Stewart
Lee
2009 has
been an exciting year for Stewart Lee. His TV show, ‘Comedy
Vehicle’ aired on BBC2 to critical acclaim. This enabled Stewart
to break out of the arts centre circuit and play large theatres
for his new show for the year, If You Want A Milder Comedian Please
Ask For One. Having seen the fantastic Swansea date of this tour
(reviewed in this issue), I spoke to Stewart the next day to discuss
the tour, TV show and The Daily Mail, amongst other things. Interview
by Leigh
MM: You are currently in the middle of your new tour, having
already done the Edinburgh Festival. How has the tour been going
so far?
Stewart: It’s been going really great. In Edinburgh I did
a hundred- seater room for a month, because I knew I’d be
doing big rooms, and they are difficult to hear. You can’t
quite gauge the responses, so playing the little room which I normally
do, The Stand, was really great, because I knew the show worked
properly before I had to upgrade it to spaces that aren’t
always great for comedy. The most difficult one yet was actually
the Swansea one, because it was a big room which was only half full,
so the bodies don’t quite absorb the laughs. It’s hard
to get an atmosphere in the room and you have to trust your own
internal timing as you can’t quite hear the room, because
all the sound disappears into the roof of the auditorium. So last
night’s show was a mixture of a real performance, but also
I had to trust that it was going better than I could hear and sort
of fake it a bit, which I think that all these comics who are properly
famous and who are used to doing stadiums do, because you can’t
really get a proper flavour of what’s actually happening in
the bigger rooms sometimes, and Swansea was one of the biggest places
that I’ve done so far. It was great, but it wasn’t as
spark-y as some of the others have been, because I couldn’t
quite hear the room.
MM: One of the arcs of the show is based around Frankie
Boyle’s comment that after 40 you shouldn’t really be
doing stand up. Do you think there’s any truth in that comment
at all?
Stewart: Ummmmm no. I think people in stand up get better with age,
usually. A lot of musicians get worse. There’s something about
being in a rock band, it’s kind of a naïve art form.
It can be really great when you’ve got loads of energy and
no technique. I think sometimes technique in rock music makes people
kind of worse, actually. With comedy you tend to get better. The
pitfalls are that sometimes you can get sucked towards blandness
as your life becomes blander. You’re not out there having
adventures anymore. The other thing is that people tend to become
more conservative politically as they get older, which doesn’t
always make for great comedy. We are living in strangely reactionary
times where you could almost not be conservative enough to satisfy
many audiences. It depends where you’re coming from. When
I was 21 and started doing stand up I remember a quote from Victoria
Wood, who is kind of a godmother of alternative comedy, and she
said that no-one under 30 should do stand up as you couldn’t
possibly know enough about anything. I don’t agree with that,
either. But I also think that it’s part of Frankie’s
sense of humour. I don’t think he would really think that.
Or else he was talking about himself and what he’s doing in
his life. Stand up can be anything you
want, particularly if you’re Frankie Boyle, you know, he’s
really popular, so there’s nothing to stop him doing anything
he wants on stage. He could do a really thoughtful, nice show, or
a story show, or he can do what he does now, loads of jokes. The
main thing about him saying that was that I had an idea that this
show should be about what I’m supposed to be writing about.
I thought, ‘what am I supposed to write about as a 40 year
old comedian and a father of one?’ I had this idea about something
that happened to me in a coffee shop and I started writing about
it and thought, ‘that’s so bland, so middle-aged’.
When I read that quote of Frankie’s I thought that it was
a great way to set up an argument in the show. There’s someone
who said you should give up doing stand up, so you have to prove
why you should be doing stand up. What have you got to offer, you
know? So I suppose that’s what the show is about. I’m
talking about all the slippery ideas, things that make me feel that
there’s nothing left for me to relate to in culture as an
older man who still has the political views he had as a teenager.
I know Frankie; I wouldn’t hesitate to tell him that I’d
done that. It was just something he’d said in an interview
and it seemed funny.
MM: There is a bit in your new show which talks about Richard
Hammond [a TV presenter for any of our non-UK readers]. The Daily
Mail took sections of this bit completely out of context for a story.
What was your reaction to this ‘journalism’?
Stewart:
The guy came up to me in the street before the show in Edinburgh
and said, “I write for the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday,
I understand you are calling for Richard Hammond to be decapitated”
and I said, “Have you seen the show?” and he said, “No”,
and I told him I wouldn’t talk to him about it and he’d
have to make something up. He said, “Well what’s it
about then?” and I said, “It’s a joke, like they
have on Top Gear”. There’s absolutely no point in talking
to it about people, that’s what I’ve learnt. There’s
no point in discussing it because there’s no way that the
nuance of what you’re doing can translate to the Mail on Sunday.
