VOICE OFF: Ladies and gentlemen, will you please welcome the 41st best stand-up ever, Stewart Lee!
Thank you very much, thank you for coming. Thanks for coming to this show, which is called Stewart Lee – 41st Best Stand-Up Ever. It wasn’t originally going to be called that. I started writing it in about May last year. I didn’t know what it was going to be. And then, as luck would have it, about that time I appeared in one of those programmes – you know those terrible Channel 4 programmes, they’re about nineteen hours long and they go out on Friday or Saturday nights, and they’re a countdown of the hundred best things of a thing, ever. And each one of the things is separated from the next thing by a bought memory from Stuart Maconie. He is an amazing figure, Stuart Maconie. He is able, if the price is right, to recall almost any aspect of the entire spread of all human existence. He’s an incredible figure, Stuart Maconie. He’s rather like an omniscient alien super-being, a giant baby that lives in space, bald, wearing only a toga, orbiting the earth, able to view the entire span of all human culture and existence, and yet tragically, by the creed of his alien race, Stuart Maconie is forbidden from ever intervening directly in human affairs.
So I was on this programme, right, the hundred best stand-ups of all time. And I came in at number 41, and I was very, I was very surprised to be placed, I was very pleased to be placed, um, er, you know, I’m not exactly a household name. I’m the only person on that list of the hundred best stand-ups of all time who regularly plays in this venue, for example. And is glad of the work, is glad of the work.
Um. I was surprised to be placed. I’ve had a sort of an odd relationship with the press. In fact, when this show was running in London in December, I got a review describing me as looking like a squashed Albert Finney. Nine years previous to that, the same paper, the London Evening Standard, described me as looking like a crumpled Morrissey. And it’s good, you can see a kind of trend developing there of comparing me unfavourably to various stocky, greying celebrities in increasingly terrible states of physical distress. And a squashed Albert Finney is arguably worse than a crumpled Morrissey. As a crumpled Morrissey, there’s the possibility the Morrissey could be straightened out, put to work. But, er, a squashed Albert Finney is of no value. Except perhaps as a coaster made of meat. Um. Or a white pudding, as I believe you Scots would call them.
So it was weird, I was surprised to be placed, number41, I thought, ‘It’s not bad’, you know, number 41, it’s quite good. And in fact soon after that list was announced, Bernard Manning, who was in the top forty, he died and I thought that meant I would move up a position. But it wasn’t the case, even with, er, a letter-writing campaign to the family; they were distressed, if anything. ‘Why, why are you doing this? Please stop.’
So you know, it’s great. I’m not joking, I was pleased, I was pleased and surprised, but you might have a similar experience to me. You might be supposed to be good at something, but it doesn’t necessarily count for anything with your family ’cause they know who you really are. And my mother, for example, is still as ashamed and embarrassed as she ever was of me being a stand-up comedian. It’s not something that she’s interested in, stand-up comedy. My mum’s main area of interest is quilts. Making quilts and talking about making quilts. And a new kind of quilt she’s been making lately, I don’t know if you’ve heard of this, it’s called a quillow. And that is a quilt which rolls up into a pillow. Although it comes with its own unique set of problems, ’cause if you think about it, for a relaxing night, you need both … you need both a quilt and a pillow. So with the quillow, you either are cold with a comfortable neck, or are warm with backache. And the only solution, of course, is to use two quillows – in many ways, defeats the unique selling property of the quillow – or alternatively, to revert to the traditional quilt–pillow combo.
But my mum’s not impressed by me being a stand-up, it’s not something she’s...For my mum, me being the 41st best stand-up of all time – which I am, remember, they can’t take that away now – that’s about as impressive to my mum as if I were to be voted the world’s 41st tallest dwarf. Taller, admittedly, than many other dwarves, but still essentially a dwarf, and as such prohibited by law from applying for any job with a minimum height requirement, such as policeman, basketball player or owner-operator of an enchanted beanstalk.
I don’t know if you can hear that at home but there’s a strong uptake for that joke in this area, and the laughter ebbed away as we went towards the bar. Now, there might be a lot of you in who’ve not seen me before. If you’ve not seen me before, right, a lot of what I do, er, it’s not jokes as such, it can just be funny kind of ideas or little, er, weird turns of phrase like that, yeah? So, ‘owner-operator of an enchanted beanstalk’, yeah? And that’s a giant, isn’t it, a giant. Yeah? It’s a giant. Little turns of phrase. So all I’m saying, all I’m saying if you’ve not seen me before, yeah, is the jokes are there, they’re there, but some of you, you might have to raise your game. We’ll be all right, we’ll be all right, we’ll be all right. ’Cause there’s harder stuff than that in this show, there’s a bit that’s borderline incomprehensible, about insects, even to me, right, so, um, and I wrote it and I don’t know what it is, right.
So my mum’s not impressed by me being a stand-up. My mum has already seen the best stand-up she’s ever going to see, she is adamant about the fact that it isn’t me. My mum’s favourite stand up is the nineteen-seventies-strokeeighties TV comedy-quiz-show host of Name That Tune fame, Tom O’Connor.
A couple of people, down here, remember Tom O’Connor, but on the whole the demographic of this room is such that no one knows who Tom O’Connor is really, no one remembers him. And that’s a shame, ’cause I’m now going to talk about Tom O’Connor for about twentyfive … twenty-five, thirty minutes. Tom O’Connor, he was a Liverpudlian comic in the seventies and he … and then he ended up doing game shows. And my mum saw Tom O’Connor doing stand-up on a cruise that she took ten years ago when she retired, and this had always been a dream of hers, yeah, to go, to go on a cruise, not to see Tom O’Connor doing stand-up on a cruise. Seeing Tom O’Connor do stand-up on a cruise, it’s not even a dream of Tom O’Connor’s. In fact, in many ways it’s his worst nightmare. And one that Tom O’Connor has now been trapped in for ten years. Like some kind of silver-haired Scouse groundhog.
