How I Escaped My Certain Fate (2 page)
Read How I Escaped My Certain Fate Online
Authors: Stewart Lee
In those dogmatic days, sexual relations with women, who could often be found wearing earrings depicting men being castrated, were a complex ideological negotiation. How many student-union anti-sexist men’s groups were staffed by young boys who wanted only to be kissed? How many heroic lesbians first headed south only as a result of
political
expediency? Frequently, the most a man could aspire to was to be described as ‘a sound bloke’, an epithet which mixed left-of-centre political inclinations with a suggestion of un pretentious solidity. Yet in many ways things were
simpler
. The teenage girls we tried to date did not wear T-shirts saying ‘Whore’, ‘Slut’ or ‘No Gag Reflex’, nor queue up to get talent-spotted by lads’ mags in the Student Union
Super-Pub
, formerly known as The Mandela Bar. Oh, Winnie, how fortunate that you did not live to see your memory sullied so.
Back then, under the shadow of an unattainable ideal of ideological purity, nobody, not bands or stand-up
comedians
or comic-book creators, wanted to be seen to ‘sell out to the Man’ by doing an advert or appearing on
Top of the Pops
or achieving any level of commercial
sustainability
. Gigs were performed on pallet stages in smoky pubs and scary squats, and were advertised on photocopied
sepia-toned flyers pinned to walls. This was before
computer
graphics programs meant that even jumble-sale adverts have the production values of Hollywood movie posters, and before the internet could rally a crowd to see minor cult figures at the click of a mouse.
And today’s young consumers would not tolerate our lack of sophistication. The first cappuccino I ever tasted was in the Queen’s Lane Coffee House in December 1985, when I went up to Oxford for university interviews, and it came with a tuna mayonnaise roll, served in a seeded bun with salad. At that time, the mid-eighties, these two items
comprised
the most exotic meal I had ever seen, and I
remember
the shock of the taste to this day. Back then, exciting food was still a novelty. Even pizza was regarded with
suspicion
. Pubs stopped serving at 10.30 p.m. and closed all
afternoon
. There were only four delicatessens in the whole of the country and all they sold was Belgian biscuits.
And it was cold back then! It snowed all the time and we wore fingerless gloves and black woollen beanies and dead men’s Crombies and Dr Marten boots every day, not out of punkish affectation, but out of sheer necessity. There was no shame in a duffle coat in those dark days. Michael Foot, the last socialist leader of the Labour Party, a man who had actually put his life on the line voluntarily, fighting Fascists in the Spanish civil war, wore one. (He always said he didn’t, but he did.) And so did Alan Davies, who, along with Jack Dee, was the first Alternative Comedian of any profile to break ranks and do a big advertising campaign, flogging Abbey National policies sometime in the early nineties.
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Alan Davies later became infamous for biting the ear of a
homeless
man who shouted at him one night as he left Soho’s exclusive media hangout the Groucho Club. I am sure there are mitigating circumstances in this story – perhaps the tramp had an especially delicious ear – but it is too good an event not to use as a mile-high metaphor for the way the Alternative Comedian’s role has drifted somewhat since the early days of the circuit. Once we stood
shoulder
to shoulder with society’s outsiders. Now we view them as a late-night snack.
Writing this now, God, how I miss the cultural side of the eighties – the rhetoric, the raggedy clothes, the politics, gigs you were frightened to go into, Radio 1 when it had weird bits, Channel 4 when it was radical, the
NME
when it had writers, and the thrill of discovering underground music and new comedy for yourself. Or maybe I just miss being eighteen, and like all those columnists who turned forty sometime in the late nineties and wrote simultaneous think-pieces on why Punk was the best thing ever, I’m just confusing the thrill of being young with the notion that the era in which I was young was in any way especially creative or remarkable.
Nevertheless, because various brands of bespoke
comedy
are now ubiquitous on television, in clubs and on the internet, I don’t think anyone today will have the same experience we had, of stumbling across a slice of that new Alternative Comedy when it was fresh and unformed. And to find it you had to dig. There were a paltry two editions of Paul Jackson’s well-intentioned BBC2 circuit sampler
Boom Boom Out Go the Lights.
