of less moral or aesthetic worth than Music Theatre.
As you may have guessed, I hate Music Theatre. What you may not have guessed is that for the last three years, without even realising it at first, I worked in the medium itself. In the spring of 2001 the composer Richard Thomas asked me to help direct, and write some extra words for, an opera he was writing about the American talk show host Jerry Springer. We worked the show up for eighteen months with friends and acquaintances who gave their time largely for free in small rooms at Battersea Arts
Centre
and The Edinburgh Fringe Festival and eventually the finished product,
Jerry Springer: The Opera
, was staged at the National Theatre and then London’s West End, where it won four Olivier awards.
Somewhere along the line, a hit musical had been
created
. This was a strange and delightful surprise for
everyone
involved, and especially for me, as before I started work on
Jerry Springer: The Opera
I had never seen a
musical
. I had always assumed Music Theatre wasn’t something
I’d enjoy. Out of professional curiosity I went to see some, and found Music Theatre to be even worse than I could ever have imagined. It is important for me to point out here that my views in no way reflect those of any of my co-workers or employers in
Jerry Springer: The Opera
, all of whom I have nothing but immense respect for.
Admittedly, my initial exposure to the genre of Music Theatre wasn’t ideal. The first musical I ever saw was not
Carousel,
or
West Side Story,
or
Guys and Dolls,
but
We Will Rock You, The Queen Musical By Ben Elton and Queen
. It’s as good a metaphor as any for the problems inherent in the genre. We Will Rock You, The Queen Musical By Ben Elton and Queen is set in a dystopian future where all rock music is banned. Some BBC comedy show wardrobe department style punks who live underground in an old tube station covered with generic rebel graffiti are inspired by the music of Queen to overthrow the state. In real life, Queen’s
relationship
with politics is less clear cut.
Miami Steve Van Zandt was compelled to form Artists Against Apartheid after Queen broke an international
cultural
embargo and played South Africa under apartheid in the early 80’s, and who will ever forget Brian May playing the National Anthem off the Queen’s roof in jubilee year? When Hendrix massacred The Stars And Stripes it
threatened
the status quo. What Brian May did to God Save The Queen merely confirmed it. At one point in
We Will Rock You, The Queen Musical By Ben Elton and Queen
a list of people who, like Freddie Mercury, ‘died for rock and roll’, invokes Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain. Ironically, Kurt Cobain’s own suicide note offers Queen’s relentless professionalism as an example of one of the things he didn’t want to become, as one of the reasons he is taking his own life. The teenage American hardcore punk in me wept fan tears of anger.
But the real problem with
We Will Rock You, The Queen Musical By Ben Elton and Queen
, is not these
moral-philosophical
quibbles. It was just the sheer lack of
ambition
. Put 1000’s of people in a room, get them to sing along to a bunch of songs they already know, string them over the loosest story line possible, give them glow sticks to wave and send them home happy. All you can take away from
We Will Rock You, The Queen Musical By Ben Elton and Queen
is huge admiration for the way the cast do their best to make it work, confirmation that music theatre
performers
, whether they love a show or hate it, remain the super-efficient, highly trained warrior-ninjas of the stage. Most British people go to the theatre only three times in their lives. It is sad to think that for many people,
We Will Rock You, The Queen Musical By Ben Elton and Queen
will be one of those three times, and that it is a wasted
opportunity
to show them what great theatre can be.
We Will Rock You, The Queen Musical By Ben Elton and Queen
remains the worst musical I have ever seen, and obviously the show can only have been conceived in a spirit of extreme cynicism. But its problems define the genre’s physical limitations. There is a perceived crisis in Music Theatre. Where are the new ideas?, ask opinion pieces in the industry papers. The answer is, they are out there, but not in Music Theatre, and under current circumstances, never will be. Music Theatre is fatally compromised.