How I Escaped My Certain Fate (4 page)

Despite this obvious lack of exploitable teen fans, throughout the second part of the decade Richard and I were put on the road, rock-and-roll style, in a tour van, for heavily and expensively advertised tours. We usually
played to largely empty rooms in unloved council-run
theatres
, where disillusioned programmers booked whatever was pushed at them, regardless. The overheads prevented us from seeing a significant share of any profits. Comedy was the new rock and roll, perhaps, and as in the early days of rock and roll the cash rarely trickled down to the acts. Our second series,
This Morning with Richard not Judy
, was ignominiously cancelled by the then BBC2 controller Jane Root in 1999; our final tour as Lee and Herring, in 1998, actually appeared to have lost money. Most of what we’d earned from the first television series was eaten up by debts from Edinburgh, as we insisted on going back every year with more and more new shows, sometimes doing three or four performances of different things every day, trying to remain loyal to the egalitarian ethics of the Fringe that had formed us as teenagers, and thus losing more money and sinking deeper into debt.

We ceased trading as Lee and Herring in 1999. People still ask me why we split up the double act, but we never really did. I remember when I was a teenager I loved The Moodists, a gang of beatnik Australian blues punks based in London which dissolved in 1987. The following year, I saw their guitarist, Steve Miller, loading gear into a venue for The Triffids, another expat Australian band. ‘Why did you split up The Moodists?’ I asked. ‘We didn’t split up,’ he said, wearily, presumably remembering a decade of struggling to make ends meet in the face of indifference and mismanagement. ‘We just stopped.’ At the time I was confused. The Moodists were brilliant. Literally dozens of people loved them. How could they just stop? But Lee and Herring didn’t split up either. We just stopped.

Even while we were touring the double act and
writing
television, I’d always had other projects on the go.
Regrettably, Cluub Zarathustra, a Dadaist live show
initiated
by Simon Munnery and featuring a brilliant
revolving-door
cast including the likes of Kevin Eldon, Sally Phillips, Richard Thomas, the future Mighty Boosh mover Julian Barratt and Roger Mann,
*
came to nothing. Perhaps
ending
the rather short pilot we submitted to Channel 4 in 1997 with the words ‘Insert More Money’ flashing across the screen didn’t help.

In between commitments to the double act I did
hundreds
of stand-up gigs a year on the circuit, which was always my principal creative outlet, and usually knocked out a new solo show for Edinburgh and in theory beyond, although the low-level, solo comedy show touring
network
of today didn’t exist. But there were other problems too. By the late nineties, my management company had grown from a two-man operation into a massive
conglomerate
, with dozens of subdivisions staffed by
hopeful
serfs. It was hard to feel the same sense of all being in it together. The days of acts and management out in the van behind enemy lines on flyposting missions were long gone. And now, the live department was run like a
telesales
desk, with hungry young operatives trying to place acts around the country for maximum fees, to ensure a healthy turnover, often irrespective of the suitability of the venue. This meant we tended to be sent to
councilfunded
places anxious to tick boxes by showing they’d had some comedy, unaware that the event wasn’t going to fly. And because I gave each subsequent solo show a new title, rather than just being billed as ‘Stewart Lee’, and a theme, and a poster that tried to reflect that, all the information would get jumbled up by my bookers and I’d arrive at some regional arts centre somewhere with a show totally different to the one advertised, a two-year-old poster and press pack having been sent out. And all the while,
audiences
dwindled away.

In the early part of 2000, the big manager booked me a one-off gig at Dundee Rep. I paid the 15 per cent
commission
. I paid the support act. I paid for travel. I paid for accommodation. And then there was almost nothing left of the fee. The audience barely reached double figures. I arrived and left in darkness, with little to show for my
trouble
either financially or creatively. It seemed like a
metaphor
for my career. Creatively, I was in Dundee. By now, I’d hoped at least to be in St Andrews. I’d been on television to
two million viewers less than a year ago, but now it seemed there was no one out there interested in what I did. I sold out a new stand-up show called
Stewart Lee’s Badly Mapped World
for a month in a 150-seater in Edinburgh in August 2000, but lost money as usual. The show received dreary middling reviews, saying I was boring or monotonous or drunk. I performed it a few times subsequently, but the momentum soon petered out.

In the spring of 2001, I was supposed to be doing a
minitour
of Scotland and the friendlier parts of the North,
supported
by the clown-haired satirist Andy Zaltzman, but the venues showed me contracts that proved his presence on the bill had never been confirmed, and because they’d already booked their own opening acts, they refused to pay him or allow him to go on. Thus, Andy accompanied me on a strange holiday, a bizarre and unwanted chaperone figure visiting random and largely empty rooms in faraway towns where his contribution was not required, watching me lose my way emotionally, creatively, geographically, while I paid all his hotel bills and made him tramp across Scottish moors in search of uncharted stone circles during the long dead days off.