In fact, ladies and gentlemen, Tom O’Connor has now been performing stand-up exclusively at sea for so long that he has developed scurvy. Yeah? That’s a sea-based illness, isn’t it? My wife wrote that joke, it’s not one of mine. No, she did, my wife wrote it, it’s not the kind of joke I would write, it’s too … It’s got a good kind of rhythm, hasn’t it, conventional sort of rhythm to it, it’s good but it’s not the kind of thing I would do. Um, but I put it in because it’s better than most of what I would do.
Now, my mum saw Tom O’Connor doing stand-up on a cruise, and whenever the subject of stand-up comes up, she never stops talking to me about Tom O’Connor. She goes, ‘Oh, he was amazing, Stew, Tom O’Connor, take your feet off that quilt, it’s not finished. He come out, Stew – he’s a comic, like you – he come out, Stew, on the cruise, Tom O’Connor, and he said to this chap in the front row, “What do you do for a living?” And the man said that he worked for Esso or Shell, one of them firms, you know. And Tom O’Connor, Stew, he was, oh, he was quick, he was quickwitted. He said to him, off the top of his head, he said to him, “Are you a sardine?” It was hilarious, Stew. [long pause] I have remembered it wrong, yes.
‘Yeah, he come out, Stew, Tom O’Connor – don’t touch those bits of felt ’cause they’re cut into the shape of lions, for a jungle scene to go on it, it won’t just be … – he come out, Stew, on the … Tom O’Connor, yes, he’s like a comic, and he said to this chap, “What do you do for a living?” And the man said, Stew, he said, “I’m in oil.” Tom O’Connor, he was … He was quick, Stew. He was quick as a fl– … he’s like lightning, coming out of a dish. And he said to him, “Are you a sardine?” No, he wasn’t a sardine, Stew, he was er … he was a man. Why? Well, if he’d been a sardine, it wouldn’t have been a joke would it? It would have been a statement of fact.
‘Yeah, you don’t understand it. He come out, Stew – listen – Tom O’Connor, yes, from Crosswits. Don’t touch that. It’s a quillow actually. It’s both a … And he’s come out, he’s a comic, he’s like you, and he said to this chap, “What do you do for a living?” The man said, “I’m in oil.” And Tom O’Connor, Stew, he – oh, well – I think he saw the window of opportunity. And hurled hisself through it bodily. And he says to him, “Are you a sardine?” Yeah, you’re right, Stew, it doesn’t make sense, strictly speaking. Yes, you’re right. If you said to a sardine, “What do you do for a living?”, no, it wouldn’t say, “I’m in oil,” you’re right. No, it’s not its job, it’s not its job. Well, it’s swimming around, yeah. It’s not waged, no, it’s voluntary. Yeah, you’re right, Stew, the only circumstances under which a sardine would reply “I’m in oil” is if you said to it, “What substance do you expect to be preserved in for retail purposes in the event of your death?”
‘He come out, Stew, Tom O’Connor – listen, don’t touch those pins, they’re holding the lions on – and he’s a comic. He is the same as you. And he said to this chap … The man said, “I’m in oil.” And he flew at him, like a wolf, Stew, and he said, he said to him, “Are you a s– …?” Yes, you’re right, Stew, they don’t always come in oil. They can come in tomato sauce, yes. No, he could have made that work, Stew. He could’ve … Tom O’Connor could’ve done, Stew, ’cause he’s quick like Zephyrus the wind, and he’d … and Mercury, and he would have said to him … If he’d said to the man, “What do you do for a living?” and the man had worked for Heinz and he’d said, “I’m in tomato sauce,” Tom O’Connor could still have said, “Are you a sardine?” And there would have been a pause while the audience thought, “Hmm … well, they normally come in oil, surely. Ah, but they can come in tomato sauce! I should never have doubted Tom.”
‘He come out, Stew – listen – Tom O’Connor, he’s the same … – don’t touch that, it’s the pattern. He said, “I’m in oil,” he said, “Are you a sardine?” Yes, Stew, it was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. Yes, it was better than anything you’ve ever done. And you know why? ’Cause it was clean. He come out, Stew, Tom O’Connor, and he said to this chap, “What do you do for a living?” And the man, he wasn’t a plant. He said, “I’m in oil.” And Tom O’Connor, Stew, he said, “Are you a sardine? Are you a sardine? Are you a sardine? Are you a sardine? Are you a sardine? Are you a sardine?”’
Of course, what my mother doesn’t know is that since a nervous breakdown that Tom O’Connor suffered in the mid-eighties, as a result of having been outed by the tabloid press for allegedly having had an affair with a teenaged prostitute, Tom O’Connor has answered any dialogue he becomes involved in with the phrase, ‘Are you a sardine?’ And like a stopped clock, Glasgow, inevitably this means that Tom O’Connor will be right at least twice, and simple, grinding, tedious repetition will take on the illusion of genius. And yes, there is a subtext there, there is a subtext. And, yeah? Oh right. The last time that Tom O’Connor was right to reply ‘Are you a sardine?’, the last time, was about ten years ago, and my mum saw him on a cruise. He came out, and he said to this man, ‘What do you do for a living?’ And the man said, ‘I’m in oil.’ And he said, ‘Are you a sardine?’ I don’t know if you remember that from earlier, from earlier in the show, way back, way back at the beginning? Yeah? Yeah, you remember that.
And the other time, the only other time that Tom O’Connor was right to reply ‘Are you a sardine?’ was in 1987. Now, to try and patch things up after the sex scandal in the tabloids, Tom O’Connor took his wife, Mrs Tom O’Connor, on a bargain-break weekend. And they went to Lisbon in Portugal, yeah? And while they were there, they were in a plaza, a piazza, a public square of some sort, and Tom O’Connor was approached by a small, oily fish. And the small, oily fish said to Tom O’Connor [falsetto Portuguese], ‘I am a traditional street festival snack of choice every year here in Lisbon on January the 19th, the feast day of St Cuthbert. But, Tom, I am also a traditional summer delicacy throughout all of rural Portugal as well. What am I?’ Yeah! That’s how they speak, that’s how they speak.
