London Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle

This programme contains some strong language

What I would like to talk about tonight is property, wealth

and poverty on both a national and a global level.

I am aware this is supposed to be a comedy show,

so I'm just going to open with ten minutes of jokes about dogs.

But as they proceed you'll realise that actually I've been talking

about poverty all along.

It's very clever...

Now, we love dogs, don't we? Oh, yeah, we love dogs.

Man's best friend.

Man's best friend, but only if your best friend

is the sort of person who defecates in a children's play area,

licks their own genitals in public and bites a toddler's face off.

A Premiership footballer, basically.

Or Dappy from N-Dubz.

I don't know who that is.

A child told me to say that.

Now, my uncle used to like to groom dogs, by which I mean

he would go on the internet and he would visit...

He would visit websites frequented by dogs

whilst pretending to be a much younger dog.

Now, it was never going to work out.

In the flesh, there's no way that a 57-year-old ice cream man

could pass himself off as a three-year-old King Charles Spaniel.

Even with his elaborate and expensive home-made costume.

Some big laughs for that.

But there's also, in areas of the room, no laughs, aren't there?

Quite interesting. People that are laughing, what they've done,

they've just taken a little time out to imagine what that costume

would be like, and the process involved in its manufacture.

They've imagined an elderly ice cream man knitting

all the felt together, they've pictured that

and they've got extra free laughs in their own heads.

Those of you that are sitting at home,

and I expect there's a lot of you, going, "What are they laughing at?"

That's because, what you've done, you've just sat there, haven't you?

I've said, "Even with his expensive and elaborate home-made costume,"

and you've just gone, "Oh, he's finished saying that sentence."

"What sentence will he say next, I wonder?"

It's not like that.

With my act, a lot of it happens in the spaces, it's suggestion.

So you can carry on watching if you like

but you need to raise your game.

Now, I hate dogs, I'll tell you why.

Cos I've got kids and every day they step on the pavement,

they step in the dog excrement, they jump up and down and they shout,

"Poo poo poo on my shoe shoe shoe."

They're 28 years old.

All kids in jokes are 28 years old.

When will you learn?

It's not their fault, is it?

If kids see something brown and sticky, they're either going

to step in it or eat it, which annoys me because they won't eat

the delicious, gourmet, middle-class meals that I cook for them.

"Come on, eat your desiccated squid and marinated fennel

"or you won't be allowed to watch Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood.

"Or any of his oeuvre."

Likewise, people at home,

use of the word "oeuvre" there, as a punch line.

You may not like it, but I guarantee there's no-one on Mock the Week doing that.

Yesterday my son stepped in dog excrement

and trod it all up the stairs.

It's sort of an endless...problem.

It doesn't make it any less irritating

to have written a routine about it.

So it was the fact of it happening that made it irritating?

It's not that you've seduced yourself into being irritated by pretending?

-I can't laugh my way out of it...

-Well, that would be ridiculous.

To laugh your way out of a mess caused by dog excrement.

You'd look absurd.

I mean, it's pathetic in a way.

10, 15 years ago, I was writing whole shows

about religious censorship, big ideas.

And the bulk of this episode is about how irritated

I am by dog excrement.

But I am incredibly irritated by it. More so than...

More so than wars or injustice, really.

I'm absolutely fed up to the back teeth with it.

The problem is, right, that dog excrement can blind children.

Barely a week goes past without us going into A&E with what

medical professionals call "dog shit eye blindness disorder."

And the reason there's so much dog excrement outside our house,

it's on a T-Junction, so the drug dealers gather there

from about 11 at night until 5 in the morning,

doing deals with their horrible weapon dogs defecating everywhere.

And the drug dealers never make any effort to pick the dog excrement up.

Which annoys me because I know they've got no shortage of small plastic bags.

Who are these people?

Don't they believe in David Cameron's dream of a big society?

I carry that vision within my heart, what about you?

I don't have a problem with drugs in and of themselves.

It's just, it's not possible to buy drugs ethically.

There's no Fairtrade cocaine, is there?

If you buy drugs, you're connected to a supply network that links you

to slave labour and violent death.

And in that respect, drugs are the same as all Apple products.

And there's a new app you can download that gives you live updates

on Chinese factory worker suicide rates.

SPARSE LAUGHTER

More dog stuff, then.

Fine, we won't do stuff about politics or exploitation,

we'll just do stuff about... You decide what to laugh at.

You decide. You decide what's funny.

Obviously you all know more about stand-up than I do, don't you?

I've only been doing it two or three hundred nights a year for 25 years.

You can come, free, to something and sit there in judgment.

Oh, I hate dogs, I can't bear them, I tell you.

I hate dogs more than the exploitation of Chinese workers.

I can't bear them. I hate dogs.