The problem was that if I had tried to explain it then it would’ve
spoiled the joke for people coming. And also no-one that reads the
Mail on Sunday or likes Top Gear is going to come and see me anyway.
So it doesn’t make any difference. What I learned from Jerry
Springer The Opera, which I co-wrote and got in trouble for, they
sent me around the country trying to justify it when people tried
to ban it, and there was absolutely no point having a discussion
with any of the people because they’d already made their minds
up. All that happened was that I was forced to explain what we meant
by it, which I think spoilt it for people who were coming to see
it, so I’d be happy to have a conversation about what I meant
the show to be about with you, but there’s no point doing
it on the back-foot when you’re being attacked by a tabloid
newspaper.
Actually I thought the article in the Mail was really funny. The
way it was written up was hilarious. They changed what I’d
said, they had me saying, ‘I hoped his head had exploded into
a million pieces’, which is pretty funny. They had this picture
of me smiling, looking quite nice, then next to it a picture of
Richard Hammond’s car exploding and then a picture of Richard
Hammond’s face looking unhappy. It looked like something they
do in Viz, you know. Anyone with half a brain reading between the
lines would realise what the joke was, it’s about…well
you know what it’s about. It’s about if you are on Top
Gear
and you attack the weak and the defenceless and say, “It’s
only a joke”, then what’s to stop that being used against
you? Nothing. You have no comeback on it because that’s your
defence when you pick on gypsies or whoever. The best you can come
up with is ‘it’s just a joke’. It’s just
about that idea. No-one reading the Mail on Sunday would agree with
that anyway, because they hate the poor (laughs). It’s not
as if I’ve lost any audience by it. At the end of the day,
when you’re 41 and have a family it’s nice to get good
reviews, but really all you’re hoping is that bad reviews
don’t make it more difficult for me to pay my mortgage.
MM: This year you’ve gained more exposure with your
BBC show. On your ‘41st Best Stand Up Ever’ DVD you
talk about the disappointment of having the show offered and then
taken away. Were you surprised when the offer was then put back
on the table?
Stewart: I was, yeah. It was offered to me in May 2005, withdrawn
in April 2006, then back on the cards in spring/summer of 2007.
So I was surprised and confused, because the offer was for exactly
the same project that was already turned down by the man who had
turned it down. The thing about television is that there’s
no point trying to make any sense of it. It’s like looking
at the weather system. If you go out and it starts raining and you
get wet, it doesn’t mean that the weather was trying to harm
you. It was just raining. Likewise if it’s sunny and you’re
happy, it doesn’t mean that weather likes you, it’s
just weather. So you have to view television and commissioning procedures
as kind of a random system that there’s no logic to. You can’t
start to believe that it means anything because there’re lots
of people much better than me who have never been on television
and there’re lots of people much worse than me that are on
television all the time, so it doesn’t mean they are good
or bad, it just means that their face fitted at the time, and what
strange decisions were being made behind closed doors about what
kind of audience they were trying to attract. That said, I still
think that the BBC is out best bet globally for any kind of quality
news coverage or comedy or anything. There’s a tiny chink
of risk there, where they can afford to make things without having
to worry too much. I know it’s a deeply flawed system, but
I’ve benefited hugely from it and I don’t think there’s
any way that a commercial broadcaster would have made any of the
things that I’ve done.
MM: In the series you did an episode criticising some aspects
of television. Was there anything you wanted to add to that show
but couldn’t as it was on the BBC?
Stewart: No, there was nothing I was stopped doing in the whole
series, apart from one sentence about David Cameron that I was made
to slightly re-twig so that it was factually accurate. It was just
something he’d said about religious schools, I just had to
change it so it was right. One other bit was this idea I had about
religious dog training schools, and I wanted to have an Islamic
one for training dogs, and there was a concern that was never really
resolved that because there’s a cultural, but not a specifically
religious, taboo about dogs in Islamic culture, although not necessarily
in the Islamic faith, that it would look like I was being deliberately
provocative. I was asked not to do that, and to be honest no-one
was really able to resolve whether this Islamic dog taboo was the
case or not, so we just had to let it go. It actually made the bit
funnier. Those were the only things I was stopped on. But there’s
other stuff that I wouldn’t have done on TV anyway, because
there’s things that I do in the live shows that are very long
and they are contextualised and they have balance. You worry that
on TV a sentence gets taken out of context and pinged around the
world, and it’s not worth the risk with YouTube and all this
kind of thing.