In the end, I got sick of my mum going on about Tom O’Connor all the time. I said to her, ‘Look, Mum, when you’ve made a new quillow, I don’t say to you, “I saw a much better quillow than that on a ship,” and then make a joke about a quillow, do I?’ And she went, ‘No, Stew, ’cause you wouldn’t even be able to think of a joke about a quillow. Tom O’Connor could, Stew, he’s quick. He come out, Stew, on the cruise …’ I said, ‘Shut up, shut up about Tom O’Connor now.’ I said to her, ‘I’ll let you into a secret, Mother, a trade secret, right. I don’t want to break your heart, but in the trade of stand-up comedy Tom O’Connor is regarded as a ludicrous, absurd, sad figure, and here’s why,’ I said to her, right. ‘’Cause when he’s onstage, Tom O’Connor, his wife, Mrs Tom O’Connor, sits in the foyer behind a little kiosk they take round with them that Tom O’Connor’s made out of all plywood and hay and mud. And to try and grub up a few more pennies, like a pig in the dirt, Mrs Tom O’Connor sells – and this is true – she sells golf umbrellas with a drawing of Tom O’Connor’s face on them. And that is sad.’ And my mum said, ‘It isn’t sad, Stew, it’s good. And anyway, you haven’t even got a golf umbrella with your face on it.’ And she’s right, she’s right.
Twenty years, twenty years in the business. 41st best stand-up ever apparently. Yeah, I’d go to the golf-umbrella comedian-marketing manufacturing company. ‘Can I have my face put on a golf umbrella?’ ‘No. You’re just not getting the figures, son.’ Twenty years. Nothing to show for it. And we’ve just had a little baby. And that’s not cheap.
So all I’m saying, 41st best stand-up ever, it doesn’t necessarily count for anything. What does it mean in real terms, being the 41st best stand-up ever? It means nothing at home. And I thought, ‘Where was this list?’ It was on Channel 4, on television, Channel 4, the worst television station in Britain. Who I’ve just realised probably won’t be buying this for transmission.
Even as I said that, I realised, ‘Ah, there’s a potential market just …’ But they are though, aren’t they? It’s awful, Channel 4, awful. It used to be good, didn’t it, in the old days, but not any more, it’s rubbish. Last year they had this twenty-fifth anniversary, when Channel 4, it used to screen all the brilliant programmes it used to make twenty, twenty-five years ago. Channel 4, it’s like a syphilitic old man leafing through a photograph album of all the society beauties he used to romance, all of them now dead. Because of him, because of what he did. Channel 4.
I don’t like television generally. I’ve got nothing against the medium of television, right? It’s great, it’s just colours, lights, shapes and sounds, God knows we all love them, don’t we? Over here, the people over here like them, over there, they like them one at a time. All together, it’s a bit much, isn’t it? A bit much. Have to ration them out … The problem with television, I think, is it’s increasingly incapable of dealing with anything thoughtful or serious, yeah? And a good example of this was this time last year, the Celebrity Big Brother racism scandal. You remember that? There was an Indian woman in the house and, er, everyone picked on her. Now, it was awful but I was kind of fascinated by it ’cause it showed us how television can’t cope with a serious thing. And I sort of love the Celebrity Big Brother racism scandal for that. I loved it for three main reasons.
Firstly, I loved the Celebrity Big Brother racism scandal ’cause it meant that because of the bad racism, the show’s official sponsors, the Carphone Warehouse, were contractually obliged to issue the following genuine press statement. This is a genuine press statement from the Carphone Warehouse: ‘Racism is entirely at odds with the values of the Carphone Warehouse.’ Entirely at odds. I don’t know about you, Glasgow, but I was hugely relieved to read that press statement, because prior to reading that press statement, I had suspected that the [falsetto Irish] Carphone Warehouse was in fact a front for a white supremacist organisation. And I have in my hand here a piece of paper bearing the true values of the [falsetto Irish] Carphone Warehouse, the true values of the [falsetto Irish] Carphone Warehouse.
Sell phones.
Sell more phones.
Deny the Holocaust.
Sell more phones.
Deny the Holocaust again, this time by texting your mates.
Lobby for the return of the gollywog and the Black and White Minstrel Show.
Sell phones, sell phones to cars, sell as many phones as … quickly, sell phones, sell the phones, sell …!
The values of the Carphone Warehouse. The sheer transparent naked hypocrisy of even imagining for a moment that such things exist as the values of the Carphone Warehouse. Do you follow the values of Jesus or Buddha or Marx? No. I follow the values of the Carphone Warehouse, committed as they have been these past twenty years to fighting racism through the unusual medium of discount phone retail, a sure method which for so long eluded the ANC or the Rock Against Racism movement. The values of the Carphone Warehouse.
At what point do you think it was that the [falsetto Irish] Carphone Warehouse decided that Big Brother was no longer compatible with their values? Was it about three series ago when Channel 4 broadcast live footage of a clearly inebriated twenty-year-old woman inserting the neck of a wine bottle into her vagina? Did the Carphone Warehouse go, ‘Yes, at last, random objects inserted into the vagina of a drunk and the Carphone Warehouse are a brand-profile awareness marketing marriage made in heaven. And what a missed opportunity for product placement.’ The values of the Carphone Warehouse, of which there are none.
And the second great thing about the Celebrity Big Brother racism scandal was this. There’s a programme on that you may have seen called Big Brother’s Big Mouth or Big Brother’s Little Brother, something like that. Anyway, it’s not on Channel 4 normally, it’s on E4. And E4, if anything, is worse than Channel 4, isn’t it? ’Cause Channel 4 is like a flood of sewage that comes unbidden into your home, er, whereas E4 is like you’ve constructed a sluice to let it in. Ah, another potential market has disappeared. Just the Paramount Channel left then. They’ve been good to us in the past.
Um, so … Big Brother’s Big Mouth or whatever, it’s on E4. And they have experts on – sociologists, psychologists, psychiatrists – and they provide expert insight into and expert analysis of the phenomena of some twats in a place. And this programme’s hosted by Russell Brand. And what it meant when the bad racism happened, it meant that Russell Brand was contractually obliged to look meaningfully into the camera, making a serious face, and condemn racism in the strongest terms possible, whilst dressed as a cartoon pirate, before going back to his ongoing life’s work of thinking up cutesy, diminutive Mr Men names for his own penis. Mr Winky. Mr Dinky. Mr Dingle-donky-dinkywinky-wooky-woo-wa-ner. And the way that Russell Brand thinks up cutesy, diminutive Mr Men names for his own penis makes him sound like a child molester who is trying to convince himself to allow himself to molest himself.
