How I Escaped My Certain Fate (13 page)
Read How I Escaped My Certain Fate Online
Authors: Stewart Lee
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The twisting of the idea of ‘political correctness’ into a soft,
one-size
-fits-all punchbag for the right-wing media and your nan is a personal bugbear of mine which I return to time and time again onstage, most specifically in the 2007 show, 41st Best Stand-Up Ever. In 2008, Edward Stourton published It’s a PC World, which explained everything I ever wanted to say on the subject far more eloquently than I ever could have, and used actual hard statistical facts to back it up. Because no one can imagine a remotely
propolitical
correctness book, Stourton’s balanced account was, tellingly, misfiled by bookshops in the humour section, alongside Richard Littlejohn’s Hell in a Handcart, those crappy politically correct fairy tales books and Al Murray’s Pub Landlord annuals. Pundits on the Right like to imagine we live in a PC dictatorship, but the fact remains that in a high-street bookshop it is assumed that any book with PC in the title must be a hilarious attack on PC, rather than a book in its defence, because the only time you ever see PC mentioned is when people are complaining about PC. For money. And usually on the very publicly funded radio stations that these dicks believe are involved in a politically correct conspiracy to silence them.
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Even when you are using the word in inverted commas,
quoting
someone else unfavourably, there is an electric charge to
saying
‘nigger’ onstage in front of hundreds of people. It feels utterly forbidden and wrong, as one would hope it would. Lenny Bruce, in his fantastic fifties routine ‘Are There Any Niggers in Here Tonight?’, argues that repeated use of the word robs it of its power. I don’t know if this is the case, and it’s certainly unlikely that this is a motivation that Ron Atkinson had in mind when using it in this context. Though in a world where the London Evening Standard has described Russell Brand as ‘the closest thing we have to Lenny Bruce’, I suppose it’s possible that Ron Atkinson too may have been using offensive language and semantic shock tactics to expose our own inner hypocrisy. Or something. Anyway, here’s hoping he dies face down in a toilet too.
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‘The culture of football’. What a ludicrous phrase! Listen to
yourself
, Hill.
And I thought, ‘Call me old-fashioned … I mean, I know the culture of football has a very broad definition of harmless fun, broad enough to include carrying out a racial assault and still getting in the England team, er, gang-raping a teenage girl in a London hotel room, and yet perversely allowing Jimmy Hill to carry on living. But surely that can’t be the case.’
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I hate football. And anyone that likes it.
But Jimmy Hill went on to qualify his statement. He said that in his opinion, calling a black man a nigger was no more offensive than calling him, Jimmy Hill, ‘Chinny’, because he had a big chin.
And again, I read that and I thought, ‘Call me a square from the past, but surely the word “nigger” is more
offensive
than the word “chinny”?’ Because the word ‘nigger’ comes with a whole weight of cultural and historical
significance
that is not really there for the word ‘chinny’. You know, there are not, um, there are not people standing for election now on the grounds that ‘People with big chins should be sent back to wherever they come from – Chinland probably, I don’t know, I haven’t done any research into it, obviously.’ And there were not vast swathes of humanity historically enslaved on the grounds that they had big chins. If there had been, all popular culture as we know it would be entirely different. There would not be a blues root underpinning all the late-twentieth-century popular music that you love if the Mississippi delta had been populated exclusively by disenfranchised ex-slaves with big chins …
‘Woke up this morning,
Got a big chin.
It’s not that much of a problem to be honest.
I won’t base an entire musical genre on it.’
And you don’t hear news reports saying, ‘A man was beaten to death in Hull last night. The violence is thought to be chin-motivated.’ Although in Jimmy Hill’s case I’d be happy to see an exception made. Kill him! Kill Jimmy Hill! But kill him in an ironic way! Break into the
Natural
History Museum, steal the jawbone of a blue whale, the largest chin currently known to science, and beat Jimmy Hill to death with it, in an example of what sociologists are already calling chin-on-chin violence.
But we shouldn’t be surprised, Glasgow, to find out that Jimmy Hill is evil and mad, right, because all people that are involved in the business of football or play football or go and support it or watch it on television, or even know anything about it, are filthy, reactionary scum, right. Er …
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It was great fun taking a more or less arbitrary position against a whole bunch of people here, using football fans to stand for the new, post-Alternative Comedy consumer, and saying this show isn’t for you, so go and watch something else.
Take Gary Lineker for example, right. Gary Lineker is a twisted, evil man. You’re going, ‘No, he isn’t, Stew. He’s nice. He’s like a velvet owl.’
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He isn’t, right? Gary Lineker is evil. Gary Lineker chooses to advertise crisps, right, and with the benefit of early-twenty-first-century super-science, we now know that crisps, rather than being a life-giving health food as we previously thought, make little children fat, and then they die. Right?
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Each night I would change what Gary Lineker was like, but it usually involved fabric and some kind of living thing. Oddly, ‘velvet owl’, the one that got recorded here, seems the most
appropriate
that I remember coming up with. If you were to see Lineker captioned ‘Gary “The Velvet Owl” Lineker’ on a sports show, you would probably assume it was a real football nickname. During the 1990 football tournament – I don’t remember if it was the World Cup or the FA Cup as I don’t like football – there was a goalkeeper called Peter Shilton, who my football-fan flatmates randomly
christened
Peter ‘The Bee’ Shilton. I know nothing about football, but I did find this funny.
Now, about six years ago, due to a tragic chain of events, I didn’t live anywhere for about four months. I had to sleep on the floor of an office in West London. And I ate mainly … I couldn’t cook anything, so I ate mainly crisps from the garage. And during that period, I put on about four stone. And someone said to me, ‘Do you not know that a single packet of crisps contains your full daily allowance of saturated fats?’ And I just thought that represented good value.
