Jerry Springer: The Opera. ‘The staff at the National are like the civil servants in Yes, Minister’ says its director Stewart Lee. ‘They save you from making terrible mistakes.’ Photograph: Dave Benett/Getty

Comedian Stewart Lee co-wrote and co-directed the National’s first new opera, Jerry Springer: The Opera, which started life at BAC before running at the Lyttelton and then transferring to the West End.

I would say the experience of doing Jerry Springer: The Opera definitely changed my life. It helped me get taken a bit more seriously. But it wouldn’t have had the respect it did had it not gone through the National Theatre. I ended up there through a string of accidents. I’d been feeling frustrated, thinking about what things you can’t do in standup, when Richard Thomas, whose idea Jerry Springer was, thought it would be nice to try things on a bigger scale, with resources.

I don’t know at what point I became the director of Jerry Springer: The Opera, I was just around helping out. Then I started organising rehearsals and I was very intimidated, but they put great people behind you and it was a very friendly place. The stage management team there is so good, they are almost like assistant directors, really. They quietly guide your hand with their experience, a bit like the civil servants in Yes Minister and without embarrassing you, they save you from making terrible mistakes. If you want something made, you can talk to the different people about costumes and whatever – you can’t do that at the BBC, say, because everything is franchised out. There’s actual communication between departments, it’s fantastic.

It also has a really good bar. In the West End, you get spat out with your shitty wages and have to go drinking around at six quid a pint. But the bar is really nice and the people develop a sort of community. You’d find yourself talking to someone who was working on something else and you’d realise they knew how to solve the problem you were having. You didn’t have to go to some meeting, you just ended up talking to directors from other things without it being a big thing, it was curiously informal. At the BBC now they have all these hubs and pods, there’s not proper offices – you have to sit on a sofa and put your laptop on a coffee table – there are no tables at waist-height. I don’t think that works. Just being nice to people and giving them a bar or cafe – that’s how you get all that done, not by forcing people to sit in egg-shaped sofas and not giving them a proper desk.
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Commercial theatre is awful, though. I’d do something with the National Theatre again if they wanted me, but never again with commercial theatre. It’s run for profit and the people are treated like slaves.

Things in the West End are so expensive, the only people who go to them are people who don’t know anything about culture, who could find much better things for less, or people trying to impress by having their corporate box. It’s just a waste of time and money, and the stuff’s not good enough anyway. There’s no need to go and see anything in the West End. The National is still a theatre that takes risks – it can afford to. Like the BBC, it gets attacked for doing things that are inaccessible and too arty, but also for doing things that are surefire commercial hits. But let’s not forget that before War Horse opened they were all crapping their pants about it – “Oh God, we’ve got a thing about the first world war with a puppet horse in it – it’s going to be a disaster.” Then it became a global hit.

But that’s the good thing about the BBC and the NT – they can afford to do that. They are the last places where you can develop things for their own sake without taking a focus group. Nobody you stop in the street and ask: “Would you like to see a puppet show about a horse in the first world war?” will say yes. They’ll say: “Actually, I’d prefer to see The X-Factor, if it’s all right with you.”

Commercial theatre will never develop things that jump off the tracks. They’d rather commission a jukebox musical based on the back catalogue of the Boomtown Rats or something. The public do actually like new ideas, they just don’t know they do. As everything else becomes more and more degraded, this is absolutely vital.