And when Martin Luther King saw racism in nineteensixties America, Martin Luther King called it out in the strongest, most visionary, eloquent terms possible. Martin Luther King said, ‘I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character,’ Martin Luther King. And when Russell Brand saw racism in his place of work, Big Brother, Russell Brand said, ‘Oooh, there’s been some bad racism and stuff going down today and no mistake, my liege. It’s made Mr Winky go right small, it has. Oh yes it has, oh yeah. And my ball-bag, my old ball-bag, has only gone up my bum. Here’s H from Steps.’
And the third great thing about the Celebrity Big Brother racism scandal was this. There was a glamour model in the house, you may remember, Danielle Lloyd, a former Miss UK. And she said the worst racist things, arguably. And as a result of this, for the next three or four months, Danielle Lloyd lost a lot of lucrative glamour-modelling work. Now, what this means presumably is that the editors of Nuts magazine and Zoo magazine and Loaded magazine and FHM magazine must have sat around and tried to decide whether their readers would feel comfortable masturbating over images of a racist. And they decided that they would not, yeah, which I feel is to underestimate the tenacity of the readers of Nuts magazine and Zoo magazine and Loaded magazine, who I think would have given it a good old go. I think they would have tried to find the inner strength to push through whatever ethical barrier the racism of the naked woman had presented them with. Um, who knows, who knows? The sheer wrongness of it may even have created an extra sexual frisson. We can’t tell, can we, we can’t be sure. We can never really know without carrying out a controlled experiment. And there’s no money for that now, not with, not with the Olympics coming up, it’s all … Those kind of things are all cut. So, um …
So there’s some kind of theoretical objections to television, and that’s all well and good, well done to me. But, er … But if I’m honest with you, the real problem I’ve got with television is it’s now coming up to twelve years since they’ve commissioned anything that I’ve written. Um … But it nearly wasn’t the case, um … I’m going to sit down for this bit, ’cause it’s a little story about TV and it gives it the flavour of a … sitting down makes it feel like a sort of Ronnie Corbett monologue, which is good. So, it nearly wasn’t the c– … I’ve been doing this about twenty years, like I said, and I’m on a kind of seven-year cycle of being fashionable, right, and it’s good that it’s so regular ’cause I can plan expensive medical crises around them.
The last kind of critical peak for good reviews and stuff was about the start of 2006, and we’re just on the downside of the curve from that now. Um … But anyway, as a result of being trendy about two years ago, I got asked in to see the head of BBC2, which is really weird because normally we have to petition them to be seen. But he asked me in and he said to me, ‘We’re all very excited about your work, whatever it is. You can do anything you like for the channel. What would you like to do?’ And I thought … So I chanced my arm. I said, ‘I’d like to do six half-hours of stand-up, fairly straightforward, like the old Dave Allen shows.’ He said, ‘You can. You don’t need to do a try-out, get on with it, it won’t be a problem.’ So I left this meeting – I didn’t even know what it was for – and when I left, my whole life had been completely transformed, professionally, financially, I suppose, everything.
So I started writing this series, right. And I had this idea that each week, I’d do a bit where I did a bit of stand-up to a weird group of people in an odd place, right, and I’d film it. So first of all I wrote a set that would work for really little kids, right. And it was about how when I was a kid, my mum said, ‘Eat your greens,’ and I didn’t, and I got smaller and smaller, and then I got carried off by a bird, right. Yeah. Now, it’s not aimed at you, but they like it, don’t they, they like it, the people, yeah … It’s for children really, but you know … Imagine me, being carried off by a bird, it’d be hilarious … ‘Help!’ … So, er … Especially if it was a funny bird, like a budgie or something …
So, I started doing this at kids’ parties and stuff with a view to filming it at some point. And kids are really funny, right, ’cause they don’t heckle. But what they do do is they put their hands up like that and then you have to decide whether to accept the heckle. It’s a good system, you know.
So I was doing this kids party on a Sunday afternoon, I was talking about becoming really small and whatever. And this little girl about seven put her hand up. And I went, ‘What?’ And she said, ‘If you were so small then, why are you so fat again now?’ And that’s funny, isn’t it? So, um … No, it is, you know. So I said to her, ‘Well, I may be fat, but at least I’ve got some pubic hair.’ [shouting] ’Cause the old skills kick back in, Glasgow, twenty years, twenty years, night after night after night. I didn’t want to say it but it’s like Pavlov’s dog. Pavlov’s dog! Any seven-year-olds that cross me will be crushed into the ground ’cause they don’t have twenty years of road-hardened skills!
And the other thing I wanted to do, right, wasn’t just that. I wanted to do like a kind of parody of observational comedy. Now, The Stand audience, you see lots of comedy, you’ll know what observational comedy is. Observational comedy is when the comedian pretends to have the same life as you, right, rather than being a philandering coke addict. This is what observational comedy’s like, isn’t it, it’s like this.
[sniffs] ‘Wa-hey! Who’s, er, who’s married? Who’s married, who’s got a girlfriend? Who’s ever seen a woman, you seen a photo of one, you know what they are, you’ve seen them around, yeah? Yeah? Not men, with the hair. Are there any in? Any women in? Any women? Girls, answer me this. Why do you take so long to get ready, what’s going on? What’s going on? What’s going on? What’s going on? Why do you take so long to get ready? What’s going on? What’s … Who’s got kids? That’s finished, that bit. Who’s got kids? It’s finished! It’s finished! It’s fini– … Who’s got kids? I’ve got a little boy. Have you got a little boy? How old is he, fourteen? Mine’s three. It’s the same, it’s the same. It’s the same! Some of the things he says, though, they’re mad, it’s hilarious, it’s mad. It’s like he can only understand the world from the perspective of a child.’
