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Authors: Stewart Lee
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dry humour. ‘There are no old buildings here,’ Richard said to a German actor. ‘That is because you destroyed them all,’ he answered. TheWeihnachtsmarkt by the station glittered pleasingly, and I finally found an Irish pub where I could drink halves of Guinness all day. But the flat we were billeted in was freezing and we ended up spending too much time there, sitting up, dealing with phone calls and emails and mass panic when, suddenly, out of nowhere, the Jerry Springer: The Opera shit hit the born-again Christian evangelist fan.
Because the show was now on its last legs as a live West End proposition, the producers had decided it was time to auction it off to the BBC, who had long been seeking a transmission, and then send it out to tour the provinces. The TV director Peter Orton, who had played sax for the sixties mod group The Attack, was contracted to film it, and caught a great performance with the sublimely subtle David Soul in the lead. I was happy the piece was going to be out there, for anyone to see, for free. And then a rightwing Christian pressure group decided to use objections to the show’s religious content to catapult themselves into the public eye, causing 65,000 people to complain in advance of the broadcast, their vociferousness eventually leading the police to advise some BBC executives to go into hiding on the night of the programme. *
* An early attempt by the BBC to get the opera on BBC2, which we were able to resist, saw the then controller Jane Root advising me to learn about how to present it using the example of On the Hour, a show for which I had been one of the four main writers.
It was odd to be in Germany and to know that 65,000 people wanted your work banned. The Germans found it funny, and mocked us for being enemies of society and makers of ‘Entartete Kunst’, the Nazis’ demonised ‘decadent art’. When we had first heard about them, I had looked at Christian Voice’s website and assumed the whole thingwould soon blow over. They were obviously small-time shock merchants, who even suggested that Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment on New Orleans for having a gay parade. Matters soon escalated, though. On the night of the broadcast, we sat, in defiance of Christian Voice’s homophobic agenda, in a gay bar in Hanover, drinking gay drinks nervously until we were sure the show had gone out without anyone being killed. *
* A gay bar in Germany is the same as a normal bar here. Whereas a normal bar in Germany is like a dentist’s waiting room with beer.
Christian Voice’s head honcho, Stephen Green, had quickly mastered the art of the inflammatory soundbite, and the press lapped his comments up without really doing any background checks on him or his organisation. Acres of angry newsprint were generated, much of it about things that weren’t even in the show – the supposed nappywearing Jesus, the 6,000 swear words that never were – and frightened white people who imagined immigrants were getting an easy ride whenever their faiths were mentioned joined the queue of incoherently angry people eager to see the show closed. In December, Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s play Behzti had been closed by furious Sikhs at the Birmingham Rep, and on a not unrelated note even the national treasure Billy Connolly had recently been censured for a routine about the British hostage in Iraq Ken Bigley. But Stephen Green managed to mobilise the non-specifically miffed on a previously unseen scale. Then he started to close in for the kill. Green’s creative interpretation of the legal implications of the proposed and pending new laws on the incitement of racial and religious hatred meant that a whole slew of venues that were lined up to take the show on tour pulled out after he wrote to them and said they’dbe prosecuted. Our final chance to make some money on the opera faded away.
Over the next few months, as the fuss rumbled on endlessly and Christian Voice began to make plans
Because the show was now on its last legs as a live West End proposition, the producers had decided it was time to auction it off to the BBC, who had long been seeking a transmission, and then send it out to tour the provinces. The TV director Peter Orton, who had played sax for the sixties mod group The Attack, was contracted to film it, and caught a great performance with the sublimely subtle David Soul in the lead. I was happy the piece was going to be out there, for anyone to see, for free. And then a rightwing Christian pressure group decided to use objections to the show’s religious content to catapult themselves into the public eye, causing 65,000 people to complain in advance of the broadcast, their vociferousness eventually leading the police to advise some BBC executives to go into hiding on the night of the programme. *
* An early attempt by the BBC to get the opera on BBC2, which we were able to resist, saw the then controller Jane Root advising me to learn about how to present it using the example of On the Hour, a show for which I had been one of the four main writers.
It was odd to be in Germany and to know that 65,000 people wanted your work banned. The Germans found it funny, and mocked us for being enemies of society and makers of ‘Entartete Kunst’, the Nazis’ demonised ‘decadent art’. When we had first heard about them, I had looked at Christian Voice’s website and assumed the whole thingwould soon blow over. They were obviously small-time shock merchants, who even suggested that Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment on New Orleans for having a gay parade. Matters soon escalated, though. On the night of the broadcast, we sat, in defiance of Christian Voice’s homophobic agenda, in a gay bar in Hanover, drinking gay drinks nervously until we were sure the show had gone out without anyone being killed. *
* A gay bar in Germany is the same as a normal bar here. Whereas a normal bar in Germany is like a dentist’s waiting room with beer.
Christian Voice’s head honcho, Stephen Green, had quickly mastered the art of the inflammatory soundbite, and the press lapped his comments up without really doing any background checks on him or his organisation. Acres of angry newsprint were generated, much of it about things that weren’t even in the show – the supposed nappywearing Jesus, the 6,000 swear words that never were – and frightened white people who imagined immigrants were getting an easy ride whenever their faiths were mentioned joined the queue of incoherently angry people eager to see the show closed. In December, Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s play Behzti had been closed by furious Sikhs at the Birmingham Rep, and on a not unrelated note even the national treasure Billy Connolly had recently been censured for a routine about the British hostage in Iraq Ken Bigley. But Stephen Green managed to mobilise the non-specifically miffed on a previously unseen scale. Then he started to close in for the kill. Green’s creative interpretation of the legal implications of the proposed and pending new laws on the incitement of racial and religious hatred meant that a whole slew of venues that were lined up to take the show on tour pulled out after he wrote to them and said they’dbe prosecuted. Our final chance to make some money on the opera faded away.
Over the next few months, as the fuss rumbled on endlessly and Christian Voice began to make plans
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