Childhood Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle

This programme contains strong language.

-This is this, right?

-No, this is trying to be this and failing.

It's not failing to be this, it's... This is this. THIS is this.

You know, I've been finding it much harder to know what to write about,

and I think it's partly cos I don't do anything.

I just do gigs or look after kids.

And I don't want to do what all the other comics of my age do,

which is to just sort of come out and remember their childhood

in a regional accent.

LAUGHTER

Hey, do you remember gripping-hands Action Man?

And no, I had one of them, gripping-hands Action Man.

I say gripping-hands, it was the 1970s,

it was more like wandering-hands Action Man.

But we mustn't judge Action Man by the values of today.

LAUGHTER

Note how my attempt at a parody of generic Live At The Apollo

nostalgia material is in of itself superior to the real thing.

But still, the years pass, the call never comes.

So...

LAUGHTER

Well, I'll do some remembering-childhood stuff,

cos it's sort of a generic thing of stand-up.

People normally enjoy this, so...

In 1973,

when I was five years old...

..I was...

I was kicked into a urinal trough

and I was urinated on at length

by a boy called Matt Clitheroe,

and the other boys in my class

at Brook Street Infant School in Solihull.

Matt Clitheroe started it, and he was

urinating on me and laughing, and then he...

Uh...he called all the other boys over, and they were all

urinating on me, laughing, and, er...

I was five, I was a little boy and I was...

..in a urinal trough, and my eyes were stinging,

some urine had gone in my mouth.

And I was...

all wet and I was frightened as well.

But I have to admit,

looking back, if I'm honest,

on some level,

I did enjoy the experience.

LAUGHTER

Not the experience of being urinated on in and of itself.

I didn't enjoy that. But what I did enjoy -

and this is interesting, I think,

in the light of what's happened in my life - what I did enjoy, I think,

was the experience of

provoking laughter in others.

LAUGHTER

I know. I mean...

HE INHALES

Yeah. Er...

OK, I've not been in therapy or anything like that,

but you know,

I wondered, did that experience go on to be addictive, you know?

I may have been lying in a urinal trough,

covered in hot urine and crying,

but on some level

it was show business.

LAUGHTER

And I think back over my adult life -

26 years of doing this five, six nights a week, and I...

You know, I've not been in therapy, as I say,

but I wonder, has my whole adult life

been just an ongoing attempt to try

to recapture, night after night,

that...first amazing taste of what it means...

LAUGHTER

..to be a creative artist.

LAUGHTER

I don't know. I think about it a lot, I don't know. I mean, I...

OK, I don't have any problem with urinal troughs.

I go up and down the motorways doing gigs

and I use the urinal troughs in the service stations.

You know, it's fine. But what I...

What I have noticed now

is there's now no longer enough pressure in my bladder

to force my urine out across the one-inch gap

between the tip of my penis

and the rim of any standard wall-mounted

service station urinal trough. And...

..you know, it wasn't always the case. I mean, once,

the jet of my urine was...

it was powerful, it was accurate.

It was like a riot control water cannon.

Now it's like a crop sprayer.

LAUGHTER

Descends in a fine mist.

Toxic to weasels.

LAUGHTER

Do you know, I remember once I fractured my arm.

I was blowing bubbles on the step of a static caravan

in a place called Beer in South Devon,

and I slipped on the bubble mixture and I fractured my arm.

And my grandad took me into hospital in Exeter

and I was in traction for a month,

and one day my grandad gave me a little pot

to urinate into in the bed,

but I sort of missed the rim of it,

and the jet of my urine was so powerful

that it actually hit my grandad,

who was standing five feet away,

fully in the face.

LAUGHTER

(Watch this.)

I was 28 years old.

LAUGHTER

OK, what you can feel at home,

you can feel the unease in the room, and the pr...

OK, what's happened is,

these tickets have gone through the BBC Ticket Unit, right?

So people that have seen me before, which is these people here, right?

They're laughing throughout cos they know

that I wouldn't just do half an hour on urine, right?