Anyway. I’ve got a terrible feeling there’s some people at the back there going, ‘Now he’s cooking, now he’s cooking.’ Why do they take so long to get ready, the women, if only we could ask them, but they’d go mad. So, I thought, what’s the best way to do a parody of observational comedy? And the best way to do a parody of observational comedy, I thought, was to do it from the point of view of an insect, about being an insect, whilst dressed as an insect, right. So, I’m an insect comedian, right, it’d be like this. I’m an insect, yeah?
[sniffs] ‘Right, who’s er, who’s killed a grasshopper? Come on, we’ve all done it, haven’t we? Friday night, we’ve all done it. There’s a bloke down there laughing, he’s on film now, he’s on film, and he’s done it. And um … We’ve all done it, Friday night, killed a grasshopper, you get ’em, don’t you, in your mandibles, yeah, and er – not what you were thinking, mandibles, yeah, what are you thinking, what are you thinking – you get ’em and you spit your enzymes onto ’em, don’t you, yeah, your enzymes, yeah, you spit your enzymes on ’em, on the grasshoppers, to dissolve ’em, yeah, into a liquid, yeah, you dissolve ’em into a liquid, yeah, so you can feed ’em to your grub. Who’s got a little grub, who’s got a little grub? I’ve got a little grub, honestly, some of the things he says, they’re mad, it’s hilarious, it’s like he can only understand the world from a larval perspective.’
So. I wanted to do that insect comedy but I didn’t know where to film it, right, for this programme that I was given. And then it turned out, as luck would have it, that in May last year there was a three-day event happening at Barnes reservoir, the wildlife reserve in south-west London, and there were entomologists, insect scientists, coming from all over the world for a three-day celebration of insects, and this event was called Pestival, right. Pestival. That’s not my joke, that’s an entomologist’s joke. Don’t judge me. And on the opening night I found out they were having an insect-themed cabaret to welcome all the entomologists, and they’d already booked Robyn Hitchcock the singer-songwriter, ’cause he’s got loads of songs about bees and ants and things. And they’d booked this saxophonist David Rothenberg, who was going to improvise live to a tank of crickets and stuff, right. So I – no, he was, it was good, actually, so – so I rang up the organiser Bridget Nicholls and I said to her, ‘Can I come to Pestival and do half an hour of stand-up about being an insect whilst dressed as an insect to the world’s three hundred leading insect scientists?’ And she said, ‘Yes, that would be exactly appropriate. But’, she said, ‘we can’t pay you. Do you love insects?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I love insects. I luv them.’ And then she said, ‘Also, there’s a party of entomologists in from Prague and we’re excited to have them ’cause they made a breakthrough study last year into the life cycle of the peach potato aphid, so it would be really great’, she said, ‘if most of your, er, gags, quips could be about aphids.’ And I said, ‘That’s fine, I’ve got loads. I’ve got loads, ’cause I started out doing stand-up in the eighties, you remember standup in the eighties? It was all aphid stuff, wasn’t it, aphids and, er, Thatcher, the milk snatcher, remember, snatching all the milk?’
So I, er, so I rang up this guy Martin Soan and I paid him 500 quid to make the insect costume. I thought I’ll get that back from the programme eventually, and the producer said he could secretly film it for this TV series. And then about two days later, my then manager Don Rodeo, he got an email from the BBC withdrawing the offer of the whole series, out of nowhere. Now, I mean, I was disappointed obviously but it was a strange disappointment, ’cause the whole thing had always seemed too good to be true.
You don’t get what you always want, it just doesn’t happen, getting what you want, but what had happened … It’s like going up to a little child and going, ‘Hello, what thing would you like to have most in the world? What’s your favourite thing? What?’ ‘A toy red fire engine.’ ‘Is it? Well, I’ve got one for you. There you are, that’s for you. And that light flashes and the ladder goes up … No, it is, it’s for you, you can have it, really. Take it, there it is. [shouts] Oh dear, it’s been smashed in front of your stupid, crying face.’
Don’t ever dream.
But there were some practical problems with the sudden withdrawal of this work. First of all, um, I’m self-employed, I hadn’t really earned much out of Jerry Springer: The Opera because it kept being banned, and I hadn’t set up any other work because I assumed I was doing this TV series, we had a little baby due at the time, and, er, the other problem was it meant that I was now contractually obliged to go to Pestival at Barnes reservoir and do half an hour of stand-up about being an insect whilst dressed in a now unjustifiably expensive insect costume to three hundred of the world’s leading entomologists for no fucking reason at all.
And all I’m saying, Glasgow, is does that seem to you like something that should happen to the 41st best stand-up of all time? [shouting] Twenty years, twenty years, twenty y– … I should not at this stage in my career, I should not have to go to a reservoir to do half an hour of stand-up about aphids for no … I should at least be paid for that. And after twenty years, the places I perform, their principal purpose should not be the storage of water. They should be theatres or whatever this is, a cesspit with lights. I shouldn’t even be in Glasgow at all, I should … I do a month in Edinburgh every summer, you should just travel, just travel … It’s so near it’s the same city basically …
It’s a joke, isn’t it, 41st best … I don’t even have to … I can come, what, five feet from the front row, I don’t even need to look round to know that there’s people that can’t even be bothered to turn thirty degrees. ‘We’ll just … He’ll come back probably … I don’t know what this bit is anyway. Is it innovation or a mistake? I’ll just look at nothing, I’ll look at nothing. Or at that …’ ‘Can I have a backdrop?’ ‘Yeah, what would you like?’ ‘Can it be of my face?’ ‘Yeah, we’ll just distort it a bit.’ ‘What?’
I should get respect, I should get … At the very least from children. There shouldn’t be seven-year-old kids shouting out at me that I’m fat. I am fat, but not by the standards of a comedian. Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown is fat, that’s in his name. And Fatty Arbuckle, and Fatty Arbuckle, yeah? And Large. They were fat. If you saw, if you saw me here on the tour for the last show, I have put on weight since then, I admit. And coming back here, I thought, ‘I like The Stand, it’s really nice, I’ll try and lose some weight so I look nice for them.’ But, you know, I’m glad I didn’t actually, ’cause there’s people going, ‘Oh I won’t even look at him. I’ll look at a distorted, bad acid image of his own face rather than actually look at him.’