I was delighted when I read that the first dog in space

was incinerated to death on re-entry.

And I'll tell you why. Because if...

I hate dogs. If aliens had intercepted that dog,

they would have assumed that the planet Earth was ruled

by a race of creatures which liked to rub themselves

against children's legs in a state of sexual arousal,

sniff each other's bottoms as a form of greeting

and yet had somehow managed to develop the technology for space travel.

I hate dogs. In 2012...

I do, I can't bear them. I hate dogs.

In 2012, there were over 6,400 hospital admissions for dog bites,

over 1,000 of them were under-tens,

470 required plastic surgery.

There were a number of fatalities and there were over

four-and-a-half million tonnes of dog excrement on my doorstep alone.

But who is responsible for this holocaust of dog excrement?

Dog owners, that's who. But who are the dog owners?

Who are those people so pitiful, so weak, so lacking in self-esteem,

self-confidence and self-belief that they need the loyalty and affection

of something as pathetic as a dog, to give their lives meaning?

Dog owners, if you died, your precious dog would eat you.

To your dog, you are just meat that can talk.

But you love dogs, don't you, dog owners? Yeah, you love dogs.

Shitting everywhere and howling and biting children.

But you hate foxes, don't you?

Shitting everywhere and howling and biting children.

Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, is supporting a cull of foxes

which have bitten almost three Londoners in the entire history of the city.

Is it only me, or do you ever stop amazed

when you remember that Boris Johnson is an actual mayor?

Boris Johnson is an actual Mayor of London.

A capital city of an industrialised nation in the developed world.

He is an actual mayor.

But he's not a kind of comedy, clown, mascot mayor.

Who goes around being buffoonishly amusing, while the real mayor

work is done by Ken Livingstone locked in a shipping container.

He's the actual mayor, Boris Johnson, of actual,

real London in Great Britain.

This isn't Italy.

Where the mayor is just whichever man has touched

the most women in the town.

I do apologise. Of course, this is going out on national television.

I'm talking about the Mayor of London.

There's going to be people in the north of England tweeting in

and e-mailing in right now going, "I don't even know what that is, the Mayor of London.

"How dare you do a joke about the Mayor of London on national...

"I've got no idea what that is. How London-centric, it's just so..."

What I say to those people in the north of England,

I don't sit at home watching Coronation Street and going,

"I can't possibly understand what this is."

I just use my intelligence and imagination

to vault the vast cultural chasm that separates us.

Oh, yeah, it's just like normal life anywhere else, except worse.

Use your imagination. Buy in.

I've never met anyone like Jason Manford, but I'm sure they exist.

It must exist.

It would be harder to hoax Jason Manford

than to just have a real one, wouldn't it?

Like there are people going "The moon landings are hoaxed,"

it would be harder to hoax the moon landings than to land on the moon.

And that's the way I feel about the stupid "Jason Manford is a hoax" rumour that's going around.

It's ridiculous. I mean, you go round comedy clubs,

there's bills going back to the '90s with his name on them.

You'd have to go and insert it all into that,

drop loads of clips into those I Remember 1987 programmes.

He's obviously real, it's ridiculous. So...

Boris Johnson wants to see a cull of the foxes, though.

Now, people can die from bee stings, so let's kill all the bees.

Oh, we already are.

Never mind, I never liked honey anyway.

Or cereal crops.

Or the eco-system.

Or the ongoing survival of all life on Earth.

Do you like that joke?

It contains within it a prophecy of all your deaths.

What about the consistent element you've had, I think,

in all three series, that you talk to a camera,

directly and it's much lower down than you are?

Well, I think that what the director's helped me to do there,

by me literally talking down to the camera, is he's visually represented

the air of condescension that comes off everything that I say.

Because there are a lot of condescending people on television...

-Yeah.

-And no-one really seems to have availed themselves of this tool.

Even total bastards like Huw Edwards.

Yeah, I mean, really no-one has yet, in news or current affairs,

has stolen the condescending low angle camera.

I think when we start to see it bleed out into those areas,

then we'll know that on some level it's all been worth it,

we've had an influence on mass culture and you can't really ask for more than that.

Now Boris Johnson also said he'd make sure the property boom

didn't ethnically cleanse lower income workers out of London.

But he didn't and it has done.

Remember when he got you all to sweep up, after the riots, remember?

"Sweep up after the riots, everyone.

"Yeah, thanks for sweeping up after the riots.

"Thanks for volunteering for the Olympics. Yeah.

"Thanks, everyone, thanks.

"Now fuck off."

He wants to be careful, Boris Johnson,

pricing all the low income workers out of London.

Pretty soon, there'll be no-one to pour his champagne.

Or mine, for that matter.

Yes, I do read the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail.