At some stage during this downward spiral of a tour, I found myself onstage at the Rawhide club in Liverpool, going mechanically through the motions of material I knew inside out, hoping that something would happen to wake me from my torpor and invest these stale riffs with some spontaneity. And it did. A drunken young man in a suit in the front row kept shouting that he didn’t want to hear about anything I had to say – admittedly voicing the feelings of most of the room – and that I should talk about illegal immigrants. ‘Talk about illegal immigrants,’ he grunted, ‘talk about fucking illegal immigrants.’ I decided
to take a bold course of action and get him onstage and hand him the mic, probably having just read a biography of the erratically inspired American comic Andy Kaufman or some other dangerous piece of literature, to see what he came up with on the subject of illegal immigrants, while I watched from his now vacant seat. I knew it would be incoherent and awful, which it was, as he slurred and
stammered
about asylum-seekers and how they should be sent back, but my plan was to let the room boil in irritation and fade away, before flipping the mood with a perfectly
chosen
bon mot. But as the crowd turned, security came and got the man offstage and told me, in no uncertain terms, that I had to go back on, utterly undermining any status I had left. There I was in a cellar in Liverpool, standing in front of a drunk racist, but somehow in the wrong. And what was a man like that even doing in one of
our
comedy clubs, being all racist, in his suit and tie? Did Tony Allen, the Godfather of Alternative Comedy, die onstage,
repeatedly
, night after night, for this?

Suddenly everything was clear. It was the twenty-first century and I was a mumbling relic from an earlier age. The crowds had changed. The rules were different. The management weren’t out flyposting with the acts, and Alternative Comedy was dead. I was spent. I was trapped. I listened to the material as I was saying it. I watched it float out of my mouth over the bored faces of the Rawhide
regulars
like a brown tongue of acrid smoke, stinking the place out. Arch, cynical, tired, fake, conceited, formulaic and flat. I was no longer the person that wrote it, and the audience that it was written for weren’t to be found at any of the places I was playing. I didn’t believe in it any more; even people that liked me had seen through it. And for the
racists
at the Rawhide, everything I was saying was irrelevant
anyway. So, quietly and without any fuss, I decided, then and there, to stop. Not that anyone noticed.

I spent a long time wondering how best to explain to you, dear readers, what I was doing in the period I disappeared from view. Then I was sent the text of a blog by The Spirit, the silver-haired member of the multi-billionaire Brixton country hip-hop group Alabama Three, who had spoken to me when I was signing DVDs after a recent live show. The Spirit, who is in fact a fully corporeal human, summed up my career post-Lee and Herring at the beginning of a piece called, unpleasantly, ‘I Bum Stewart Lee’.

The timescale is a little out of whack, but I don’t feel I can really better The Spirit’s brutal and unsentimental assessment of my career from 2000 to 2004. Nonetheless, here goes.

In the spring of 2001, Richard Thomas, a composer and former member of the musical comedy double act Miles and Millner, asked me to contribute some storylines to, and effectively direct, a new idea he was working on. I had directed Richard’s opera shorts for Simon Munnery’s BBC2 series
Attention Scum
, and he’d been happy with them. Now Richard had begun a project called
How to Write an Opera about Jerry Springer
, which featured him alone at a piano, playing snatches of tunes and talking about how you
could write an opera about the American talk-show host Jerry Springer. His initial explanation of the genesis of the idea remains perfect: ‘One night I was watching
The Jerry Springer Show
, drunk, and there were all these fat people shouting at one another and you couldn’t understand what they were saying, and I thought, “That’s an opera.”’

But Richard’s keen ear for a musical motif, and his keen eye for human suffering, found tragedy and comedy in
Springer Show
dialogue, which had previously just sounded profane, and his experiment played to a packed
forty-seater
room at Battersea Arts Centre. BAC’s genius move of the noughties was the introduction of Scratch Nights. You could use their facilities for free to develop new pieces, as long as you showed the work in progress to the
public
and appeared to entertain their inane suggestions in the bar afterwards. In the light of the now punitive costs of road-testing new ideas at the Edinburgh Fringe through my management, it was a real lifeline, and I doubt I would ever have written or performed anything new ever again without BAC’s encouragement.

There was no money in the opera at this stage, and no obvious future. I didn’t give up stand-up to work on
Richard
’s opera, which I wasn’t being paid anything for in any case. I just gave up stand-up anyway, because I was sick of it and no one came to see me outside London and the Fringe. Instead, I was scraping by through writing weekly record reviews for my default arts patron at the
Sunday Times
Culture section, Rupert Murdoch. The mortgage on my flat was £500 a month, I wasn’t on drugs and got lots of free records. I managed on very little.

On paper, the story of the opera’s success looks like a showbiz dream. Every few months we’d add another scene to the piece, expand the cast of enthusiastic operatic
volunteers, and restage it during another little run of
Battersea
Scratch Nights, under the auspices of their
dramaturge
Tom Morris, who quietly changed our lives, and will doubtless do so again. And the audience, and the buzz, would grow.

In August 2001, I declined to go to the Edinburgh Fringe for the first time since 1987. Instead, we staged a lengthy run of all the Jerry Springer material we had in the big, 200-seater room at Battersea. The great and the good all pitched up. Nick Hytner, the future director of the National Theatre, sniffed around like a funny little cat. We were written about in American newspapers by critics whose names excited people. We headed off a writ from the
Springer Show’s
production company. And our
manager
, now the producer of Richard’s opera as well, began to try and find investors who would take the show forward commercially.