MM: Some of your shows talk about religion and atheism.With
books by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens hitting bestsellers
lists in the last few years, do you think that atheism is being
looked at more positively in mainstream society?
Stewart: Definitely. The worry about it then is that you have to
remember to be polite. There probably isn’t a God, but it’s
not worth getting too cross about. You have to be able to carry
on your discussions with your mental enemies with a greater degree
of politeness than they’ve historically shown to us (laughs).
There’s a worry now that in Europe, as the rationalist’s
cause starts to gain ground that you have to avoid triumphalism.
Remember that there’s still a lot of work to do and that’s
best achieved with a degree of cautious politeness, but you can
understand people’s frustration when their work gets banned
and they get shouted down.
MM: The TV series recently came out on DVD and, as you mention
in your new show, you’ve had trouble with people illegally
downloading your DVDs, so will you continue releasing live DVDs?
Stewart: I will do, in fact the guy that put out the last one sold
57 last week, so he’s just about to cover his costs, so he
wants to do this show.
MM: Is that Go Faster Stripe?
Stewart: No, this is Colin Dench, who runs another company, but
Go Faster Stripe are great as well, and I’ll definitely do
some more with them if they’ll have me. Probably audio stuff
or old archive, but the new show will be filmed with Colin Dench.
He films it to broadcast quality which means you can flog it on
to the Paramount channel or whatever. Go Faster Stripe are really
brilliant and what they’ve done is fantastic, because there
a lots of really great comics who don’t get on telly, and
there’s no documentation of them. Four or five of the DVDs
that Go Faster Stripe have got are of the best people working today,
people like Tony Law, Simon Munnery and John Hegley. Will Hodgson
is amazing and it’s really great that they are out there doing
it. It’s one guy in Cardiff, Chris Evans, and I think that
the British Film Institute should give him a grant because he’s
documenting the best people, and they don’t get documented
as a rule.
MM: He’s also bringing comedy out on different formats.
He released your Pea Green Boat poem/story on 10”, and comedy
hasn’t been pressed on vinyl for 20 years or so.
Stewart: (laughs) Just as everyone else is heading into downloads
I’m going back to vinyl. Good idea.
MM: In your new show you tell a story about your youth and
being friends with members of Napalm Death…
Stewart:Well there’s no-one that I knew in Napalm Death who
are still in Napalm Death. The only person from the line-up on the
first album was Nick Bullen, who sang on one side. Nick Bullen wasn’t
at my school, but the other three were. The other three were, they
were Daryl Fedeski, Simon Oppenheimer and Miles Ratledge. I didn’t
know them that well; they were in the year above me. I was in a
play with Daryl Fedeski, I was a butler and he was a sailor, I was
in a walking club where we used to go walking in Wales with the
other members of Napalm Death. I did see them when they had that
lineup and around that time they were only 14 or 15. They got on
these compilation albums that Crass used to put out called Bullshit
Detector which were samplers of new anarcho-punk bands, but back
then they sounded more like Crass or Poison Girls or something.
They hadn’t got that sound, even that’s on the first
album, where they sort of invented speed/metal/thrash/grind punk.
They played sort of early 80’s anarchopunk.
MM: Speaking of music, in your new show you close the show
with a song. Did you approach picking up a guitar live with some
trepidation?
Stewart: I stopped doing stand up in 2001 for three years, partly
because I was never nervous and did the same sort of things again
and again and I was sort of jaded with it, and I think that communicated
to audiences. So every new show I do I try and do something I think
is going to be difficult. In the last show it was trying to show
a degree of sensitivity, I suppose, about having a kid and things
like that. In the show before that it was about having one 40-minute
routine which only had one joke at the end. This time around I thought
I’d try and end on a song. It’s sort of not something
you’d expect from me, and also it’d make me nervous.
It means I’ll be nervous all the way through the show until
the end, because I’ve got this thing coming up. It was a deliberate
thing to do, and when I can afford to get him along I have a fiddler
to play along as well. He helped me learn it. It was a deliberate
decision to make it hard for myself.
MM: I think a few people may have missed the Sex Pistols
reference in the song last night.
Stewart: Yeah... I do like the song ‘Galway Girl’, and
I was sad when it was in an advert, that’s what gave me the
idea for the words, with Iggy Pop and John Lydon being in adverts.
