How I Escaped My Certain Fate Read Online Free PDF

hoped at least to be in St Andrews. I’d been on television totwo million viewers less than a year ago, but now it seemed there was no one out there interested in what I did. I sold out a new stand-up show called Stewart Lee’s Badly Mapped World for a month in a 150-seater in Edinburgh in August 2000, but lost money as usual. The show received dreary middling reviews, saying I was boring or monotonous or drunk. I performed it a few times subsequently, but the momentum soon petered out.
    In the spring of 2001, I was supposed to be doing a minitour of Scotland and the friendlier parts of the North, supported by the clown-haired satirist Andy Zaltzman, but the venues showed me contracts that proved his presence on the bill had never been confirmed, and because they’d already booked their own opening acts, they refused to pay him or allow him to go on. Thus, Andy accompanied me on a strange holiday, a bizarre and unwanted chaperone figure visiting random and largely empty rooms in faraway towns where his contribution was not required, watching me lose my way emotionally, creatively, geographically, while I paid all his hotel bills and made him tramp across Scottish moors in search of uncharted stone circles during the long dead days off.
    At some stage during this downward spiral of a tour, I found myself onstage at the Rawhide club in Liverpool, going mechanically through the motions of material I knew inside out, hoping that something would happen to wake me from my torpor and invest these stale riffs with some spontaneity. And it did. A drunken young man in a suit in the front row kept shouting that he didn’t want to hear about anything I had to say – admittedly voicing the feelings of most of the room – and that I should talk about illegal immigrants. ‘Talk about illegal immigrants,’ he grunted, ‘talk about fucking illegal immigrants.’ I decidedto take a bold course of action and get him onstage and hand him the mic, probably having just read a biography of the erratically inspired American comic Andy Kaufman or some other dangerous piece of literature, to see what he came up with on the subject of illegal immigrants, while I watched from his now vacant seat. I knew it would be incoherent and awful, which it was, as he slurred and stammered about asylum-seekers and how they should be sent back, but my plan was to let the room boil in irritation and fade away, before flipping the mood with a perfectly chosen bon mot. But as the crowd turned, security came and got the man offstage and told me, in no uncertain terms, that I had to go back on, utterly undermining any status I had left. There I was in a cellar in Liverpool, standing in front of a drunk racist, but somehow in the wrong. And what was a man like that even doing in one of our comedy clubs, being all racist, in his suit and tie? Did Tony Allen, the Godfather of Alternative Comedy, die onstage, repeatedly , night after night, for this?
    Suddenly everything was clear. It was the twenty-first century and I was a mumbling relic from an earlier age. The crowds had changed. The rules were different. The management weren’t out flyposting with the acts, and Alternative Comedy was dead. I was spent. I was trapped. I listened to the material as I was saying it. I watched it float out of my mouth over the bored faces of the Rawhide regulars like a brown tongue of acrid smoke, stinking the place out. Arch, cynical, tired, fake, conceited, formulaic and flat. I was no longer the person that wrote it, and the audience that it was written for weren’t to be found at any of the places I was playing. I didn’t believe in it any more; even people that liked me had seen through it. And for the racists at the Rawhide, everything I was saying was irrelevantanyway. So, quietly and without any fuss, I decided, then and there, to stop. Not that anyone noticed.
     
     
    I spent a long time wondering how best to explain to you, dear readers, what I was doing in the period