Springer in his step
Edinburgh Focus: IN THE CITY The Stage 15/08/2002
This year Stewart Lee has resolved to try something completely new with his unique musical take on a very American institution

Last Summer, after a workshop performance of fragments of Jerry Springer - The Opera at Battersea Arts Centre, a journalist told me: "You simply have to take it to the Edinburgh Fringe." As the show's director and lyrical contributor, I was faced with absorbing the hopes of its growing following nightly and finally cracked. Did she have any idea how much it would cost to take the show to the Fringe? Did she appreciate that even if it sold out, both I and the show's originator Richard Thomas would end up in the debtor's prison?
A year later I am writing this in an Edinburgh flat, in downtime before our last preview performance. I deserve a slap. In the spring of 2001, when Richard asked me to help out on his Jerry Springer opera, I was at something of a crossroads. We had both worked on Simon Munnery's cancelled BBC show, Attention Scum! , but the execs hated it so much that when it won a Golden Rose of Montreux Nomination they tried to stop us going to collect it.
Through a mixture of professional incompetence and a public that was as increasingly indifferent to my arrival in their town as I was, I had reached the end of the line with stand-up. The most satisfying thing I'd ever done was finish my first novel, The Perfect Fool, and I was looking forward to retreating to the shed to write - if only I could find a way of paying the bills. Showbiz had been good to me but familiarity breeds contempt and I had to split before our marriage became a sham. Then I saw Richard's workshop performance at BAC.
Even when it consisted simply of him sitting alone at the piano and describing how he might stage the show, it was clear he had followed this superficially banalsounding concept through to its logical end point with such commitment that all human life could be encompassed within its profane arias. Something I would never dreamed worthwhile appeared to be not only viable but beautiful.
The subsequent 12 months saw me seconded to a project unlike anything I'd ever worked on before. In small bursts of workshop performances at BAC, JSTO kept growing, Richard kept writing and the goalposts kept moving. The press buzzed. Possible backers acquiesced to scaling the show up from ten singers and a piano to 20 singers and a band, to road test it at the fringe for larger productions.
Many ideas, dismissed in our former areas of employment, began to bear fruit. It was difficult not to feel vindicated. Only the fact that we are yet to make a penny from the production keeps us sober, though Richard did once make a paper hat out of a particularly positive Independent feature.
After our fourth preview here the cast and crew hit a level that enabled us to stand back and see the show's remaining weak spots and we know there is more work to do at script level. The press have been effusive and our Edinburgh run has fulfilled its research and development role. Next week I start my new solo show at the Traverse.
Pea Green Boat features me, a cello player and the kind of material I wish I had found the confidence to do years ago. It began in BAC workshops, in the shadow of JSTO, in a spirit of enquiry and has shown me a path forwards. Jerry Springer, the man, maintains he does not do conflict resolution. But Jerry Springer - The Opera has resolved a few of mine.

Jerry Springer - The Opera runs at the Assembly Rooms until August 26