STEWART LEE – BIG ISSUE FRINGE DIARY #1

Another year, another Edinburgh Fringe. I am on my 21st, and for me the Fringe used to be a fun place, where my own brand of pretentious, experimental stand-up enjoyed no end of effusive reviews, if little or no financial reward. But this year I really need Edinburgh to work out for me in a big way.

Christian protests against the theatre piece I co-wrote, Jerry Springer The Opera, meant I never saw any money from the nine years I spent co-developing it, and was personally responsible for defending myself when I was threatened with imprisonment, defenestration and deportation for blasphemy, running up costly legal bills. A severe illness brought on by stress, resulting in the implementation of a permanent catheter and the amputation of a toe, meant I had to cancel a run at London’s Soho theatre and was left with hefty debt to the promoters. The bank are threatening to take my flat, and because my car was driven over by a tractor full of Evangelicals in Aberdeen, I couldn’t travel to those stand-up gigs that will still take me, despite the threat of prosecution for doing so. It’s nice being thought of as a great artist, but this year I need to hit paydirt!

To this end I’ve booked myself into the biggest, and classiest, venue I’ve ever played – that massive, 300-seater, purple tent in the shape of an upside down cow in Bristo Sqaure – and tried to write the kind of set that will get me on prime time television. My last Edinburgh show was praised for using a deliberately contrived collision of charged sexual, scatological and religious imagery, offset against a self-counsciously mythic narrative, to explore notions of taste, and the way meaning is qualified by context. This year I’ve written a load of stuff about spacehoppers, found a lovely glove puppet of an orange giraffe, and will be ending with a song. Hopefully, I’ll be able to pick up all Peter Kay’s crowd without losing too many of my own. I just hope it works out! Come on Edinburgh. I NEED THIS!