Escaping his certain fate: the journey to Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle
The sat-nav is off
Like a lot of men who once told a joke that a group of close friends thought was really funny, I’ve occasionally wondered if I could have tried my hand at stand-up comedy.
In entertaining such thoughts, I was of course guilty of ignoring quite a few fundamental facts, not least my own unsuitability for a career as a performer, as well as the levels of resilience required to keep working like hell on an act and potentially enduring years of doing the hard yards of bad gigs before any big break did – or did not – materialise.
In any case, any lingering ambitions largely went out of the window after I first watched Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, which aired on BBC Two more than 15 years ago. At the risk of conforming to the stereotype of a typical Stewart Lee fan, I thought it was better than any stand-up comedy I’d ever seen before, or could imagine myself or anyone else doing.
I would say that 2009 doesn’t seem that long ago, but although I do sort of feel like that, I also realise that it has, in fact, been absolutely ages, really, and a million different things have happened in real life since then.
Those two feelings, taken together, probably add up to the actual reality of the situation, which is that Comedy Vehicle does still feel groundbreaking, even though this first series mentions things like Chris Moyles and Mock The Week, which belong firmly in the past.
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In 2009, the last I’d seen of Stewart Lee was in his earlier incarnation as part of a 90s TV double act with Richard Herring, although my awareness of their work extended little beyond their occasional appearances presenting Top of the Pops and certainly not as far as membership of the cult fandom that their shows Fist of Fun (1996) and This Morning With Richard Not Judy (1999) attracted.
Shortly after the cancellation of TMWRNJ, the double act ceased to be, with apparently little ill feeling or rancour – although relations between the two seem to have subsequently chilled – as Lee puts it, they simply stopped.
What he was doing between then and Comedy Vehicle is the topic of Lee’s memoir How I Escaped My Certain Fate: The Life and Deaths of a Stand-Up Comedian, released in 2010.
The book, as well as containing transcripts of three of Lee’s mid-00s stand-up shows, also describes a long journey: from experiencing diminishing returns while touring in the early 00s, to a period of poor health and brief infamy thanks to his contribution to Jerry Springer: The Opera, before rebuilding his reputation as an acclaimed stand-up comedian, culminating in a return to TV.
Lee’s final pre-Comedy Vehicle stand-up show was called 41st Best Stand-Up Ever, after he made a brief appearance on, in his own words, one of ‘those terrible Channel 4 programmes [which are] a countdown of the hundred best things of a thing, ever. And each one of the things is separated from the next thing by a bought memory from Stuart Maconie’.
Clip shows featuring talking heads were perhaps second only to panel shows in terms of the formats that dominated mainstream TV comedy output in the 00s. Like many others, I watched – and often enjoyed – both, although by the end of the decade had become a little tired of the latter as a forum for a particular kind of male-dominated, competitive and often cruel brand of comedy that was perhaps best encapsulated by the BBC’s Mock The Week.1
Despite also featuring a male comedian whose on-stage persona indicates a level of competitive interest with other comedians, some of whom become the targets of his material (more on which later), Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle still felt like it offered a counterpoint to the basic obnoxiousness of other TV comedy at the time, looking at what else was out there and saying to the audience – or at least the half of the live audience that, in what would become a regular schtick, he deemed clever enough to be following the material, and an even smaller percentage of the TV viewers at home – come on, now, we can do better than this, can’t we?2
And while it may still be considered pretentious by some and certainly not to everyone’s taste,3 I think it’s hard to argue that a Stewart Lee comedy routine isn’t – with the best will in the world – so far removed from what most people would recognise as a stand-up comedy set as to be completely inaccessible.
The opening episode of Comedy Vehicle, for example, while admittedly containing a repetitive and deliberately alienating section on ‘rap singers’ (‘During which,’ Lee explains in How I Escaped My Certain Fate, ‘viewing figures record 300,000 people switched off or died of boredom’), also places clear targets on elements of contemporary popular culture – in particular, the notion of the celebrity hardback, as represented by the second autobiography by Chris Moyles, then the presenter of the Radio 1 Breakfast Show, and the literary oeuvre of Jeremy Clarkson – that were ripe for deconstruction.
Stand-up comedy itself is another favoured topic, and the subject of a later episode, during which Lee playfully mocks the cliché about it being the ‘hardest job in the world’ by claiming a fireman once told him that this was the case (‘I’d rather go into a burning building, filled with asphyxiating smoke, than appear at a provincial arts centre in front of 100 people, many of whom are already kindly disposed towards me due to my many amusing Radio 4 panel show appearances’) and the identikit approach of many American stand-ups, in particular their tendency towards short routines based on racial or national stereotypes.4
While Lee has been known to offer a less than charitable interpretation of traditional observational comedy elsewhere (including in 41st Best Stand-Up: ‘[This is] when the comedian pretends to have the same life as you, right, instead of being a philandering coke addict’), in How I Escaped My Certain Fate, he also acknowledges the ‘incredible and admirable skill’ in ‘expressing opinions and feelings [the audience] themselves had had but never expressed’.
It might also be argued, by extension, that a typical audience often fails to sufficiently acknowledge that skill, assuming that instead of working hard on their material and honing an act, observational comedians are simply naturally funny people who walk onto the stage and talk about their lives in an off-the-cuff manner, able to entertain the crowd on their wits alone.
