How I Escaped My Certain Fate (29 page)
Read How I Escaped My Certain Fate Online
Authors: Stewart Lee
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I don’t really imagine making the journey back to the religious faith that I had briefly in my teens. But it was dramatically
necessary
for me to have something at stake here, and it was easy to extemporise something convincing every night when I put myself in the position of an agnostic, or even a faltering believer, rather than an atheist, worrying that they might be shut out of God’s light for ever. The visible Stewart Lee onstage in this show needed to be more uncertain of his beliefs than the Stewart Lee inside his brain controlling him, so that the charge of blasphemy had an emotional impact for him and for the audience.
I also wanted to make the piece relate to everyone, irrespective of their religious beliefs, and to invite believers to put themselves in my position. After all, the issue that I was seeking to explore here was a human-rights issue about freedom of expression that everyone should be able to support, regardless of the red herring of their actual religious beliefs.
In the six years since I wrote this, atheism or agnosticism has become the default setting for many more performers, writers and audiences, probably as a reaction against the rise of religious
fundamentalism
. It’s no fun preaching to the converted, even when you agree with them. Recently, the comedian Marcus Brigstocke toured a show, God Collar, which examined the emotional
limitations
of atheism, the piece being an alternative to a glut of
rationalist
comedians currently making a progress round the mid-scale art-centre circuit. As the comedian Simon Munnery once quipped, ‘If the crowd gets behind you, you are facing the wrong way.’
Luckily
for Simon, this is not a situation he has ever had to deal with.
And so in February, I … I left London where I live and I went to stay with my mum, where she lives, in a little
village
in Worcestershire, right.
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This is the kind of little
village
it is. I got there early to see her once and she wasn’t in. So I walked round to the village shop and I bought a muesli bar and I ate it in a lay-by, right. And about four hours later, my mum said, ‘Oh, the woman next door said she saw you eating a muesli bar in a lay-by earlier.’
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That’s the kind of little village … This is the kind of little
village
it is, right. The house opposite my mum’s, on the lawn the guy’s got a white flagpole and occasionally he runs the Union Jack up it.
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And if he does, you know that British troops have committed an atrocity abroad, OK? That’s … that’s the kind of little village it is, right.
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I did not go to stay with my mum during this phase of the Jerry Springer blasphemy scandal. I was actually in Germany at the time. But I had been to my mum’s two months previously, in November and December 2004, after I was discharged from hospital with diverticulitis, and it was this period, as explained in the previous chapter, and this memory of my mother’s home and the landscape around it, that I used as the basis for the rest of the show.
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This happened.
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It would be nice if you didn’t assume anyone flying the flag might be a BNP voter, but they usually are. Especially west of Birmingham. A chain of bed-and-breakfasts run by frightened racist Brummies stretches as far south-west as Land’s End, where they in turn are hated by pureblood pirates as unwanted incomers to the republic of Cornwall, taking our jobs, buying our cottages,
gobbling
up our cream.
But as it turned out, running away to Worcestershire was a mistake. What I didn’t know was that the New Labour MP for Worcester was one of the New Labour MPs that was calling for our opera to be banned and for us to be
prosecuted
, so it was in all the local papers. My mum’s friends would keep coming round with clippings of me and the composer, with a thing saying ‘BAD MEN DUE TO GO TO HELL’ or something … And my mum would go, ‘Oh, you look a bit fat in that one. Never mind, I’ll put it in the scrapbook. With all the other clippings of people calling you a cunt. Going right back to your school reports. And your adoption certificate.’ [
turns back on audience
] ‘
Reason
for abandonment of infant.’ ‘Infant is a cunt, clearly.’ ‘I expect this early childhood rejection will lead to him spending most of his adult life travelling the country in search of the approval of ever-dwindling groups of
strangers
.’ [
turning back
] Yeah, laugh it up. Um …
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Obviously, as an adoptee, I reserve the right to do this material about myself being adopted, but I don’t know if I’d do it today, as a parent myself. I suppose the joke enabled a valuable moment here, creating a jarring shock laugh in the middle of this meandering set-up, and it was fun to play with the set of assumptions made around adoptees, such as them being attention-seekers looking for approval, that dovetail with similarly glib assumptions made about stand-ups. And perhaps the brutal line ‘Infant is a cunt’ was also an important hinge in the whole show’s shift of tone. ‘Infant’ is also one of the great comedy words, an especial favourite of the shadowy satirist Chris Morris.