So they're assuming that it's about something else

or there's some sort of subtext or it's about nostalgia

or memory or whatever. But a lot of these people -

and I try every year to make it harder for them to get in,

but they come... LAUGHTER

they're just liggers that apply through the BBC ticket unit.

They don't know what they've come to

and they've brought nothing to the table, right? And they're thinking,

"Oh, I won't listen to this cos it's just about urine."

But it's not. And it...

What I've tried to do is I've shown you, right -

I'm trying to get you to buy into a story, right?

But if it's, like, just shit little stupid crap jokes that you want,

I can go, "Oh, I was 28 years old," like that,

and I can make you laugh and I can do it at will like that, OK?

I can turn on a sixpence and do it.

But I'm trying to do something better, OK?

And this is being recorded and you are here as a privilege

so fucking make some effort and listen.

LAUGHTER

Right, there's a guy... At the very point where I say,

"Make some effort and listen,"

there's a guy stubbling over to sneak out, right?

In front of my eye line, right?

And that's not going to make good telly, is it?

A bloke flailing around while people visibly leave in camera.

LAUGHTER

Look, my grandad, he wasn't that bothered.

This was...

a man who'd been shot at by Nazi fighter planes

when he was RAF ground crew in World War II.

I mean, he'd looked death in the eye. To him,

child's urine off his old man's face

was just water off a duck's back.

Or a child's urine off an old man's face.

Which became a figure of speech in our family...

LAUGHTER

..used to describe anything of no consequence.

"A traffic warden was rude to me in Mell Square today, Stu."

LAUGHTER

"Were you upset, Gran?"

"Not really, no.

"It were child's urine off an old man's face."

"A fella tooted at me for driving too slow on the Digbeth Flyover

"this morning, Stu."

"Were you upset, Grandad?"

"Not really, no.

"It were child's urine off an old man's face."

"I saw a child urinating onto a duck's back

"in Cannon Hill Park today."

LAUGHTER

"Was the duck upset, Mum?"

"Not upset, exactly, Stu.

"To be honest, I'm not sure how best to describe its emotional state."

LAUGHTER

They're still doing the main amount of work here, aren't they?

You, mate, with the beard - you're a dead weight in this room.

You are. And you're right in my eye line. You're a dead weight.

There are cackling sycophants that would have loved that seat.

LAUGHTER

I've got another, um...

happy childhood memory involving my grandfather and urine.

About two years after I urinated into my grandad's face

in Exeter, down in the West Country there,

my mother took my grandad and I on holiday to Malta,

and while we were there, we were both urinating together

into a kind of ceramic urinal trough

on the floor of a quite ornate public urinal in Malta,

and there were big, black Maltese flies buzzing around

the twin streams of our urine,

and my grandad - who'd been in the RAF, remember -

he started trying to sort of shoot down the flies...

LAUGHTER

..saying to me as he did so,

"I like to pretend they're Germans."

LAUGHTER

You know, for a lot of men of his generation, I think in many ways

the war never really ended.

LAUGHTER

Still just you, isn't it? It's still just you. Do you know what?

I've been running this in live for about six months

and there is normally applause there,

and it is fucking Sod's law that the night you come to record it

it's just one pocket of people going...

That's why I always drink the water at this point,

cos I drink the water sort of magnanimously

while I wait for the...

LAUGHTER AND SCATTERED APPLAUSE

Don't, no! Don't...

APPLAUSE No, no, no.

No.

No. We play the hand we are dealt in this game, right?

Play the room as it lays, right?

What the fucking...? Unbelievable.

It's a good routine, this.

This is... Right, there's a lot of scepticism in the room,

you particularly, sir. You've not...

People in the front row going, "Uh..."

This is a good bit, right? The problem is you're not...

This plays into your...what you think of us as well, doesn't it?

You think we're mad, comedians, don't you?

Sort of crazy desperate figures.

Sort of low self-esteem, you know,

wanting the approval of strangers all the time,

perhaps because of some childhood trauma.

LAUGHTER

OK, this is why this is unworkable, right?

Because there's people... There's a table here

finding things that aren't there, right?

And yet here, the beard guy, this front row...

And yet I'm supposed to steer a course through this.

I'm glad this has been captured

because it shows what an impossible...