(goes back onstage) I’ve been going to Weight Watchers anyway. I have been going to Weight Watchers. But I’m forty. I was forty two days ago. And it’s hard to go to Weight Watchers as a middle-aged man, it’s embarrassing. Everyone else there is women, so you feel embarrassed. And you have to be brave as a middle-aged man to keep going back to Weight Watchers, brave, braver in many ways than a fireman or someone fighting in a war. And I’m the only person currently failing to lose weight at Weight Watchers as a result of Islam. Some laughs here, mainly an anxiety in the room. Don’t know what you’re scared of. Haven’t you got a bloke, an airport baggage handler, who can pretend to have kicked someone? It’s an empire built on sand, that man’s career.
Don’t worry, I’m going to talk about Islam, don’t worry. There’s people walking out, they’re so afraid. Ben Elton says we can’t talk about Islam because we’ll be killed. Well, I don’t care. Don’t worry, right, don’t worry about where this bit’s going, ’cause this, don’t worry, ’cause this bit, if you’re nervous, this bit was reviewed in the London Evening Standard as being ‘tediously politically correct’. So, don’t worry about where it’s going. In fact, if you were confused so far, you can now add boredom to that.
Now. I go to Weight Watchers where … I go to Weight Watchers, ladies and gentlemen, I go where I live. And I go to Stamford Hill library, Stoke Newington, in northeast London. And, um, there’s only two men in my Weight Watchers group, me and an old Polish man in his late seventies. And everyone else is women, women of all races and creeds and colours and cultures and shapes and sizes. It’s like a United Nations day out to a funfair hall of mirrors. Which they have actually, they have those. And um, I was in the queue waiting to get weighed, you queue up to get weighed, right, and three in front of me there’s a young Muslim woman about twenty-five years old, and she was wearing the hijab, this is the headscarf they wear ’cause there’s an Islamic taboo about men seeing hair. And she turned round to me and she said, ‘I do apologise but I’m about to get weighed, would you be so kind as to go out in the corridor?’ Now, at the time, I mean obviously in retrospect, um, it was ’cause she was going to take the headscarf off and I couldn’t see her hair, but I didn’t make the connection then and I thought she just didn’t want me to see how much weight she’d put on. So I said, ‘No, I’m not going out, and I don’t know what you’re worried about, love, you’re not even that fat.’ And then she said, ‘No, it’s the …’
And then I realised, right, and I started to apologise, but in-between me and her was a Hassidic Jewish woman about fifty years old, and she sort of budged in and she looked at the young Muslim woman and then she looked at me and then she sort of went [sigh of exasperation] like that. [sigh of exasperation] As if to go, ‘First the suicide bombings and now this.’ But the irony was that the Hassidic Jewish, they have a thing where they shave their hair off and the women wear wigs over it. So she’s in a wig, the young Muslim woman’s in this headscarf. Me, I’m an atheist, right, a fat atheist we’ve established, but I didn’t see why my attempts to lose weight should be compromised in any way by the hair anxieties of a God I don’t necessarily believe exists, right. But it looked like there was going to be a three-way argument. Everyone was looking at each other. And then I thought, ‘I can’t stay here to debate this,’ I thought. ‘I can’t stay here. ’Cause if we ever are going to decide how exactly, if at all, God wants hair to be concealed, that’s not going to happen at Stamford Hill Weight Watchers. It’s Stamford Hill Weight Watchers, not Stamford Hill Weight Watchers and Religious Hair Taboo Discussion Circle.’ Although I would go to that.
And I tell you what, it’s really nice being back in a kind of cosmopolitan city like Glasgow, where you can say the phrase, er, ‘Stamford Hill Weight Watchers and Religious Hair Taboo Discussion Circle’ and you people realise that that is a joke, there’s no such thing. Because what I’ve found is, in the north of England, right, in Carlisle or Derby or somewhere, when I say ‘Stamford Hill Weight Watchers and Religious Hair Taboo Discussion Circle’, there’s no laugh, ’cause all the north of England people are going, ‘Well, they would have that in that London – the kind of stupid thing that they would have there.’ And what I say to people in the north of England is not every town has to have a cake named after it, yeah. And it’s not strictly true, they haven’t all got cakes named after them, right, but enough of them have, if you say that to a north of England person, they go, ‘Oh, Bakewell, Eccles …’ and then they get confused. So … ‘Yorkshire pudding, is that …?’
So, anyway, I went out in the corridor. And the young Muslim woman had already asked the old Polish man to go out in the corridor, and he was out in the corridor, and he looked at me and he made this kind of angry face, right. And I looked away, ’cause I was worried he was going to say something like ‘fucking Muslims’ or something, yeah, and I looked away. ’Cause I didn’t want to have to agree with something racist out of politeness. ’Cause I can do that whenever I go home at Christmas. I say quilts, but they’re flags really. Banners.
So … And then I was out in the corridor, and I was annoyed initially ’cause I thought, ‘I’ve gone out, I’ve left the Weight Watchers now, and I’m going to lose my nerve and I’m not going to go back in, and I’m going to get fatter and fatter.’ But then I thought, ‘You know what, it doesn’t matter, right, it’s ten, fifteen minutes out of my day, I can rejoin the queue.’ And if I was a young Muslim in Britain today, maybe I’d feel quite put upon and maybe these kind of cultural signifiers would take on an extra importance – it doesn’t matter. Then I thought, ‘You know what, it doesn’t matter, it’s ten, fifteen minutes out of my day, I can rejoin the queue.’ And if I was in a queue for something and there was someone behind me who was, like, blind or on crutches or mentally handicapped or something, I would let them go ahead of me. And then I thought, ‘That’s a bit weird, isn’t it, ’cause I’ve just equated having a religious belief with being mentally handicapped.’ Which obviously isn’t appropriate. Even though it is correct.
