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

I disappeared from view. Then I was sent the text of a blog by The Spirit, the silver-haired member of the multi-billionaire Brixton country hip-hop group Alabama Three, who had spoken to me when I was signing DVDs after a recent live show. The Spirit, who is in fact a fully corporeal human, summed up my career post-Lee and Herring at the beginning of a piece called, unpleasantly, ‘I Bum Stewart Lee’.
    Stewart Lee. He was the edgy, handsome half of the duo that did ‘Fist of Fun’ in the nineties. For four years he was very hot. Then he wasn’t. He spent a decade getting fat and doing increasingly bitter and surreal sets to uncomfortable social workers in provincial arts centres, before suddenly bouncing back into the public eye by accidentally co-writing ‘Jerry Springer – The Opera’.
     
    The timescale is a little out of whack, but I don’t feel I can really better The Spirit’s brutal and unsentimental assessment of my career from 2000 to 2004. Nonetheless, here goes.
    In the spring of 2001, Richard Thomas, a composer and former member of the musical comedy double act Miles and Millner, asked me to contribute some storylines to, and effectively direct, a new idea he was working on. I had directed Richard’s opera shorts for Simon Munnery’s BBC2 series Attention Scum , and he’d been happy with them. Now Richard had begun a project called How to Write an Opera about Jerry Springer , which featured him alone at a piano, playing snatches of tunes and talking about how youcould write an opera about the American talk-show host Jerry Springer. His initial explanation of the genesis of the idea remains perfect: ‘One night I was watching The Jerry Springer Show , drunk, and there were all these fat people shouting at one another and you couldn’t understand what they were saying, and I thought, “That’s an opera.”’
    But Richard’s keen ear for a musical motif, and his keen eye for human suffering, found tragedy and comedy in Springer Show dialogue, which had previously just sounded profane, and his experiment played to a packed forty-seater room at Battersea Arts Centre. BAC’s genius move of the noughties was the introduction of Scratch Nights. You could use their facilities for free to develop new pieces, as long as you showed the work in progress to the public and appeared to entertain their inane suggestions in the bar afterwards. In the light of the now punitive costs of road-testing new ideas at the Edinburgh Fringe through my management, it was a real lifeline, and I doubt I would ever have written or performed anything new ever again without BAC’s encouragement.
    There was no money in the opera at this stage, and no obvious future. I didn’t give up stand-up to work on Richard ’s opera, which I wasn’t being paid anything for in any case. I just gave up stand-up anyway, because I was sick of it and no one came to see me outside London and the Fringe. Instead, I was scraping by through writing weekly record reviews for my default arts patron at the Sunday Times Culture section, Rupert Murdoch. The mortgage on my flat was £500 a month, I wasn’t on drugs and got lots of free records. I managed on very little.
    On paper, the story of the opera’s success looks like a showbiz dream. Every few months we’d add another scene to the piece, expand the cast of enthusiastic operaticvolunteers, and restage it during another little run of Battersea Scratch Nights, under the auspices of their dramaturge Tom Morris, who quietly changed our lives, and will doubtless do so again. And the audience, and the buzz, would grow.
    In August 2001, I declined to go to the Edinburgh Fringe for the first time since 1987. Instead, we staged a lengthy run of all the Jerry Springer material we had in the big, 200-seater room at Battersea. The great and the good all pitched up. Nick Hytner, the future director of the National Theatre, sniffed around like a funny little cat. We were written about in American