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Other / Miscellaneous PressStewart Lee: Unreliable Narrator

By Patricia Nicol in The Times Posted on Sunday, June 13th, 2021

Reardon, as his much-interrupted work on his memoirs attests, is an unreliable narrator, which was the topic of yesterday’s entertaining, inventive Archive on 4, presented by the stand-up and writer Stewart Lee. Lee begins his journey “walking along Cecil Court”, off the Charing Cross Road, which when Lee first arrived in London was lined with second-hand bookshops. “But do you trust me? Do you think I’m really on Cecil Court? Or would it be more impressive if we’d fabricated this with some clever sound design that I can just switch off?” Cue silence. “Or if we’d fabricated it, couldn’t we have fabricated something more impressive or atmospheric?” Cue howling winds and Lee shouting: “Somewhere like the Yorkshire moors, where I might speculate, loudly, on the persona of Nelly Dean, whose not necessarily trustworthy reminiscences Emily Brontë used to frame the story of Wuthering Heights.”

Lee has been preoccupied with unreliable narrators ever since his mother took him to see John Boorman’s Excalibur, which inspired a fascination with King Arthur. In the British Library he comes face to face with a 12th-century calfskin manuscript of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain. There are gales of laughter from the BL’s curator of medieval manuscripts, Julian Harrison, and the medievalist Hetta Howes as Lee reads out William of Newburgh’s assessment from 1190: “Everything this man [Geoffrey of Monmouth] said was made up . . . either from an inordinate love of lying or for the sake of pleasing the Britons.”

Lee is an obdurate obscurist and some of his more contemporary examples are niche (1960s experimentalist writers Rosemary Tonks and Ann Quin, performance poet Rob Auton). “You’re probably wondering when are we going to talk about an unreliable narrator you’ve heard of? That’s taught you not to trust me!” But then he brings on Nish Kumar to discuss (apparently reliably) Bob Dylan. The comedian Russell Kane talks of how he kept his late father alive for seven years in his stand-up because he “did not have the skill to tell an audience my dad was dead without spoiling the atmosphere of a gig”. Imaginatively produced by Michael Umney, this made for a stimulating hour.

Written by Patricia Nicol in The Times on 13th June 2021. Filed Under: Radio, Radio Documentary
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