How I Escaped My Certain Fate Read Online Free PDF Page A

always had other projects on the go.Regrettably, Cluub Zarathustra, a Dadaist live show initiated by Simon Munnery and featuring a brilliant revolving-door cast including the likes of Kevin Eldon, Sally Phillips, Richard Thomas, the future Mighty Boosh mover Julian Barratt and Roger Mann, * came to nothing. Perhaps ending the rather short pilot we submitted to Channel 4 in 1997 with the words ‘Insert More Money’ flashing across the screen didn’t help.
    * Roger Mann was a superbly strange comic whom I first saw at Marco’s Leisure Centre in Edinburgh in 1989, when he was known as Paul Ramone. His ability to make a sudden mid-stream switch from genial rambling into a kind of highfalutin Regency fop register , complete with the appropriately constipated face and pursed lips, was certainly an influence on his friend Frank Skinner’s subsequent use of the same tic. Roger, who resembled Herman Munster ’s rakish younger brother, combined off-the-wall surrealism and coquettish whimsy with a kind of threatening suppressed rage, and we all loved him. His timeless party piece, the role of the decadent storyteller Edgar Allan Poo, began with the superbly portentous sentence, ‘I had been called upon to invent a new kind of pig.’ Roger and Kevin Eldon’s 1992 Channel 4 sitcom Packing Them In, while roundly panned at the time, would probably stand up rather better than most recent offerings, and included the line, ‘Look. It appears that, all along, Alan was a mechanical eagle.’ Roger retired early, destitute and disillusioned, to veg out somewhere in the Pyrenees foothills on a bottle of red a day and a baguette a week. Nevertheless, the Swindon Advertiser recently voted him Swindon’s twenty-ninth most famous person, beating XTC’s Dave Gregory at number 34. Roger gave me loads of gigs early on in tiny clubs he ran in south London, and I am eternally in his debt. Not financially though, if I could just make that clear, as I understand his paltry savings largely disappeared in the 2009 crash.
     
    In between commitments to the double act I did hundreds of stand-up gigs a year on the circuit, which was always my principal creative outlet, and usually knocked out a new solo show for Edinburgh and in theory beyond, although the low-level, solo comedy show touring network of today didn’t exist. But there were other problems too. By the late nineties, my management company had grown from a two-man operation into a massive conglomerate , with dozens of subdivisions staffed by hopeful serfs. It was hard to feel the same sense of all being in it together. The days of acts and management out in the van behind enemy lines on flyposting missions were long gone. And now, the live department was run like a telesales desk, with hungry young operatives trying to place acts around the country for maximum fees, to ensure a healthy turnover, often irrespective of the suitability of the venue. This meant we tended to be sent to councilfunded places anxious to tick boxes by showing they’d had some comedy, unaware that the event wasn’t going to fly. And because I gave each subsequent solo show a new title, rather than just being billed as ‘Stewart Lee’, and a theme, and a poster that tried to reflect that, all the information would get jumbled up by my bookers and I’d arrive at some regional arts centre somewhere with a show totally different to the one advertised, a two-year-old poster and press pack having been sent out. And all the while, audiences dwindled away.
    In the early part of 2000, the big manager booked me a one-off gig at Dundee Rep. I paid the 15 per cent commission . I paid the support act. I paid for travel. I paid for accommodation. And then there was almost nothing left of the fee. The audience barely reached double figures. I arrived and left in darkness, with little to show for my trouble either financially or creatively. It seemed like a metaphor for my career. Creatively, I was in Dundee. By now, I’d