From Esquire, August 2001

A DRINK WITH...STEWART LEE
The bequiffed comic on obsessive fans, persecuting Christians and the decline of BBC2 - oh, and his new novel
WORDS Bill Dunn

Stewart Lee has been a cult comic for over a decade - both as a stand-up and partnering Richard Herring on TV's Fist of Fun and This Morning with Richard, Not Judy. He has written for The Day Today, Harry Hill and Al Murray, and produced The League Against Tedium's Attention Scum for BBC2 (which was nominated for a Golden Rose of Montreux comedy award). His recently published first novel, The Perfect Fool, features two musicians searching for their Sixties drug-casualty musical idol, a freemason and an ex-astronaut searching for the Holy Grail, a mental patient searching for a spliff butt, a native American Hopi clown and a woman who has had sex with a pig.

ESQUIRE: What are you drinking?
STEWART LEE: Pint of lager, please. Cheers.
[Lee's mobile phone rings.]
SL: Sorry. I'll turn it off after this. [Into phone] Yeah, yeah - I'll be there in the morning.
ESQ: More book promotion?
SL: No, this is the first interview I've done. I've started going to a gym. I sat in for two years writing and put on about two stone and smoked loads of fags.
ESQ: It was worth it - it's a great book.
SL: Thank you. As long as I can get through the "comedian writes book - fuck off" shit-storm.
ESQ: I liked the description of a crap stand-up gig in the book. It has all the elements, from "Do you remember Spangles?" through The Clangers to dope-smoking and all-night garages.
SL: A lot of people were expecting a comedian's book and said, "It doesn't seem to be very funny". But then they say that about my act, too!
ESQ: In the book, the cult musician who's tracked down by his fans seems reminiscent of some of your musical icons.
SL: I've done the odd music feature for The Sunday Times, and got to meet a lot of people I really liked as a kid. Sometimes things are better left alone...
ESQ: You're diversifying a lot, as a script advisor and producer.
SL: It's partly 'cos I'm trying to raise the money to make a film. Plus, as regards doing telly with me in it, I got about as far as it was going to go. My interest in comedy hasn't waned, but the platforms you can do it on, at least the stuff I want to do, are disappearing. Any unfavourable criticism we used to get was that we targeted our stuff at nerds and students. Now broadcasters are equally as definite about the demographic they want to appeal to. Jane Root (BBC2 Controller) says she wants to target affluent, sophisticated over-35-year-olds. Who would sit down to write something and think, "I must appeal to these people"?
ESQ: Time to move on.
SL: Yeah. Now the book's out there, I can see that it's about that too - leaving part of yourself behind as you grow older.
ESQ: No more teenage girl fans...
SL: I think they've grown up with us. Rich and I were interviewed by a tabloid newspaper once, and they said, "Do you have loads of groupies?" We said "No, our fans are more likely to come up to us and ask about specific details." He wrote that up as, "No - all our fans are dog-ugly."
ESQ: The book must have taken a lot of research.
SL: Yeah, it got ridiculous. I got bogged down for nine months - Hopi culture, the Grail stuff. I thought I'd made up the plot - wouldn't it be funny if NASA had tried to get freemasons on the Moon? - then I found out it's an established idea.
ESQ: One of your characters treats the Holy Grail very irreverently. I once heard that you wanted to persecute all Christians in comedy.
SL: Who told you that? Well... [laughs] I'm a member of the National Secular Society. If there is a God, I think the best thing we can do is ignore Him and get on with making everything fair and reasonable, irrespective of whether He exists or not.
ESQ: One character is a woman who has filmed being fucked by a pig. Have you seen such a video?
SL: Er, yeah. I was doing a gig in Nottingham in '93. I couldn't get into my hotell, so this bloke who'd been at the gig said I could stay in his spare room. I went back to this student flat and his flatmates were watching this video. There were posters of my tour on the walls - it was a bit like that Alan Partridge episode [where Alan meets his "mentalist" fan]. A few years ago, I met one of the guys again - he was working for Men Only. The strange inevitability of his life. Quite a nice bloke, but...
ESQ: ... but you could see where his priorities lay.
SL: Yeah. I didn't want to talk about the pig thing in interviews, 'cos I don't want people going, "I really want to read that book - it's got sex with an animal in it."
ESQ: Oops! You've blown it first time.
SL: Yeah. Actually the first cover design the publishers came up with was a nun with her arm around a pig. The pig's smoking a cigarette, and underneath it said, "TRACY GOES THE WHOLE HOG!" Everything I wanted to avoid.
ESQ: Try explaining that in an interview.
SL: Being interviewed as a comedian never works. Me and Rich were on Richard and Judy and they showed a clip of Fist of Fun and Judy Finnigan said, "It's sort of about... nothing, isn't it?"
ESQ: Probably the most incisive review you've ever had.
SL: I know! I used it as a quote for our stuff: "'Comedy about nothing' - Judy Finnigan".