But those women in that shop … The women in the shop that I mentioned, right, they really like me in the
village shop. And from what I can work out, it’s ’cause I’ve got a long black coat that I sometimes wear. And that’s kind of enough, you know. They go, ‘Ooh, he came in, Mrs Lee, in his coat.’ Whatever next. It’s like Keanu Reeves in
The Matrix.
It’s like Gary Numan had come round. Batman.
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I once owned a huge, long, swishy leather coat and I wore it in Edinburgh in August 1999. I was of no fixed abode at the time and I could sleep in or on the coat, wherever I ended up, and keep pants and deodorant in the massive pockets. Because I wore this coat, the Guardian Photoshopped my head onto a picture of Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, dressed in full leather cyberpunk mode, and appended an unfunny caption.
And so they really like me. So they used to cut these things out of the newspaper slagging me off, laminate them, stick them on the wall in the shop and get me to sign them, right. Like I’m an outlaw, you know. So if you ever go past there, you’ll know what that is.
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It’s all true. In the corner shop, on the road near the village where my mum now lives, I was asked to sign a clipping of a newspaper article in which the local MP slagged off Jerry Springer: The Opera, which was then put on the wall by some bus timetables above the takeaway-pork-roll counter.
But again, joking apart, the blasphemy things did your head in, the legal threats, the collapse of the work and every thing, it did kind of stress me out. So I did what
anyone
would do under the circumstances, which was to drink heavily every day. Um. But it’s difficult to drink in the countryside, right. It’s not like here in Cardiff where the streets are thronged with revellers all the time.
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Nothing going on, you know. I used to have to walk about two miles to the nearest pub. And I’d get in there and there’d just be the same three old blokes every night. And they’d go, ‘Ooh the blasphemer’s arrived, cross yourselves lads,’ you know.
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And they’d make me drink stuff without telling me what it was. They’d go, ‘Have some of this.’ And I go, ‘All right, I’ll have a pint of that.’ ‘A pint?’ ‘Yeah.’ I’d have about four pints of this stuff. I thought it was real ale, it turns out it’s this thing called barley wine, right. And you’re only, you’re only supposed to have an egg cup of it, basically. But no one told me that, ’cause I wasn’t from there. I was from a town, right.
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Whatever town I was in I would use its name here. People either seemed to think it was funny because the streets often were thronged with revellers, as in Nottingham or Newcastle, or because they weren’t, as in Malton, Yorkshire.
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The whole affair did make me feel paranoid. People would come up to me – in motorway service stations, in pub toilets, in the street – and ask me if I was one of the writers of Jerry Springer: The Opera, and I never knew if they were going to congratulate me or attack me. I was even threatened with physical violence by a busker in an Edinburgh subway as a result of the opera. He raised his guitar like a weapon on behalf of aggrieved Christians everywhere, before backing down when I lost my temper with him and briefly became berserker fearless, shouting, ‘Come on then, come on then, for fuck’s sake, you fucking idiot.’
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This story makes its way into our tale from a weekend’s writing retreat with Richard Herring in 1992, to the home of our radio
producer
, Sarah Smith, in the spooky Suffolk village of Hoxne, where none of the bar staff in the pub saw fit to tell me that you shouldn’t drink barley wine in pints. I have never been so sick. I slept on the floor in an attic, the walls of which were covered in ancient LSD and magic mushrooms and Hawkwind-themed graffiti, and woke in a carpet of vomit. Just once, before I die, I’d like to do this sort of thing again.