There might be specially recorded sessions on the John Peel show, from John
Hegley
or Eric Bogosian. And occasionally, in some
provincial
town that didn’t have London’s burgeoning comedy scene, you’d catch one of the Alternatives opening for your favourite band. To me, growing up in a conservative
suburb
south-east of Birmingham, these voices seemed like transmissions from Mars. I saw Peter Richardson from
The Comic Strip opening for Dexys Midnight Runners as a Mexican bandit, and a young Phill Jupitus doing
performance
poetry at a Billy Bragg gig under the name of Porky the Poet. And in October 1984, I saw Ted Chippington, the man who made me a stand-up, supporting The Fall, and everything changed.
Ted Chippington took the stage at The Powerhaus, Hurst Street, Birmingham, in Teddy Boy regalia, to a crowd that wasn’t expecting him. For the next half an hour, he stood rooted to the spot, scowling and supping beer, and in a flat Midlands monotone delivered variations on the same joke, involving a torturous misunderstanding of a place name, or a make of car, or an abstract concept, and all of which began with the phrase ‘I was walking down this road the other day’. These he interspersed with listless
interpretations
of pop hits. People were paralysed with laughter or furious with irritation. At the point tuned-in comedy
consumers
were beginning to process the new stand-up styles of Ben Elton and Alexei Sayle, Ted was already dismantling the form itself. With every frill removed, and with the very notion of what a joke was boiled down to the barest of bones, Ted was stand-up in its purest form, belonging
neither
to the politically charged world of the new stand-ups nor the reactionary hinterlands of working men’s clubs. I was utterly transfixed and my heart was racing as I realised that stand-up could be anything you wanted it to be. You didn’t even have to look as if you were enjoying it. And I thought, ‘That’s what I want to do.’
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‘Eventually, Ted became a minor cult, though he never played any conventional comedy clubs, preferring to perform where he was not necessarily wanted. In 1986, a collaboration with
Birmingham
bands The Nightingales and We’ve Got A Fuzzbox And We’re Gonna Use It nudged Rocking With Rita to the bottom of the charts, and the DJ Steve Wright’s fascination with Ted’s oddly moving take on The Beatles’ She Loves You led to brief major label interest and three TV appearances. Years later Vic Reeves arrived by another route at a similar, but more sophisticated, form of bent light entertainment. At the dawn of the nineties, Ted’s audiences were in on the joke, so he split to seek fame and fortune in Los Angeles, eventually ending up driving trucks to Mexico and
working
as a cook. And then the trail went cold.
‘In the late 1980s, at university and the Edinburgh fringe, I met other teenage, would-be comics who knew Ted’s lone album, Man In A Suitcase, off by heart. Ted’s releases documented him
struggling
with hostile crowds, though his indifference seems now almost sublime. Ted taught us that a bad audience reaction didn’t necessarily mean that what you were doing was worthless, and we co-opted his low-energy insolence and fed off it. At the risk of seeming delusional, I now think you can hear second and third hand echoes of Ted in the routines of comics who probably never even heard him. The relentlessness of Ricky Gervais’ Aesop’s Fables bit is Ted with a tailwind, and in 2005, when I had the superbly baffling young Edinburgh fringe award-winner Josie Long open for me on tour, a disgruntled Leeds punter remarked, “This is the worst thing I’ve seen since Ted Chippington, twenty years ago.” I couldn’t have been happier.
‘It’s difficult to say who the first alternative comedian was. Ben Elton? Alexei Sayle? Victoria Wood? John Dowie, if you really know your stuff? But one thing is for certain. Ted Chippington was the first post-alternative comedian, and without him, everything would be different. Not necessarily worse. But different.’ (From a piece written for the Guardian upon the release of the Ted Chippington box set Walking Down the Road (Big Print records), in February 2007.)