Also things you like generally, Nick Drake songs being in phone
adverts and so on. I thought one of the only things you’ve
got when you get older is culture that you love, books, films, music,
comedy that means stuff to you. It’s really depressing when
it’s taken away or the meaning is changed. Although I hope
that the song’s funny, I am also serious in saying that we
need to value these things more and let them retain their original
meaning and not abuse them. You’ve only got one memory, you’ve
only got one life and those special things are what keep people
going, and certainly the Nick Drake albums that I loved, you just
now think of that horrible fucking BT advert where his music is
playing and they are talking about options for friends and family
and stuff like that. It’s insane, it’s awful. I know
that’s an old-fashioned point of view, but that’s what
I think. Leave stuff alone (laughs).
MM: You also talk about the recent Magner’s Cider
adverts, and of course the comedian Mark Watson is the ‘actor’
in them…
Stewart: Yeah, I don’t mention him in the show because I’ve
got no personal animosity with him. I wish it hadn’t been
him and had been some anonymous actor. I know him a little bit.
I’ve seen some of his work and I like it, but it would be
hard to watch him again without thinking of advertising.
MM: I like Mark Watson, but wondered why he’d decided
to do an advert.
Stewart: I expect he did it because he’s got a family. He
always does very well in Edinburgh, but for the rest of the year
you don’t really hear much of him. I would worry if I were
Mark Watson. The brand of Mark Watson, as a quirky young fellow
who thinks deeply about things and wears a Socrates T-shirt is compromised
by being in an advert, on a purely practical level. I would imagine
there are people who would stop going to see him because of it.
But then he might pick up a lot of people who like cider (laughs).
MM: You’re closing up the year with a month-long season
at Leicester Square Theatre with If You Want a Milder Comedian Please
Ask For One. Have you done a season that long before in London?
Stewart: I think it’s six or seven weeks. I have done five
weeks before at Soho Theatre, which is half the size. It may be
that people won’t come, but on the tour I’ve been getting
25-50% more people than usual, so maybe it will be all right. It’s
about a 350 seat theatre, and I could probably have done a shorter
run at a bigger venue, but I chose this as it’s sort of an
optimum size for stand up, especially with what I do. It’s
not a big show. So I decided to do a longer run at Leicester Square
and see what happens. I hope people come. It’s been good around
the country so far.
MM: Do you have any new projects for next year?
Stewart: I’m not sure yet. The BBC are supposed to tell me
at the end of January whether we’ll do a second series. If
they will do a second series then I’ll get on with that and
I’ll do some stuff in Edinburgh and film it before the summer
of 2011. If they don’t do another series then I’ll write
a new show for August next year and then I’ll tour it and
hopefully be back everywhere I’ve been before in about a year’s
time. It’d be really nice to do a TV show again, because it’s
nice to earn that money, and it’s nice to earn that money
without being away from home when you’ve got a little kid.
On the other hand, just having it on at all has been amazing and
it’s transformed my life. The money meant we could get a mortgage
and stay in London and get a flat with a room for our son. And the
exposure, it’s not like being Michael McIntyre, but it does
mean I get six hundred people rather than three hundred, and that
makes the economics for touring so much easier. I can get someone
to drive and come with us and help us with technical things, I can
pay an opening act properly and I can pay a fiddler for some of
the gigs and it just makes life easier. I was just getting old and
tired to be honest, and I don’t know if I could’ve carried
on doing what I did without a little bit of a leg up. I was getting
burnt out. I was in a sort of funny quandary where I’d get
really good reviews in broadsheet newspapers, but I’m not
the kind of comic who does corporate gigs, I can’t do them,
I’m not very good at them, or do the commercial gigs like
Jongleurs or the Comedy Store, so unless I’m on the small
theatre/arts centre circuit it’s hard to know what to do exactly,
and the telly show has probably really helped get people along.
It will be interesting to see what difference this makes long term,
but when I used to tour there was always 10-15% of the audience,
maybe more, where I just wasn’t what they wanted to see. They’d
come to see some stand up comedy and they end up seeing this boring
bloke going on really quietly about things they aren’t interested
in. Because the TV show was an accurate reflection of that, those
people aren’t coming on this tour. There was a bloke in Worthing
that hated it, but on the whole, most of the people who come know
what they’re coming to. You can have more fun with them and
there are more of them. In fact, a lot of people who think they
don’t like stand up come and see me because it’s not
like other stand up. It’s helped to whittle out trouble, the
people who wouldn’t get it in an audience, which is nice,
but on the other hand all of us think that who we are now is the
sum total of all our experience in the past and I wouldn’t
want to undo the twenty years I’ve had doing gigs to people
who didn’t really like me (laughs). I think it helped me become
what I am now. It is nice now, at 41, when you have a kid and want
to earn some money to be playing to large groups of people that
actually want to see you (laughs).
From Mass
Movement Magazine
