Comedy by numbers

Written by Staff Reporter

Wednesday, 27 February 2008

41st best stand-up comedian, Stewart Lee talks about inspiration, being decommissioned, that countdown slot and how his mum still prefers Tom O'Connor

1) Why is your new stand-up show called 41st Best Stand-Up Ever?

I didn't know what to call it and then in March I turned up on one of those terrible Channel 4 list programmes, where there's a countdown of a hundred things. They did one on stand-up comedians, apparently voted for by the public, and I came in at number 41, which I was very surprised about as I am hardly a household name. I think there's about 5,000 people that like me and they all voted. Simple as that. Most comedians were very annoyed by the list – it missed out all the comics that comics themselves really love and placed brilliant people really low – but I chose to embrace it as a marketing tool to trick squares into coming to see me, and this strategy worked like a dream in Edinburgh where I sold out for a month to crowds of people who probably wouldn't have come if all they'd had to go on was effusive reviews in quality broadsheet newspapers.

2) Are you the 41st best stand-up ever then?

No, almost certainly not. I am either better or worse than that. My Mum, for example, is still as ashamed as she ever was of me being a comic, even though I am now officially the 41st best stand-up ever. Her favourite comic is Tom O'Connor, who hosted 'Name That Tune'. She saw him on a cruise in the mid-90s and he did a very funny joke about a sardine, apparently. So in the show I talk about how, no matter how much people might praise us for things, our families still think we are losers. And anyway, the show was on Channel 4, the most hated broadcaster in Britain.

3) Which stand-ups inspired you to start?

I liked all the weirdo outsider acts. When I was 16 in 1984, I saw this comic called Ted Chippington opening for the band The Fall in Birmingham and it was something of a Road To Damascus experience. I never wanted to be a stand-up before, even though I liked comedy, because I thought it meant you had to be Bernard Manning or Ben Elton, but Ted just said surreal, mundane things in a grumpy voice. Then three years later when I was a student I was working at the Edinburgh Fringe and I saw Arthur Smith compere a show with Jerry Sadowitz, Arnold Brown and Norman Lovett, who were all very special in their own different ways. I started doing stand-up the next year, 1988, and I spent the next five years ripping them off.

4) But you gave up stand-up for four years in 2000?

Yes. Well, I did quite well in the mid-90s when I did a double act with Richard Herring and we had a BBC2 series, 'Fist Of Fun', but we lost all the money in debts to loss making live shows and eventually got decommissioned by the BBC. I'd managed to carry on doing stand-up on my own even at the height of the double act, but suddenly I couldn't think what to say anymore. We were of that generation of comics of whom Janet Street Porter said 'comedy is the new rock and roll'. It worked for Newman and Baddiel and Reeves and Mortimer but when I hit 30, doing my act to empty rooms I didn't really know what to talk about any more. So I went off, worked in theatre for a few years, and then came back to stand-up fatter, greyer and older and everyone suddenly seemed to like what I was doing.

5) You had a big success with the theatre piece 'Jerry Springer The Opera'.

Critically yes, but not commercially. It was the composer Richard Thomas' idea, I just co-wrote the words and directed it, but I am very proud to be associated with it. We built it up over five years from a little show in a 40-seater room in an arts centre in South London to this big West End piece. It was great fun until January 2005 when the BNP and the Religious right objected to it and basically made it impossible to carry on by threatening legal action and pickets and protests because they said it was blasphemous. It's nice that we force the BNP to have an artistic policy; previously they had concentrated too much on race hatred. I always thought the opera was a very warm, positive piece and never really understood the venom directed against it. It was a shame we were prevented from ever making much money from the show, but in a way I'm glad it got stopped rather than just being dragged around for ever in a succession of increasingly degraded franchise versions, which is what usually happens to hit musicals. I got an Olivier award. My Mum still prefers Tom O'Connor though.

6) What's next?

I'm doing a try-out of a stand-up show for BBC2, so maybe that will go to a series. Who knows? A play I wrote about Samuel Johnson is touring Scotland in the spring. I'm writing another novel, about the Angel Gabriel, and I'm trying to raise money to do a musical about the Napoleonic Wars with Johnny Vegas. And I'm touring 41st best Stand-Up Ever until the end of April. My ambition is to keep going for another 20 years and see if I can get into the top 40.

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