1) CONTENT PROVIDER BBC 2 29th DEC

CONTENT PROVIDER is on BBC again on Saturday 29th Dec at 11.55pm, and then on the i-player for 3 months afterwards.

2) Late Junction/s ON RADIO 3

Stewart Lee is to host a series of eclectic musical programmes on Radio 3 this Christmas.
The comedian takes over as guest editor of the Late Junction for three nights, being joined by Tim Key for one of them.
Radio 3 says: ‘From his time spent in record shops as a teenager, to more recent work moonlighting as a music critic, comedian Stewart Lee has had a long-time fascination with music.

Over the years he has built up a deep collection, with improvised works, post-punk and folk traditions all well-represented.’
On Christmas Day he will be joined by folk musician Richard Dawson; on Boxing Day by fellow comic and fellow leftfield music fan Tim Key, who has a special love of Soviet-era Russian tracks; and on December 27 he presents a a mixtape from recorder player and violinist Laura Cannell. The shows go out at 11pm nightly.

King Rocker

https://www.kingrockerfilm.com/

How does a working class autodidact, with no visible means of support, maintain his role as the leader of a cult British underground band into its fifth decade? Comedian and writer Stewart Lee (Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle) , director Michael Cumming (Brass Eye, Toast) and James Nicholls (Fire Records, Fire Films) investigate the mysterious existence of Robert Lloyd (The Prefects, The Nightingales, Robert Lloyd and the New Four Seasons), Britain’s ultimate post-punk survivor.

Robert Lloyd’s Prefects played with The Clash on the White Riot tour in 1977, and their ongoing incarnation, as Birmingham’s Captain Beefheart suffused post-punk poets The Nightingales, recorded more John Peel sessions than any other band. Ever.

Buoyed by endless critical acclaim, but hampered by ongoing commercial indifference, Lloyd has nonetheless continued to tour and record, The Nightingales’ affairs managed by drummer Fliss Kitson, from a Wolverhampton shipping container, and Lloyd himself, from the isolated borderland mountain fastness of Wellington, Shropshire, surrounded by prehistoric remains and industrial archaeology.

Lloyd, a post-punk flaneur, sometime postman, and master snug room raconteur, appears to have maintained a lifestyle outside the system via a succession of hustles, often involving an encyclopaedic knowledge of horse racing and pre-punk musical weirdness.

But what were the social, cultural and economic circumstances that enabled and sustained such outsider artists in the punk and post-punk eras, and how has the world changed to the point where such figures are unlikely to flourish in the same way today? Lloyd’s own odyssey echoes how abstract notions of social mobility, of the value of culture and music, have changed in the last five decades.

In an odd coincidence, Lloyd’s current home, the Shropshire market town of Wellington, in the shadow of the Wrekin, is also where the comedian Stewart Lee was born, though he only spent nine days there before being dispatched to an orphanage, and has not been back since.

Further chance collisions abound. For a brief period the skyline of ’70s concrete Birmingham was defined by Nicholas Monroe’s unloved, and soon sold off pop art sculpture, of the giant ape, King Kong. Missing and presumed lost for years, this icon of Birmingham was eventually discovered prostrate in a Lake District garden, before being critically rehabilitated in an exhibition of great British public sculpture at the Henry Moore Gallery in Leeds in 2017.

As a child, Stewart was fascinated by the sculpture, and in a strange piece of synchronicity Lloyd compared his onstage persona to Monroe’s Kong in a triumphant post-gig rant in King’s Cross this year. The parallels make the point of comparison too good to ignore. King Rocker will shadow Lloyd’s story with that of Birmingham’s forgotten, and rediscovered, giant art ape, King Kong.

**UPDATE** We are now 1/3rd of the way through filming and editing and are looking for donations to complete the film. Everyone who donates, no matter how big or how small, will be featured in the end credits.