I am aware that I'm routinely referred to as a champagne socialist.

I am not a champagne socialist.

In the 1990s, I was an amphetamine communist.

Which was good, it gave me a radical perspective on world events.

Did help to keep the weight off as well.

I have piled on the pounds

since I've drifted towards the centre ground.

But I came to London in 1988, '89,

to seek my fortune like a little Dick Whittington.

I don't know if people will be able to afford to do that today,

the property's got so expensive.

But in 1988, '89, I earned £90 a week, temping.

My rent was 50 and yet I lived like a king.

Admittedly a king who bought all his food from an Acton corner shop

called Rimpey's, Fags, Foods and Non-Foods.

Rimpey's Fags, Foods and Non-Foods.

That is a fantastically literal brief for a retail outlet.

Rimpey's Fags, Foods and Non-Foods. It sold fags, they were fags.

It sold foods, they were foods.

And it sold non-foods, which was everything in existence

that wasn't a fag or a food.

The fags were behind the counter. The foods were in the front aisle.

The rest of the shop was one massively long,

infinite corridor with a series of reflecting mirrors set up

either end, like in Barbarella or something like that.

And it had all the non-foods there.

Every single non-food. Depleted uranium, they had.

Chlorophyll, asteroids, angels, everything.

And abstract concepts like hope and regret, despair,

enthusiasm, they had.

All the non-foods, they sold absolutely everything.

The only thing you couldn't get at Rimpey's and it's in common

with most major High Street retailers is any of my live DVDs.

Wouldn't stock any of them.

Rimpey's Fags, Foods and Non-Foods. It's a brilliant, brilliant place.

That was back then.

Back then you could afford to come to London and seek your fortune.

Today, the only way a little Dick Whittington could come to London

today is if Mr and Mrs Whittington had enough money to buy him a flat,

where he could live rent free, while he did six years unpaid internship

for a massive, tax avoiding, international media conglomerate.

It's over, isn't it? London's all oligarchs now. It is.

The Guardian reader audience that I've actively courted

has been priced out.

That's why you can see some of the gags

aren't landing as well as they should.

It's just oligarchs now, London, isn't it?

The West London that I was in 25 years ago,

that's all oligarchs.

Russian, Greek and Arab Spring money, it's all oligarchs.

Rimpey's Fags, Foods and Non-Foods is still there,

but today it serves the needs of oligarchs,

and it's called Rimpey's Fags, Directories of Prostitutes

and Non-Directories of Prostitutes.

It's oligarchs everywhere in London now.

It's like living in an oligarchy.

I'm not an economist, but from where I'm standing

the supposed economic recovery of the country as a whole,

I reckon you could pin a lot of it down

to oligarch investment in properties in West London.

It seems like that. But I've noticed that David Cameron's trying

to spread the wealth around. He's proposed a high speed rail link

to Birmingham, which is a bad idea.

Because no-one wants to get to Birmingham any quicker than is necessary.

Canal barge in, ejector seat out.

I grew up in the Midlands and I love Birmingham.

I hate people doing cheap jokes about it.

It's actually a brilliant place, Birmingham.

A Brummie will tell you Birmingham has more miles of canal than Venice.

To which a Venetian will counter,

"Yes, but it's quality, not quantity."

Venetian canal,

a beautiful young man's punting you along in a gondola, isn't he?

Past all these cathedrals and you're eating a Cornetto

and he's singing a Verdi opera.

That's Venice canal.

Birmingham canal.

Little old man in a green woolly hat is floating along in a bin.

Along Gas Street Basin. He's not eating a Cornetto.

He's licking lukewarm Bovril out of a baking tray.

And he's singing, he's not singing opera though, is he? He's singing...

# I had a little donkey

# I kept him in the yard

# One day in the wintertime when it was snowing hard

# Mother said the donkey must be cold out in the storm

# Bring him in the kitchen and let him have a warm

# Well

# He come in here

# Kicks a chandelier

# Smashed up all the crockery and bit me mother's ear

# Rusty Lee and Steel Pulse

# Napalm Death and Dexys. #

That's Birmingham.

-APPLAUSE

-And that's entertainment.

Listen to the applause, cynics.

Variety's not dead.

They don't want panel shows.

They want forgotten Music Hall songs of the early 1900s.

I hope the oligarchs don't get to Birmingham.

They might spread up there along the high speed rail link.

Birmingham's got a fantastic indigenous culture

and oligarchs would not support it.

Oligarchs are not interested in what Birmingham has to offer.

Oligarchs don't want to see the Edward Burne-Jones

stained glass windows, they don't want to eat in the Balti Quarter,

they don't want to go on the Black Sabbath walking trail.

Which exists, it's very good.

Oligarchs don't like that stuff.

