Read Online How I Escaped My Certain Fate by Stewart Lee - Free Book Online
Authors: Stewart Lee
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promoters and discerning comedy consumers that my management had never connected me with. And people liked the show.
After seeing Stand-Up Comedian in Edinburgh and wrongly imagining I would soon be huge, a DVD outfit called 2entertain paid my management company’s production company to film Stand-Up Comedian for commercial release. * I saw enough from whatever fee my manager’s production company were paid to make the DVD to pay off the mortgage on my flat. (I never thought to ask, or don’t remember being told, what the actual fee paid to my manager’s production company was, although I am sure this must have been discussed with me.) The DVD’s executive producer tried to convince my manager, who he also was, to make me film it at the Bloomsbury Theatre to save money, and not to worry about spending any of the budget on making it good as all live comedy DVDs ‘were always shit anyway’. But I managed to persuade both of him to let me film it in the more intimate and tense surroundings of The Stand, Glasgow, which worked perfectly. †
* Prior to the release of the Stand-Up Comedian DVD, TV’s Jimmy Carr told me, over breakfast in Montreal, that my problem was that although critics and comics thought I was good, there was no commercially available filmed evidence of anything I had ever done to convince members of the public I was worth seeing. The sick funnyman kindly offered to put some of his own TV millions into filming my stand-up to help me, but as I then got the offer from 2entertain I was never required to see how much I could have stung him for. Peter Kay and Matt Lucas, who pretended to be physically handicapped and mentally and physically handicapped, respectively , and wiggled about to a Proclaimers song for Comic Relief, may seem more generous, but secretly Jimmy Carr is little short of a living saint. That said, of all the comics working in Britain today, I believe it to be I who am perhaps the most charitable, not in terms of the actual amount of money I give, but in terms of the time I give up for charity benefit shows. Richard Herring, of course, carries a bucket for Scope with him everywhere he goes, which also doubles up as a receptacle for his audience to be sick into.
† A 2entertain executive later told me, in secrecy outside the first night of a terrible West End adaptation of Steptoe and Son, that they couldn’t do a follow-up as the price charged by my manager’s production company had been too high considering their possible sales, which I had repeatedly told them would be the case whenever I met them. As with my management company’s telesales live department, while one was grateful for a large and life-changing one-off payment like this, these smash-and-grab ram raids never seemed to build towards return bookings or long-term relationships . I still felt, perhaps naively, that a better way forward would be to do worthwhile work at a cost-effective level at which no one lost out, in the belief that it might ultimately be rewarded on its own merits. On the other hand, shifting my mortgage in one fell swoop was an amazing thing to do, and even what I saw of the fee for the Stand-Up Comedian DVD was three times more than I’ve ever earned for similar work since.
It was great to have the show filmed too. It drew a line under the material and forced me to move forwards. The problem now was how to follow it up. Stand-Up Comedian had been assembled from the best leftovers of a decade and the few ideas I’d had in my sabbatical. What was I supposed to talk about now?
In-between my discharge from hospital and the start of the tour, in December 2004 and January 2005, I went to Hanover with the composer Richard Thomas to help out on a piece he was writing for the Schauspielhaus there. I wasn’t really switched on and felt like a passenger. I never really figured out what my role was, how to speak to anyone, or what to eat and drink. All the Germans we worked with evidenced a deep and
After seeing Stand-Up Comedian in Edinburgh and wrongly imagining I would soon be huge, a DVD outfit called 2entertain paid my management company’s production company to film Stand-Up Comedian for commercial release. * I saw enough from whatever fee my manager’s production company were paid to make the DVD to pay off the mortgage on my flat. (I never thought to ask, or don’t remember being told, what the actual fee paid to my manager’s production company was, although I am sure this must have been discussed with me.) The DVD’s executive producer tried to convince my manager, who he also was, to make me film it at the Bloomsbury Theatre to save money, and not to worry about spending any of the budget on making it good as all live comedy DVDs ‘were always shit anyway’. But I managed to persuade both of him to let me film it in the more intimate and tense surroundings of The Stand, Glasgow, which worked perfectly. †
* Prior to the release of the Stand-Up Comedian DVD, TV’s Jimmy Carr told me, over breakfast in Montreal, that my problem was that although critics and comics thought I was good, there was no commercially available filmed evidence of anything I had ever done to convince members of the public I was worth seeing. The sick funnyman kindly offered to put some of his own TV millions into filming my stand-up to help me, but as I then got the offer from 2entertain I was never required to see how much I could have stung him for. Peter Kay and Matt Lucas, who pretended to be physically handicapped and mentally and physically handicapped, respectively , and wiggled about to a Proclaimers song for Comic Relief, may seem more generous, but secretly Jimmy Carr is little short of a living saint. That said, of all the comics working in Britain today, I believe it to be I who am perhaps the most charitable, not in terms of the actual amount of money I give, but in terms of the time I give up for charity benefit shows. Richard Herring, of course, carries a bucket for Scope with him everywhere he goes, which also doubles up as a receptacle for his audience to be sick into.
† A 2entertain executive later told me, in secrecy outside the first night of a terrible West End adaptation of Steptoe and Son, that they couldn’t do a follow-up as the price charged by my manager’s production company had been too high considering their possible sales, which I had repeatedly told them would be the case whenever I met them. As with my management company’s telesales live department, while one was grateful for a large and life-changing one-off payment like this, these smash-and-grab ram raids never seemed to build towards return bookings or long-term relationships . I still felt, perhaps naively, that a better way forward would be to do worthwhile work at a cost-effective level at which no one lost out, in the belief that it might ultimately be rewarded on its own merits. On the other hand, shifting my mortgage in one fell swoop was an amazing thing to do, and even what I saw of the fee for the Stand-Up Comedian DVD was three times more than I’ve ever earned for similar work since.
It was great to have the show filmed too. It drew a line under the material and forced me to move forwards. The problem now was how to follow it up. Stand-Up Comedian had been assembled from the best leftovers of a decade and the few ideas I’d had in my sabbatical. What was I supposed to talk about now?
In-between my discharge from hospital and the start of the tour, in December 2004 and January 2005, I went to Hanover with the composer Richard Thomas to help out on a piece he was writing for the Schauspielhaus there. I wasn’t really switched on and felt like a passenger. I never really figured out what my role was, how to speak to anyone, or what to eat and drink. All the Germans we worked with evidenced a deep and
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