The Diary: Stewart Lee
Financial Times. Published: December 5 2009 00:09

Sunday. I am seven weeks into the biggest stand-up tour I’ve ever done.
Normally when I go back to a town with a new show I perform to about 25 per cent more people than before, building from audiences of about 100-150 to sometimes selling out 700-seater venues. But I did a TV series for BBC2 this year, Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, and for this tour numbers have doubled. It couldn’t have come at a better time. My wife Bridget and I were getting ready to sell our flat and leave the capital in search of space to get our two-year-old his own room. But the extra money means we now have a mortgage on a family home in London, the city that licked us both into shape, and which we’re reluctant to leave.

Tonight I’m at the Theatre Royal in Richmond. Since I got bigger crowds, I’m often upgraded into booming town halls, the rows of seats receding into the dark distance, my voice bouncing off the walls, the laughter disappearing into the dome. But this is a fantastic old theatre, where no one feels more than 50ft away. I don’t think I could ever be one of those comics who perform on massive screens in stadiums, as what I do is tiny and nuanced, but with the BBC unlikely to recommission the series this won’t ever become an issue. So that’s good then.

Monday. It’s my first day off for a week or so.
My wife Bridget and I booked a babysitter and had planned to go and see some music locally. Stoke Newington, where we live, has a rich history of improvised jazz, which my wife and I love seeing live. Lol Coxhill and John Edwards were at Café Oto in Dalston, and the American jazz bass player Henry Grimes was at the Vortex nearby but we realised we hadn’t really spoken for weeks and so sat at the back of the Auld Shillelagh, a genuinely Irish Irish pub off Church Street, and caught up. Bridget has had to put her own stand-up and writing on hold at the moment and do most of the childcare before the temporary buzz of interest in me dissipates. This was never the idea and, sometimes, when the theatres won’t put the money from my CD sales on the settlement, I bring home a handful of used tenners, which I press on her for shopping and the boy. When did our marriage move back to the 1950s?

Tuesday. I’m in Tunbridge Wells and there are two reviewers in.
I hope to get good write-ups to sell the longest London run I’ve ever done, six weeks starting on Monday. I’m curious about what the critics will say, especially if they’re the sort who actually go and see lots of stand-up. But, since I became a dad, my main worry is that bad press might hit sales and my ability to provide for my family.

Maybe I was nervous. I fluffed the opening to the show, and introduced my superb opening act Tony Law, a surreal Canadian stand-up, in a messy way, throwing him to the lions rather. The show was the most sluggish of the tour and, for the first time so far, a half-hour bit about the ethics of the cruel humour of the TV show Top Gear was compromised by the fact that most of Tunbridge Wells seemed to be big fans of Jeremy Clarkson and co. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the struggle, a kind of numb war of attrition against their bruised sensibilities and apparent boredom.

Wednesday. Birmingham Town Hall. Once again, I feared the echo chamber effect, as it’s hard to play the pauses and silences in reverberating rooms, but the sound engineers did amazing things with adjustable Perspex baffling.

Birmingham was my hometown but I left 23 years ago. Like most escapees I’ve had a love-hate relationship with Brum, but this time I felt unjustly proud by association. The latest architectural overhaul of the city centre showcases both old and new buildings in their best light, everyone we dealt with seemed enthusiastic, and Nostalgia & Comics remains the best laid-out comic shop in the country. Outside the town hall in the square there is a delightful little Christmas market. Still impossible to find anywhere to eat after 10.30, though. Damn those Quakers!

Thursday. I am in Oxford, where a quarter of a century ago I was a student.
Tony and I stayed in a little hotel off the Cowley Road, a slightly scary area back then but now full of bistros and boutiques and swelling with pride. It has changed. In fact, seeing different cities every day, I’ve realised that the whole world has changed. The liminal zones where people limped along on grant money and dole cheques are long gone, as even the poorest live it up on borrowed wealth.

Even as I got more popular I could still never get in the big theatre in Oxford. On the last tour I performed the show four times in a local promoter’s 200-seater pub room. This time around he’s put me in a 1,000-seater bingo hall that’s newly opened as a rock venue. It took 90 minutes to seat everyone and I was worried about the mood turning. But the show went well and even the Telegraph reviewer liked it, though afterwards I had an argument with the tickets guy, which will no doubt lead to me being traduced anonymously on the internet. My old English tutor came and liked the show. I was relieved. I think I was still, subconsciously, expecting to be graded.

Friday. I walked with Tony to the newly refurbished Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and saw two paintings by Edward Calvert, a disciple of William Blake, whose grave lies hidden in dense undergrowth in a cemetery opposite my flat in north London, and admired the craftsmanship of the Alfred Jewel.

Then we drove to Peterborough, where I bought my son a SpongeBob SquarePants ukulele and ate some soup alone in the Travelodge. Is this not the most rock’n’roll tour ever? Do you envy me, Financial Times readers, with your big City jobs? Hell, when I’ve finished this, I might even get that ukulele out of its box and give it a strum. Everything could go wrong tomorrow. I could go deaf, the tide could turn against me, I could forget how to be funny ... but this afternoon I’m strumming a child’s mandolin in a Peterborough Travelodge and I am free.

From The Financial Times