Oligarchs like Premier League football,

horrible, garish, disgusting, massive shopping centres

and lap dancing clubs.

Come to think of it, they're going to love Birmingham.

It's like an oligarch trap.

But it's all oligarchs now, London.

For a long time, London's been where artists came to build an audience,

develop their work. Is that going to happen when London's all oligarchs?

Would my act appeal to oligarchs? Probably not.

What a good capitalist would say is you have to tailor your product

to the demands of the market,

so it's attractive to the new consumer base.

I ought to be developing an act that would appeal to oligarchs.

In fact, I have been doing that.

I think it would go a little bit like this.

Good evening, oligarchs and prostitutes, welcome.

Welcome to London. It's yours now.

Drive it like you stole it.

It's awful being an oligarch, innit? You know what it's like when you're an oligarch,

and you're in Hyde Park, the Princess Diana Memorial Playground,

and you've all your prostitutes with you, all your prostitutes are there,

you're in the playground and there's so many little kids running around

in the sandpit, aren't there, you can't find anywhere

to bury the severed head of a murdered business rival. Unbelievable!

And all your prostitutes, "Argh, there's blood in the bag,"

you're going "Calm down, girls!"

You know what it's like, it's awful, when you're an oligarch,

you know what I'm talking about? Yeah, you're all oligarchs.

You know what it's like when you're an oligarch, you know what it's like,

you invite George Osborne round to stay at your villa,

with all the prostitutes there, all of your prostitutes,

George Osborne goes, "Can I have a drawer to put all of my pencils in?"

You go, "Yeah, put them in that one," and he can't,

he opens it and the drawer's all full

of the severed hands and feet of murdered business rivals.

All the feet are coming out, all the prostitutes are going,

"Argh! God, there's severed feet," and George Osborne's going

"I can't put my pencil in there. Argh!"

You know, it's awful when you're an oligarch,

we're all oligarchs, aren't we? You know what it's like

when you're an oligarch and you invite Boris Johnson round,

you invite him round to your Mayfair penthouse,

with all your prostitutes, they're all there,

and you offer him a bath full of champagne,

and he goes in to have the bath full of champagne,

but you've forgotten, he can't use the bath,

cos it's full up to the brim

with the eviscerated internal organs of murdered business rivals.

He's going, "Oh, there's a spleen coming out!" And all the prostitutes

are going "Argh, there's an appendix in the bath! Argh!"

"Calm down!" Oh, God.

We hate the poor, don't we? I can't stand the poor. Hate the poor.

Shitting everywhere and howling...

Lowering the Ofsted results.

Taking up valuable Central London living space that could

otherwise have all of its Victorian fixtures and fittings

and William Morris wallpaper torn out,

so it looked like the departure lounge of a Saudi Arabian airport.

Hate the poor.

My uncle used to like to groom the poor,

by which I mean he would go on the internet and he would set up

payday loans websites, while trying to pretend to be Kerry Katona.

Obviously it was never going to work.

In the flesh, there's no way that a 57-year-old oligarch

could pass himself off as a former Atomic Kitten front-woman.

Even with his elaborate and expensive home-made costume.

SOME APPLAUSE

Don't clap. What you clapping?

Clapping your own ability to remember things?

You clapping yourself at home, are you? You clapping having a brain?

I can't bear the poor, I tell you why.

I hate them. Every week, me and the kids, we step out

onto the pavement where the poor live,

and they end up covered in residual guilt.

I can't do the oligarch act, my heart's not in it,

although ironically, I did notice it went a lot better than the rest of the...

I'll leave you with a final thought.

In the City of London, there is a £200 million skyscraper,

made entirely of glass, and last summer it reflected the sun

so strongly that it melted a £50,000 Jaguar car

that was parked in Fenchurch Street.

Now, as a piece of architecture, that is abysmal.

But as an extremely heavy-handed satire

of exactly where we're going wrong, superb.

Yeah, clap that.

You say "as a building, as a piece of architecture, it's abysmal.

"But as a satire of where we're going, it's faultless.

Now, I just don't know what the hell that means?

No. You know what, it sounds clever though, doesn't it?

And it sounds clever and I think people have

laughed at it in an attempt to pass themselves off as clever.

Have you tried to work out what you mean?

No. I mean, sometimes you write these things down and they seem to work.

They're best left...best left not analysed, you know?

It's quite an achievement, though.

If you look at it closely, hardly a single word makes sense.

Yeah, but it's the last line of the show, so you've just got

to whack it out there and run away from it like an unexploded bomb.

'I sort of wrote all this stuff about dog excrement

'as a kind of cliche of...

'doing a ranty routine about something trivial.

'But it is irritating...

'You know, if this series achieves one thing,

'I would like it to be that people really get behind the idea

'of a mass execution of all dogs.'