In turn, it’s perhaps also no surprise that some of the same people, upon observing Lee losing his temper with the audience, repeating himself, or feigning some kind of breakdown, as he does at various points in Comedy Vehicle, genuinely believe that the show has somehow gone wrong and they are witnessing something real rather than someone executing their material as planned.
Without underestimating the work involved, one of the tricks of traditional, relatable, observational comedy is to make it seem as if it was easy – not that just anyone could do it, but for anyone to feel like they could.
Comedy Vehicle, on the other hand, just seemed different to anything that I’d seen before. Not because it was completely unrecognisable and new, but because it raised the bar further, removing the false bonhomie between performer and crowd and replacing it with a performative arrogance: no, we’re not the same — I’m the act, and you’re the audience, and you have paid to see me perform, because I’ve worked on this and know exactly what I’m doing.
Series 1 of Comedy Vehicle is where How I Escaped My Certain Fate ends, having told a compelling underdog story where even the happy ending is subject to the vagaries of industry and TV commissioning nonsense, as Lee’s televisual return is unexpectedly off, and then unexpectedly back on again.
However, the extent to which Lee, post-rehabilitation, continued to be an underdog as one of the most acclaimed and successful stand-ups in the UK, later became a topic of some debate amongst a younger generation of comics, particularly as they started to find themselves the target of his material: from this era, they included Mark Watson, in 2010’s If You Prefer A Milder Comedian, Please Ask For One, for his decision to appear in an advert for Magner’s Pear Cider, and – more famously – Russell Howard, the subject of extended attention during an episode of Series 2 of Comedy Vehicle.5
It arguably meant that he was no longer pushing back against the bullying and breying of the late-00s scene but using his status to punch down at younger comics. And of Lee’s sometime defence that this onstage persona is a character, former comedy partner Richard Herring has observed – more than once – that if it is a character, then it’s one that thinks, acts, and has the exact same opinions as the real Stewart Lee.6
To emphasise the point, and undercut some of the on-stage arrogance,7 subsequent series of Comedy Vehicle featured interludes during which Armando Ianucci (Series 2) and then Chris Morris (Series 3-4) question Lee, now in a different, offstage character – a more self-deprecating, defeated man – about the strength, or otherwise, of his act.
In any case, the quality of the material – for Series 2 and 3 especially – remained high. But there’s something electric about the first series that makes it special to return to – perhaps, of course, boosted by my own memories of seeing it for the first time.
How I Escaped My Certain Fate works well as a companion piece, regardless of whether the reader has already seen the three shows repeated in written form here – Stand Up Comedian, 90s Comedian and 41st Best Stand-Up Ever – beforehand. Although if you think there’s nothing to be gained from reading a transcript of a stand-up set with lengthy footnotes, then you may feel otherwise.8
It’s a bit of a get-out for anyone creating anything in search of an audience for their sole source of reassurance to be their own faith in what they’re doing, in the absence of other positive feedback — and it certainly doesn’t apply equally to those finding their way with low-profile projects and those who’ve been on TV and undertaken national live tours — but I do find How I Escaped My Certain Fate an oddly inspiring tale.
In the opening pages, Lee relays the words of his own comedy hero, John Hegley, which inspired his exit from the mess created by his previous industry entanglements, and the subsequent journey undertaken:
‘You only need a few thousand fans. And if they only give you ten pounds a year, you’re away’.
Notwithstanding the trickiness or continuing viability of either part of this plan in the year 2024, it still seems like something reasonable to shoot for.
Mock The Week continued for many years beyond the era of Frankie Boyle et al, and subsequently featured appearances from many comedians whose work I enjoy. It’s probably unfair to continue to associate it with this particular brand of 00s humour, but I had stopped watching it by then.
In the unforgiving modern spotlight, you might also consider that not all of Lee’s targets are well-chosen (I’m not going to fall into the trap of trying to look clever by telling you what they are, but I think there are – to rely upon a well-worn cliché – bits of this material that he wouldn’t perform now. Of course there are! That’s how time works).
The back cover of How I Escaped My Certain Fate is adorned with the following quote from The Sun: ‘The worst comedian in Britain. About as funny as bubonic plague.’ And during this period, any online opprobrium directed his way — which was significant — was collated for publication on his own website.
During this episode, Lee affects an American accent and repeats variations of: ‘Hey, my mom was from [country 1] and my Dad was from [country 2]. So when I see a [foodstuff], I don’t know whether to eat it or shove it up my ass!’ before suggesting that he loves to go to the HBO Comedy Festival in Aspen or Las Vegas where he could see that same act ‘500 times in a week’.
Howard was of course, one of the 00s Mock The Week gang. As Lee puts it in that episode: ‘He quite a subversive character, I think… Even when one of the other [Mock the Week] comics does do a joke about disabled people or something, Russell Howard might laugh, but he doesn’t do so with any apparent enthusiasm.’
The other counterpoint would be that the younger comedians — particularly Howard — were more popular than him and on TV more often, therefore the metaphorical punch was aimed upwards and not downwards.
And, potentially, production costs, as the first series featured a selection of studio-based and on-location sketch interludes boasting an impressive array of comedic talent, rather than these interviews, although a similar exercise featuring Johnny Vegas was filmed and included as a DVD extra.
If this seems like a highbrow and pompous thing to do, you might also remember that, back in the 00s, they sold books of the scripts to hit TV shows, including Little Britain.