Every now and again, it is a very difficult job, this.

You know, we... Well...

It's very stressful. We lose a lot of people to the...

LAUGHTER

We do. You know, like Hancock and Lenny Bruce,

all these guys, cos it's...

You have got a bit, and it always goes, "Bang, bang, bang."

And then you have a night and you feel it melting under you and you...

HE BREATHES DEEPLY

I mean, audiences like you, you know,

you as good as murdered Robin Williams.

LAUGHTER

You did.

You as good as got the fucking noose and kicked the...

You did. And this is what you think, isn't it? Right.

This is what you think. "Oh, Robin Williams, he was mad.

He must have been on drugs or drunk."

That's what you think, right?

You're like journalists. We don't think that, OK?

We know what it is. It's 60 years of nights like this

where you've got a thing that's like that and that and that,

and it's all...

You know, we lose a lot...

We lose a lot of people, is all I'm saying.

A car is a lethal weapon, right?

You wouldn't get behind the wheel of a car if you couldn't drive,

would you? No.

And likewise, a comedy audience, right?

Chipping away at people's self-esteem,

that is a lethal weapon, right?

And you should not be in a comedy audience

if you can't follow the development of an idea through,

because there are consequences of your indifference,

of your stupidity,

and that is the fucking holocaust

of dead comics that we have got.

Lenny Bruce, Robin Williams, Hancock, all these guys.

And the longer you do it...

You lose people, you know... And I mean, I...

I was on a...

bill in Montreal, '98, '99.

And it was me...

For about a month, me, Richard Jeni,

Mitch Hedberg, who was very good,

and Stanhope, and...

You know, within about five years of that gig,

half the people on that bill were dead, you know?

Because of you. LAUGHTER

Well, you know...

Why would you laugh at that and not at a...

Why would you laugh at someone remembering people

that they've worked with who've...and not at a joke...

..about...flies, you know?

I don't really...

I think about them.

Well...

I think about all the comics we've lost,

and I think about all the dead comedians,

dead by their own hand, and I...

I think about them every night before...

before I come on stage, but I do come on stage, and I...

And I...

VOICE TREMBLING: I walk out onto these stages every night...

..through a forest of ghosts...

LAUGHTER

..of all the dead...

comics, and I look through them...

..and I see you.

LAUGHTER

And the worst...

..ones are the people that I knew.

Because they're not like ghosts in a film, they're...

They're just in the clothes they wore

when I knew them, and they...

They stand just like they would have stood at the bar

in Edinburgh or whatever...

..and they come up to me on this side, some of them...

..and they say to me, "Oh, don't let them get you down, you know?"

LAUGHTER

Ones on this side, they come in,

close,

and they whisper to me,

("Join us, join us, join us.")

LAUGHTER

LAUGHTER

Anyway...

The Maltese flies...

LAUGHTER

Look, I'm just going to finish this bit,

cos I don't want you all going on fucking social media and going

"Oh, then he went mad and he didn't finish the..."

I'll just finish this bit.

(Finish this bit.)

LAUGHTER

LAUGHTER

LAUGHTER

The Maltese flies...

..weren't that bothered about all the...

the stuff going on them.

To them it was just...

LAUGHTER

SHOUTING: Is that what it takes, is it?!

LAUGHTER

APPLAUSE

Is that what it takes

to get you and you

and you?

HE SHOUTS AND SWEARS INDISTINCTLY

To think ahead of the curve,

to understand that you hold, in your visibly indifferent hands,

in your indifferent hands,

in your bored TV executive complementary table hands,

a person's living, beating heart?!

You should have been concentrating like that

from the moment you came in!

Fucking sitting there staring at me,

sitting in the front row not doing anything,

looking at me like I'm a commodity

for your dying channel!

LAUGHTER

APPLAUSE

Because there are fucking blokes creeping out in front of you!

Cos there are consequences of your indifference, and that is the dead!

The piling up of the dead, now,

the old music hall guys, people you know,

and their blood is on you, on your faces,

pouring down your...

LAUGHTER

LAUGHTER

The Maltese flies...