And then I got annoyed, right, and I thought … I got annoyed, I thought, ‘I’m going to go back in, I’m going to go to her, “You, a Muslim, may be a contributing factor in my ongoing weight gain. Driving me out, you know … And if you must wear your hijab to Weight Watchers, then what I suggest is that you take it off at home and weigh it separately before you come out, and then deduct its weight from your Weight Watchers total, giving you your correct weight, using maths, which I understand your people claim to have invented.”’ Yeah? But I didn’t say that, right, I just went back in and er, you know, and I had, um … gained some weight.
Now, one hesitates in the current climate to make a joke onstage about the Muslims, right, not for fear of religious reprisals, right – when’s that ever hurt anyone? – but because of a slightly more slippery anxiety, which is, like, basically, when you do, like, stand-up in a small room, it’s like, ‘We’re all friends, hooray, and we can make a joke.’ But you don’t really know, you don’t really know how a joke’s received, and it could be that it’s laughed at enthusiastically in a way that you don’t understand, particularly out there, you don’t know who’s watching on television. I mean, if it’s on telly on Paramount, probably someone horrible, an idiot, um … The kind of person who’s awake at five in the morning, who knows what, it could be anyone laughing at this, you don’t know, awful people. And um … So … um …
So you don’t know. And the problem is 84 per cent of people apparently, of the public, think that political correctness has gone mad. Now, um, I don’t know if it has. People still get killed, don’t they, for being the wrong colour or the wrong sexuality or whatever. And what is political correctness? It’s an often clumsy negotiation towards a kind of formally inclusive language. And there’s all sorts of problems with it but it’s better than what we had before, but 84 per cent of people think political correctness has gone mad. And you don’t want one of those people coming up to you after the gig and going, ‘Well done, mate, er, well done, actually, for having a go at the fucking Muslims. Well done, mate. You know, you can’t do anything in this country any more mate, it’s political correctness gone mad. Do you know, you can’t even write racial abuse in excrement on someone’s car without the politically correct brigade jumping down your throat.’ And you don’t want those people coming up to you after gigs, ’cause that’s Al Murray the Pub Landlord’s audience, missing the point and laughing through bared teeth like the dogs they are.
’Cause I’m forty, like I said, I was forty last week, and I can remember before political correctness, that’s why I think it’s better. I remember … It’s better now. I remember when I was twelve, there was one Asian kid in our class, and every day when he read the register out, for a year, the teacher, instead of using his name, called him ‘the black spot’, every day for a year.† The street I grew up in, just south of Birmingham, there was I remember, 1972, a black family that wanted to move in and all the white families put pressure on the guy not to sell the house. And eight years previous to that, David Cameron never mentions it, but the Conservative Party won a by-election in Birmingham and they sent out little kids with leaflets that said, ‘If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Liberal or Labour.’ And if political correctness has achieved one thing, it’s to make the Conservative Party cloak its inherent racism behind more creative language. But …
But on the whole, when people say political correctness has gone mad, I think, ‘Well, what do you mean?’ Unless it’s my nan, right. When my nan says to me, ‘Oh, Stew, that political correctness has gone mad,’ I go, ‘Why is that, Nan?’ She goes, ‘Well, I was in the hairdresser’s yesterday, Stew. And they said to me, “Would you like a cup of tea, Mrs Harris?” I said, “Yes please.” They said, “Well, you can have one but you have to drink it in the waiting area, ’cause we can’t have hot liquids at the work station.” It’s political correctness gone mad, Stew. It’s old Red Robbo, Stew, he’s saying that we can’t have tea any more in case it annoys a Pakistani.’
Basically, there’s a whole generation of people who’ve confused political correctness with health and safety legislation. ‘It’s gone mad. They’re saying I can’t have an electric fire in the bath any more, Stew, in case queers see it. In the old days you could get your head and you could submerge it in a vat of boiling acid. And now they’re going, “Oh, don’t do that, what if Jews see it? Might annoy Jews …” You could get your whole family and you could jump in a threshing machine and dance around. All your arms would fly off and it was fine. And now they’re going, “Oh …” They’ve banned Christmas. They’ve banned Christmas now.’
On the whole, when people say … I mean, there’s a columnist for the Daily Mail, Richard Littlejohn, and he’s got two catchphrases. One is ‘political correctness has gone mad’. And the other is ‘You couldn’t make it up’. You couldn’t make it up, which is ironic, given that the vast proportion of what he writes has no … And about a year ago, Littlejohn did a whole page on political correctness gone mad. And it’s gone to court now, this thing, but it’s when there was a serial murderer killing sex workers in East Anglia, and the police and the broadsheets at the time routinely referred to – some of them were teenagers – and the papers would call them ‘women that worked as prostitutes’, rather than just ‘prostitutes’, and Littlejohn did a whole page on how this was political correctness gone mad, and you should call them ‘prostitutes’ and not ‘women that worked as prostitutes’, and anyway, it wasn’t like any of them were ever going to find a cure for cancer. But it wasn’t political correctness gone mad, it was the papers and the police thinking, ‘Some of these people are really young, you know, and they have surviving family and friends and … and what can we do to cushion this ugly word “prostitute”? We’ll blanket it in a, a qualifying phrase,’ you know. It was a nice thing to do.
But for Littlejohn it wasn’t that, it was political correctness gone mad and they were prostitutes and should be called prostitutes. And one wonders how far Richard Little john would go in his quest for the accurate naming of dead women. Would he go perhaps to a cemetery under cover of night, armed with a, a little chisel and a little torch? A chisel and a torch. And he’s there at the grave that says, ‘Here lies Elaine Thompson aged 19,’ and he’s there amending it. [noise of chiselling] ‘Prostitute. [chiselling] Not a woman who works as a prostitute. [chiselling] A prostitute. [chiselling] P.S. [chiselling] I hate women, obviously. [chiselling] And I’m glad when they die. [chiselling] Yours, [chiselling] Richard Littlejohn. [chiselling] Cunt. [chiselling] Not someone who works as a cunt.’
