Transcripts? Hmmm.Has S. Lee ever gone on record about Blackadder or The Young Ones?
He spoke about The Young Ones in a mid-nineties interview or magazine piece I read somewhere, in order to illustrate the decline of Rik Mayall who'd just done Bring Me the Head of Mavis Davis. He said he liked it and, I think, suggested that it was a formative comedy influence.
Got mine yesterday after pre-ordering it from amazon. It looks fantastic, and my initial worries about it just being a script book were put to rest by the (extensive) annotations. Great to see the backstory behind the routines I know so well. There are some other nice bits of writing linking the 3 sets which is a nice touch. I can't wait to get stuck in.
I am always pleased whenever the opportunity arises to say onstage that I don't like sport and have no interest in it. In the early nineties, style magazines, nascent lads' mags and Sunday supplements were thrilled when the 'alternative' comedians like David Baddiel, Rob Newman and Frank Skinner began talking about football in their comedy routines in Alternative Comedy clubs, at the Edinburgh Fringe and on Radio 4 and BBC2, where previously football would have been considered of no interest or relevance. Soon there was Fantasy Football, a low-fidelity television comedy series that applied the sort of irreverent, witty and intelligent humour usually reserved during the period for the subjects of politics, pop, sex and drugs to football, raising the bar considerably in an area in which Jimmy Hill had previously been thought of as a great wit.But the floodgates were open, and try as he might, with his considered BBC2 series and public love of Samuel Johnson, Frank Skinner could never get the djinni back in the bottle. Football fans and so-called 'new lads' began to feel welcome at once 'alternative' comedy venues, in their Ben Sherman shirts, and within five years the comedy counter-culture which our illustrious eighties stand-up comedy forebears shed blood to build, in the post-punk shadows of fat working men's club comics and elitist Oxbridge satirists, was destroyed. Suddenly, sport-loving scumbags began to comprise a significant percentage of any comedy audience. I think it was Fantasy Football and the introduction of football as a subject into Alternative Comedy that ultimately destroyed the values and the unrealised artistic potential of the Alternative Comedy community which I so desperately wanted to contribute to as a teenager. Indeed, all responsibility for the collapse of the entire sixties, seventies and eighties counter-culture in Britain can probably be extrapolated from Fantasy Football and laid at the door of Baddiel and Skinner, who shared a flat, and presumably a door, at the time.Rob Newman subsequently recognised the monster he had helped to create, and tried to make amends for his crimes. By the end of the decade Newman had changed his name by deed poll to Robert Newman and retreated from the front line to become a humble aesthete, quietly trying to save the world with his thoughtful and moving live shows, and with a carbon footprint the size of an ant's. But in contrast, today David Baddiel and Frank Skinner have massive luxury homes on the moon and their own private spacecraft made of gold and seal fur. The rest of us, who wanted Alternative Comedy to offer us merely the chance to subsist in an endless utopia of CND benefits and Women Only Cabaret Nights, have only shattered memories and shat-upon dreams.When I was fourteen, I had a massive poster on my wall of a giant pop-art mouth advertising a Swiss exhibition of abstract art. My friends and family mocked my pretention, but I loved that poster and th ehope it offered of an exciting world of thought beyond the boundaries of stifling Solihull. But one day the poster fell off the wall and the dog pissed all over it, ruining it for ever, while my mother laughed. That poster is what the Alternative Comedy dream meant to me - the possibility of a better world. And now it is covered in dog's piss.
sport-loving scumbags
There's a satisfying dig at Mitchell & Webb, too, for writing a "piss-weak" parody of the Mighty Boosh in one of their cash-in booksng Lee's entire act.
Whadduc cunt.
Is Lee ever right?
My favourite bit is when he mentions "that idiot on Cookd and Bombed (sic)".
The one who "wilfully misconstrues whatever (I) do".
CaledonianGonzo - Euro Jews or Middle Eastern Jews? Ne'er the twain y'know.
What about that stuff about deliberately alienating himself from the crowd because chummy acceptance is 'cheap'? Isn't that one of your own bugbears?
That wasn't his crowd though. And no, performing in a country who've been fucked over by his own country for a thousand years, and choosing to do anything other than champion a man who died fighting the invading army is a tad cuntish in my book.He isn't bigging up audience diversity, it seems he's moaning about it.
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Topic: New Stewart Lee Book [split topic] (Read 26633 times) Share