Not long after seeing Ted, in the spring of 1985, I applied to St Edmund Hall at Oxford University to read
English
Literature. I did so for two reasons. Firstly, I loved English Literature, and the Anglo-Saxon poetry course really appealed to me (although sadly I turned out to be particularly poor at this subject, lacking the requisite
grammar-school Greek and Latin). And secondly, a
doctor
for whom I did a Saturday morning filing job had told me about going to the Edinburgh Fringe in the seventies with an Oxford University student comedy group that had included some of
Not the Nine O’Clock News
, and it sounded superb. I passed the exams and got a place. I still can’t believe I was really allowed to study there, with all those clever people, reading books all day in the midst of the Cotswold-stone cathedrals of culture. However, the wind of change was already blowing across the comedy continent.
Everything I ever read, and every documentary I ever saw, about the fifties satire boom and its inheritors seemed to suggest that going to Oxbridge was a passport into a BBC Light Entertainment career, irrespective of your actual ability. But the Alternative Comedy scene that was swiftly becoming the dominant trope was expressly and understandably against this privileged old guard. In my early days on the circuit, I kept the exact location of my education a secret, as it would have been held against me; on the rare occasions it leaked out, I felt I had to be twice as good to prove myself.
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I remember the anarchist comedian and ‘godfather of
Alternative
Comedy’ Tony Allen being extremely keen to book me for a night he ran in a squat in Hackney after he found out I’d got a 2:1 in English from St Edmund Hall. I’d like to think that the days of
fasttracking
are long gone, but a disproportionate amount of television comedians who rose to prominence in the last decade do seem, just like in the pre-Alternative days, to be from Oxbridge. Mitchell and Webb, Katy Brand, Lucy Montgomery, Simon Bird, John Oliver, Johnny Vegas and Frank Skinner, for example, all are former
presidents
of the Cambridge Footlights. What is undeniable is that going to Oxford gave me a degree of confidence, and some organisational skills when it came to writing. But then, I would deny any outright privilege, wouldn’t I? I’m a special case. My excuse is that I’m from a single-parent family, got a full grant, and went to an
independent
boys’ school on a part-scholarship and a charity bung, so I ain’t the same as all them Oxford toffs. Nobody likes to think their own success is anything but hard won and deserved. I expect even David Cameron and George Osborne maintain, privately, that they’re ‘not like those other Oxbridge-educated Eton fuckers’, and think they have somehow achieved their positions as puce-faced masters of the known universe on merit alone.
I moved to London to be a comic in September 1989. There was a comedy micro-economy in the city where a few thirty-quid gigs a week, in the tiniest of pub back rooms, almost added up to a living wage. I got a flat in Acton with Richard Herring, with whom I had
written
some student comedy shows, and two other friends from university. From nine to five, I worked in temp jobs orange-juice packing, data inputting and finally the luxury of fact-checking for a horticultural encyclopedia. Every day I’d hassle the forty or so comedy clubs in
Time Out
for the live auditions they called Open Spots, laboriously dialling dozens of numbers on the revolving disc of the telephone, round and round, day after day. I don’t think the young people of the twenty-first century, with their mobile
telephones
, can possibly imagine what it was like actually
having
to dial phone numbers. Kids today! They don’t know they’re born.
Maybe I’d be slotted into an unpaid five minutes,
anywhere
from the thirty-seater Guilty Pea above The
Wheatsheaf
on Rathbone Place, where various thirties bohemians drank themselves to death, to the sprawling 180 seats of the old Comedy Store in Leicester Square. The stand-up guru John Gordillo, then in a double act called The Crisis Twins, saw my act and liked it, and gave me his private-promoter
phone-number list, which seemed like an astonishing act of trust and kindness. Click, whirr; click, whirr. After a few weeks of pestering, most places called back.
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Every evening, I travelled home across London on night buses, back when you could smoke and drink on the top deck – epicurean allowances which made the most inconvenient journey a hedonistic pleasure – and I’d feel like I was living the mythical life of some
fin de siècle
artist, despite the looming threat of another early start at the data-input desk.
*
It took nine months of two calls a day for Jongleurs to give me an open spot at their Battersea club, the only one they had in those days. The gig that night was compèred by Jack Dee, who was about to become famous off the back of some beer adverts. I died and was never allowed back.