So the last time I was at home, my mum said to me, ‘Why can’t you work the cruises like Tom O’Connor?’ And then the phone rang and it was Bridget Nicholls from Pestival, and she said to me, ‘I hope you don’t mind me ringing up, but I’m just checking that you’re still all right for Pestival at the weekend.’ And I said, ‘I’m glad you’ve called, Bridget, ’cause I’ve no intention whatsoever of coming at all.’ And she said, ‘Why? Why?’ And I said, ‘Well, I was going to film it for this thing but they’ve cancelled it, so it’s a waste of time for me. I haven’t written any aphid stuff, it’s … it doesn’t sound very … it sounds stupid anyway, and I’m not coming.’ And she said, ‘But I thought you said you loved insects.’ I said, ‘I don’t love insects. At best, I’m ambivalent about them. And there are many that I actively dislike. Yeah? Those ladybirds, those new French ladybirds, they stain fabrics, yeah?’ And she said, ‘Well, what am I going to tell the potato peach aphid study group, they’re excited?’ I said, ‘I don’t care. I don’t care what you tell them, ’cause I’m not coming to your stupid thing.’ And then, from the other end of the phone, I heard this sound:
[whispering to female audience member] Will you just cry into here?
[Female audience member crying.]
Oh dear. Well. I said, ‘Can you just cry into here?’ I’ve done seventy other dates of this tour where a person knows the difference between giggling and crying. And this is the one that’s being filmed. Here in Glasgow, the city where all emotions are considered to be the same. ‘I went out tonight, I had a feeling.’ ‘Were you happy or sad?’ ‘I don’t care, a feeling is enough for me.’ Imagine it was someone going [crying].
Anyway, so it was that, three days later, I found myself onstage at Pestival, dressed as an insect, in a now financially unjustifiably expensive insect costume, trying to think of something funny about aphids to say to three hundred of the world’s leading entomologists. And I, er …
Now I realised I’d missed the point. Pestival was a really good thing, actually, and I should just have done it with good grace, but it was too late and I was out there. I was looking at all these three hundred entomologists, I had nothing to say, a minute passed, nothing. Another minute, dry throat, nothing to say. And then I thought to myself, ‘What would Tom O’Connor do?’
So I said to a bloke in the front row, ‘What do you do for a living?’ He said, ‘I’m an entomologist.’ I said, ‘Are you a sardine?’ He said, ‘No, no.’ I said to a woman next to him, ‘What do you do for a living?’ She said, ‘I’m an entomologist.’ I said, ‘Are you a sar …?’ ‘No.’ And then I said to a bloke in the middle, ‘What do you do for a living?’ He said, ‘I’m an entomologist. We’re all entomologists. This is a conference of entomologists.’ And I realised that Tom O’Connor had made it look easy. Yeah?
And I asked around other comics, had anyone I know seen him in his seventies heyday, before all the game shows. And it turned out Johnny Vegas told me he’d seen Tom O’Connor in a Catholic men’s club in Liverpool in 1978, and that he was brilliant, and he should have been the new Billy Connolly, and he had all these fantastic routines about growing up and working-class life and kids and families and weddings and funerals, and it always went down brilliantly. But remember, Glasgow, this was in Liverpool, where cloying mawkish nostalgia is regarded as the highest form of entertainment. And … Rather than fighting.
And … And then I thought about what my mum had said, you know. And she was right: I had nothing to show for my career. But Tom O’Connor knows that when he dies, somewhere in a lock-up garage in Liverpool there’s literally hundreds of thousands of golf umbrellas with a picture of his face on them. And when this world finally floods, and our civilisation is buried under thousands of feet of water, alien archaeologists will find those Tom O’Connor’s face umbrellas, and they will assume that Tom O’Connor was a significant figure, perhaps a god. Maybe responsible for rainfall, whom we failed to appease. Yeah? Rather than just a man, a man who spent his twilight years travelling the high seas, endlessly repeating the phrase ‘Are you a sardine?’ in the hope that it might at last be appropriate.
And I realised I’d underestimated my mother, and obviously whenever she goes on at me about Tom O’Connor she’s not trying to wind me up, she’s just trying to find some common ground. And about a year ago, I was in a branch of WHSmiths and I looked up and at eye-level I saw a magazine I’d never noticed before, called British Quilt-Making Monthly, and there was a photograph of one of my mum’s quilts on the front, and it turned out she’s the 41st best quilt-maker. In Worcester.
So I rang her up, I felt a bit guilty, I said, ‘I’ve written this new show and the main through-line of it is how you always go on at me about Tom O’Connor’s sardine joke, is that all right?’ And she said, ‘That’s fine, Stew, that’s fine. He was hilarious though, Stew, Tom O’Connor. ’Cause he come out, Stew, on the cruise, and he said to this chap, “What do you do for a living?” And the man said, “I’m in oil.”’ And then she went, ‘Oh, hang on a minute, Stew, come to think of it, I don’t think it was Tom O’Connor that said that.’ I said, ‘What are you talking about? I’ve written this whole thing!’ And she went, ‘No.’ She said, ‘Tom O’Connor was on the cruise but there was another comic and he made the sardine joke, and his name was John Smith.’ So it wasn’t even Tom O’Connor that was better than me. It was someone that no one has ever heard of. 41st best, meaningless … meaningless …
But there was one laugh that I got about eleven months ago that did seem to count for something, and um … It was when our little boy was about a month old, and I actually made him laugh for the first time. And the way that I did it was, I put this orange woollen giraffe on my head, like that, yeah? Yeah, it’s good, innit? Er … It’s the direction I’m going in. It’s not controversial, is it, it’s just what it is, you know. And the way that you make a one-month-old child laugh by putting an orange woollen giraffe on your head is very simple. You put it on your head and then you stand still, silent and expressionless for as long as possible, as if doing this were the most normal thing in the world, right. Er, like this, I’ll show you.
[Long pause.]
MUSIC. EXCERPT FROM THE SOUNDTRACK OF HAL HARTLEY’S SIMPLE MEN BY NED RIFLE.
[Deep sigh.]
[Long pause.]
THE END.
Thanks very much, thanks for having us, cheers, good night, thank you …
EXIT MUSIC: ‘STIFLED MAN CASINO’ BY AIRPORT 5.