So I went out at about half – I was trashed – about half eleven at night. I could hardly stand. I was mad anyway, and paranoid ’cause of all this blasphemy stuff. Stressed out. And I was scared about how I was going to get home,
in the dark. But I set off along the road. And after about two minutes, exactly what I was worried about happened. A big lorry came round, I thought it was going to hit me. I had to jump into this kind of agricultural drainage ditch. I, I came out all covered in water and mud and animal
excrement
and stuff. Carried on walking along the road. And then about four minutes later, about three hundred yards ahead of me on the right, I saw this kind of white figure, like a, like a ghost, right.
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Looking at this now, I think it’s another example of the Irish comedian Dave Allen, a TV staple during my childhood, making his way into my subconscious. The long shaggy-dog story, often with a supernatural element, during which they would dim the lights in the studio, was a staple of his stand-up, and here’s me, ripping this approach off. Find some old Dave Allen on YouTube. It seems impossible that comedy so sophisticated and subtle and damned well enlightened was ever considered for broadcast. There was no tradition in stand-up that explains the emergence of Dave Allen. Was there a whole school of deadpan rationalists bubbling away in Ireland that we knew nothing about? Where did he come from? Sadly, Dave Allen: The Biography by Carolyn Soutar tells us nothing.
Now. I’m not superstitious, I was drunk, and I was under a lot of stress, and paranoid. So I thought, ‘I’m imagining this.’ I ignored it, right. And I tried to walk past it. When I got about ten, fifteen feet away from this thing, I recognised it as being Jesus, right? But even so, I still thought it was my imagination, OK? Because we all know that Jesus should be black or Arabic or Jewish or whatever. I had given Him the face of Robert Powell – the nineteen-seventies
television
Jesus. So I thought it was my subconscious. Or Jesus was real and He had chosen to appear to me in a form that I would recognise. ’Cause He would know that I also used to watch
The Detectives
. Mm? He could have come as
Jasper
Carrott, which is the same initials, right, but Robert
Powell is a more holy kind of figure, isn’t he?
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Here I’d use the whole space of the stage, marking out the
territory
in which this encounter happened, and I’d try to play all the musing on Robert Powell and Jasper Carrott as if they were the ramblings of a deranged and distracted brain, rather than as if they were attempts to be funny.
So … But even so, I thought, ‘This is my subconscious, I’m going nuts.’ I tried to walk on past it, but as I got level with Jesus, He took my hand and He started to lead me along the lane. Even then, I thought, ‘This is still my
subconscious
.’ What do I want? (a) I want to get home safely, and (b) I have this anxiety about reconnecting with faith. And He’s taking my hand, in my imagination that’s what that is, right? It’s not real.
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Again, despite not believing in God, I think part of getting this bit to work was about imagining, convincingly, the amount of
comfort
that physical contact with an apparently forgiving Jesus would give you, if you were seriously worried about being cast out from faith. To have a holy figure take corporeal form and hold your hand on a dark lane would be something we could all respond to. How wonderful it would be to have this kind of vision. Is it any wonder than sometimes people will such experiences into being?
But then He started talking to me, Jesus. He said to me, ‘Stew’ – that kind of swung it – He said to me, ‘Stew, I know that my representatives on Earth have come out against you and your co-workers and loved ones and accused you of blasphemy,’ He said. ‘But I forgive you,’ He said. ‘And I want you, if you can, to find it in your heart to forgive me.’
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And I said to Him, ‘What do you mean, Jesus?’ And He said, ‘Well, Stew,’ He said, ‘there was another man, wasn’t there, two thousand years ago, who annoyed the religious establishment of his time. In fact, a lot of people didn’t like some of the true things that he had to say. And … in fact, they crucified him for it, Stew, and … maybe, just maybe, you are the rightful inheritor of his crown.’
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