Once deemed “the voice of 90s youth culture”, now deemed “41st best stand-up ever”, The Void blags five minutes of Stewart Lee’s time to talk about his new stand-up show.
Look up Stewart Lee in any hardback version of the Big Book of British Comedy and you’ll find that he has a whole chapter-and-a-half dedicated to him, and with good reason. Not only was he half of the 90s comedy double act Lee and Herring, he also wrote and funded the outrageously successful Jerry Springer the Opera, as well as suffering an almighty mauling from virtually every Christian interest group in the country. If this wasn’t enough to seal his status as a comedy legend, he was also part of the historic team behind On the Hour, the Radio 4 forerunner to The Day Today. You can add to that the fact that he helped discover The Mighty Boosh, produced and directed shows for comedians including Johnny Vegas and Gary Le Strange, and has written more opinion pieces for assorted magazines and newspapers than most aging Conservative MPs.
Currently gearing up for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where he will be performing his new show, we find Stewart in a little café by the Thames, looking out onto the rain-sodden street outside. It seems churlish not to ask what the new show is all about. “To be honest, I don’t know yet, I’m still working on it,” he admits. “That’s the problem with having to commit to do Edinburgh so far in advance! I’m hoping that if I keep scribbling down ideas, something will coalesce. The show itself will be called 41st Best Stand-Up Ever! after my position in a Channel 4 poll in March this year.”
The poll, comprised of votes by members of the public, industry experts and Channel 4’s ‘critical opinion’, saw Lee rank higher than Jerry Seinfield, but lower than Jim Davidson (Stewart remarks at this fact that “At Edinburgh this year, only Jerry Sadowitz, Frank Skinner and Daniel Kitson are officially better than me, which clearly makes me your fourth choice for fringe laughs.”).
His harsh ranking on the poll seems even more dubious when you take into account the fact that Stewart, along with Richard Thomas, wrote and produced the ridiculously funny (and ever so slightly controversial) Jerry Springer the Opera. Despite critical acclaim and awards from every corner of the theatrical industry, the show nearly ruined Stewart, due to a high profile campaign by Christian religious groups who forced more than half of the theatres on its national tour refuse to host the show. “The whole thing was a bad time for me, to be honest”, says Stewart. “If I learnt anything from the whole experience, it made me think that it’s not personally or financially worthwhile trying to do anything any good on a large scale in the public arena, and instead, try to work out how to make a living at a low level, without being in a position where psychopaths find out about you and harass you day after day. If five thousand people like me, and they all give me £8 a year to see a show, then that would be fine. Hopefully there shouldn’t be any need to suffer like that again.”
It seems a shame to see a performer who has been working in comedy since 1988 having to physically suffer for his art, especially following his early success with university friend Richard Herring in radio shows like On the Hour and Lionel Nimrod’s Inexplicable World (which is occasionally repeated on BBC7) and TV shows like Fist of Fun and This Morning with Richard Not Judy (TMWRNJ for short). Looking back at the work he did during the 90s, does Stewart ever got nostalgic about his early work? “To be honest, I am amazed at just how much we got done. The sheer volume of work we turned out is very impressive. I watched some old episodes of TMWRNJ recently and they seemed full of ideas that would each have sustained entire spin-off series by themselves, rather than the odd five minutes in a 45 minute show. Likewise, Fist of Fun seems very charming and clever, and so unlike the brutal, misogynistic youth comedy of today.”
Following the month of exhaustion that is the Edinburgh Fringe, Stewart will be launching himself into a national tour of Britain, starting in Canterbury and ending in London, as well as working on a number of other projects none of which will involve his old partner Richard Herring (“There’s nothing in the pipeline,” he says when asked whether he would work with Richard again following their brief reunion gig at Tedstock earlier this year). With the interview drawing to a close, there was one final question to ask – perhaps the most probing and difficult the comedian has been asked in his career to date.
“If I could rewrite an episode of a classic sitcom, what would it be? Probably an episode of Love Thy Neighbour; the one where Eddie dances naked round a tree.”
Is he joking or being serious? It’s hard to tell, which is part of the attraction when it comes to Stewart Lee.
Stewart Lee will be performing 41st Best Stand Up Ever! at the Smirnoff Udderbelly, Edinburgh from 5 – 27 August 2007. For more Lee humour, visit www.stewartlee.co.uk. You can buy his previous show, 90s Comedian, from the lovely people here.