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It was Gary Lineker looking out for me. I trusted his velvet-owl face to look after me. And …
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My former manager’s personal trainer said this to me during a period when he was tasked to try and save my fat life, but my understanding of health issues was so low that I didn’t
immediately
realise he considered the concentrated and convenient
presence
of the full daily allowance of saturated fats to be a bad thing. I just thought the crisps meant that all the saturated fats we needed were being delivered in a handy condensed form. Subsequently, I went running three times a week for five years, until my knees gave in, but went through a brief period of actual genuine fitness around 2005/6. That said, periodic bouts of the stomach illness that inspired the ’90s Comedian set, coupled with months on the road eating Ginsters and drinking, have conspired to give me the fluctuating weight that means hostile posters on internet message boards are unable to decide if I am merely tubby or actually obese. As I write this, in 2010, I am approaching the weight where I will soon need to lose it, or change my act into one of those ‘a cheery fat man looks at the world’-type turns.
But he chooses to advertise crisps. Why does Gary Lineker advertise crisps? He can’t need the money. He’s on television all the time, isn’t he, amusing us. His
family
run a fresh fruit and vegetable stand in Leicester
market
, Lineker’s Fresh Fruit and Veg. He could advertise that. He could help save human lives. But instead he chooses to advertise crisps. Why does Gary Lineker advertise crisps? It can only be that Gary Lineker is sexually aroused by the idea of obese children dying.
Now … There’s one person clapping over there. Of course, remember, for a comedian, the only thing worse than no one clapping is the sound of one person clapping, ’cause it suggests you’re out on a kind of a limb.
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I love the sound of one person clapping, and inevitably use a rejigged version of this line pretty much every time I am onstage.
But to try and find out more about people who like football, I went on your internet, on your World Wide Web. And um … I went on Jimmy Hill’s website, which is real. It’s called, er, jimmyhill.co.uk, and there’s a
guestbook
there where you the public, that’s you, can leave your opinions. And, er, a bloke called Scott had been on it. Um. And um … I’m not allowed to read out what his actual email address is, but if you go there, you can find it. Erm, so, you know, do that. Anyway, he said … um, Scott says, in the guestbook of Jimmy Hill’s website, he says, ‘I agree with Jimmy’s views that Britain is rapidly becoming no more a land which is populated by genuine British people born here. Please don’t get me wrong,’ writes Scott, ‘I am no Nazi or xenophobe as the pressure groups or government would have you believe. I’m just someone who was born in this country and hates to see it going to pot now.’ And it would be easier to take Scott’s views seriously if he hadn’t spelt the word ‘xenophobe’ Z-E-N-A-P-H-O-B, which of course just means someone who has an irrational hatred of
Japanese
Buddhism.
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I don’t know if I’d do this material now. I am so politically
correct
these days that picking on someone because they couldn’t spell properly would seem wrong. Mocking the uneducated,
disenfranchised
white working class for being uneducated probably isn’t the best way to get them to feel less isolated and to stop being so racist. What is? I don’t know, but I look back on bits of these routines from half a decade ago and sometimes I wonder who the person doing them was.
But it is easy, Glasgow, right, in the current climate of paranoia to make a kind of race-based error, right. I’ve done it myself. Er, I’ll tell you how it happened. I haven’t been doing this for a few years, and one of the jobs I’ve been doing is working as a kind of arts journalist, writing about stuff. And last year I was really excited, ’cause I, I got to interview Ang Lee, the Taiwanese film director, um, about the Incredible Hulk film that he’d directed.
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And I was really excited, ’cause I’ve read the Incredible Hulk comics since I was about, er, six years old and I still read them now. And I will take … To prove that, I will take any question on the Hulk from you now, to prove that. Any question …
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I did do this. I did interview Ang Lee on the phone, but due to a bad line, my tinnitus and his accent I was barely able to understand a single word he said, and ended up having to cobble together the feature from nothing. That’s the basis of truth in this story.
I have written two record reviews a week and the odd feature for the Sunday Times Culture section since 1995, and during the
majority
of my multi-award-winning Jerry Springer: The Opera years this was my only dependable source of income, and kept me afloat.
AUDIENCE MEMBER
: What colour is he?
What colour is he? Have you asked me that because you know that’s … there’s a more complicated answer, than you …
AUDIENCE MEMBER
: Er … no.
No. OK, well … Bad luck, because he was, er … You want me to say he was green and everyone will go, ‘Aha, that’s funny.’ But actually, for the first, er, six issues of
Astounding
Stories
in 1960 – there’s a man nodding there, with a T-shirt saying KILL EVERYONE NOW on it, the kind of person who knows these facts – um, for the first six issues, he was of course grey. Of course. Um … But because of the dot-printing thing, the colours all used to run together, so it came out a blur. So they made him green after the sixth issue. And he’s been green [
sic
] twice since then. Erm … once in a six-issue mini-series written by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale called
Hulk: Gray
. He was grey in that. That came out last … year before last. Available in hardback now. And um … he was also grey in the comic strip between about 1989 and ’94, when Peter David was writing it and he made him go in a nutrient bath and that made him grey.
I’ve lost you now as well. I’ve beaten you. I’ve beaten you, with your KILL EVERYONE … No, you don’t claim to be an expert but you looked at me with a doubtful face, as if, ‘This is going to get him.’ But look, I know more about the Hulk than you, and I’m older than you. So!
No, that’s fine.
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