From Metro - 19 August 2002

Peas and cues

Stewart Lee tells Dominic Maxwell how nonsense can have real depth

Comedy can be a frustrating business, even if you're brilliant at it. For Stewart Lee, the process of being a stand-up became too much about crowd control, too little about the material.

Famous as one half of TV's Lee And Herring, he had worked on the circuit since university. After the duo were bafflingly cancelled by the BBC three years ago, he went solo again, blending highbrow with lowbrow, logical with fanciful and finding it surprisingly arduous.

Last year, age 33, he declared himself 'too old' for Edinburgh, fed up with stand-up. Yet now he's back, with a show organised around the kind of painstaking deconstruction (of Edward Lear's The Owl And The Pussycat) that fans will recognise from his earlier work. 'But Pea Green Boat is not straight stand-up,' insists Lee, clad in a black suit on a hot Edinburgh morning. 'If I was going to do it at one of the big Fringe comedy venues I probably wouldn't have bothered, because just by accident you get a lot of people who are coming to comedy rather than you. And if you don't fulfil what they think comedy is, they get annoyed.'

So he is happy to be in the civilised confines of the Traverse, with a show that features slides, a cellist and a cameo from Simon Munnery. It includes ship's diaries by the owl, some of which he tried out in his show in 2000. But this is not just Lee laconically prodding a nonsense poem. It's also about a man who has to research the life of Edward Lear and gets mighty confused by what he finds.

'The poem was based on his homosexual relationship with another writer,' says Lee. 'It's about this genderless pair of characters that flee some repressive society - let's assume it's a Victorian society - and go to a Utopia where they're married by a turkey.'

He was inspired to mix comedy with something gnarlier after directing and co-writing the ambitious Jerry Springer - The Opera, which is packing them in at the Assembly Rooms. But while augurs are good for Springer's West End transfer, Pea Green Boat is unlikely to find other ports of call.

He has already turned down an offer of a month's run at the Battersea Arts Centre, where he first tried out the show last December. After 14 months without pay on the opera, he can't afford more Fringe work: 'But if we got a proper run for Springer in London, and as many people came as are coming up here, surely I'd have to be paid sooner or later. It can't go on!'

If the payoff doesn't happen, he might look for more TV script-editing jobs. He has worked on Harry Hill's show and Al Murray's Time Gentlemen, Please and continues to be a rock critic for the Sunday Times. His novel The Perfect Fool was published last year. He has written three film scripts, one of which, Saturated, has Peter Fonda, Daryl Hannah and Alan Rickman attached to it. You can't say he's idle. At his suggestion we meet at 10am - the sort of time some Fringe acts are just going to bed. And, yes, he and Richard Herring would love to do another TV show. They are sharing a flat during the Fringe. But the Beeb's erratic attitude to comedy makes Lee doubt it'll happen any time soon.

'I was really surprised when they cancelled us. But on the other hand, I'm much more where I want to be now. Even though I'm kind of living on what I saved from doing three years of telly. And we'd literally be on a quarter of the money we were on eight years ago, so what's that? You can't bloody do anything.

'To write six hours of a double act, on spec, knowing that it could be sabotaged by schedulers and whoever, would be heartbreaking. Whereas here, you do the show, you get it seen on its own terms and then you go.'

LEE's MACAROONS
1) Stewart Lee was banned from performing in Lichfield in 1991.
2) Stewart Lee has a Scottish father he has never met. You owe him your financial support by way of atonement.
3) The former Lee And Herring double act is now in a period of hiatus as both members have become 'the fat one', affording little opportunity for comedy.
4) Stewart Lee feeds mainly on ants and honey and is commonly found nesting in trees or ditches.
He reproduces asexually and can fly.
5) Stewart Lee's first novel, The Perfect Fool, is available in paperback this autumn priced £6.99.