LAUGHTER

..weren't that bothered about all the...going on them.

To them it was just...

LAUGHTER

HE BREATHES HEAVILY

..an old man's urine off a Maltese fly's...

SCATTERED APPLAUSE Don't clap, don't clap!

APPLAUSE

Don't... What are you...? You're clapping yourselves!

You're clapping your own ability to follow the development of an idea!

I take that as a given! That's what you should...

It's not a fucking treat for me that you've decided to...

This is being filmed!

LAUGHTER

And the worst thing about that memory is my grandad,

when he was urinating on those flies,

he was in his late 70s, he'd had a heart attack, a stroke,

heart valve replacement surgery,

he was on Warfarin and all this, and...

and yet the jet of his urine then...

LAUGHTER

..was more powerful and accurate than mine is now

at the age of 47.

So I went to see the doctor about it and he asked me for a urine sample,

which I thought was insensitive under the circumstances. LAUGHTER

So I gave him a sample of my wife's urine instead,

which I'd been keeping.

LAUGHTER

You do, don't you? When you love someone, you keep little things.

A bit of wedding cake,

a sample of their urine,

a picture of them as a younger woman in a bikini on a beach somewhere.

They don't know you've got it, you found it in a tin.

LAUGHTER

She's there in Thailand or somewhere,

running around happy and laughing with a...

with another man, not you, a younger, fitter,

Australian man. A drummer with little six-pack and Speedos and...

..sitting under a straw umbrella,

laughing and drinking cocktails.

But it didn't work out, did it?

LAUGHTER

What a shame for you.

We all like to think, don't we,

that we make positive choices in life, but...

but sometimes it's all about which chair you're sitting in

when the music stops.

LAUGHTER

Anyway, the doctor told me I was pregnant, so I had to come clean.

LAUGHTER

He said, "It's just age."

I thought, "47's a bit young to be told something's just age,"

but I know that I'm falling apart. Since I last performed here,

I've been told I'm going deaf

and I've got to wear hearing aids. I've got them in tonight.

I've been wearing them this year.

It's a bit weird being told,

25 years into a stand-up career,

that you've got to wear hearing aids.

For example, I developed this cold, distant, arrogant stage persona

because I'd assumed audiences didn't really appreciate what I was doing.

LAUGHTER

Turns out the gigs have been going very well.

LAUGHTER

APPLAUSE

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I thought I was a hard-to-understand outsider artist, but...

apparently I'm incredibly mainstream.

LAUGHTER

Audiences even like it when I'm rude to them.

They love it.

To them, it's just...

LAUGHTER

But I wasn't always this popular.

Once I was kicked into a urinal trough and urinated on.

But it made me what I am, I suppose.

MUSIC: Miserere By Gregorio Allegri

This is this. You go, "It's not that."

They can say it isn't this, but it is.

-This is this.

-You've spent 25 years honing your craft

-and you're just reduced to saying, "This is this."

-This is this. Yeah.

And you can't even really prove that, can you?

-Well, it is.

-You just have to insist that this is this.

You've written loads of material and you've done loads and loads of gigs

all over the country, and the best you can offer anyone is, "What I'm saying is, this is this."

There'll be people sitting at home going, "Oh, look at that. It isn't that."

-I go, "It is th... This!"

-How do you know?

That's a straw man.

Who on earth is sitting at home going,

-"Look at that, it isn't that."

-BOTH LAUGHING

-What evidence have you got?

-They might be.

They might be! So I'm going to build a whole career

to refute what I imagine somebody might be thinking.

-This...

-Yeah.

-This is this.

You keep saying that. It doesn't sound any better.

BOTH LAUGHING

There's all sorts of things they can...

This is happening again now.

This is...

Hang on. But is this happening?

-I've lost track of what this is now.

-Well...

Last time this happened, I felt I should intervene.

Now I feel like I've literally got no tools to deploy.

Again, right. It's two years of work.

It's two years of work. I've been gigging six nights a week

for two years to get all this together.

People go, "Oh, it's not as good as last time.

"You know, he's done this, that doesn't make any sense."

Well, fine, right?

All those things might be true,

but this is this.