How I Escaped My Certain Fate Read Free Page B

the final, beating Simon Munnery’s Security Guard character, which was much funnier than my act. (‘I went to work today. Nothing happened. That’s what I get paid for.’) *
    * I had seen Simon in a remarkable double act in Edinburgh the previous summer, the iconoclastically named God and Jesus, and first spoke to the skinny genius (and that’s a noun I use sparingly) that same week. I found myself trying to shield his tiny body from an attack by Jeremy Hardy’s wife, the comedienne Kit Hollerbach, who had flown at Simon like a harpy from the darkness of the Pleasance Cabaret bar to accuse him of being a neo-Nazi, as one did in those days, and seemed to be saying that I must be a neo- Nazi too if I was speaking to him. But I wasn’t and nor was he. Not then, anyway, but we all get more right-wing as we get older. 
     
    Even the host of the event, the hypnotically lugubrious Jewish veteran Ivor Dembina, knew I’d been lucky. ‘You were the best on the night, fair play,’ he said, in a tonetypically laden with world-weary wisdom and an indefinable regret. ‘Well done,’ said John Connor, the head judge, who was also the comedy critic of City Limits and the producer of The Comedy Store’s Cutting Edge night, ‘we’ll show these Oxbridge wankers like Rob Newman and David Baddiel what real comedy is.’ ‘Oh,’ I answered, not thinking, as we walked into the backstage darkness, ‘I went to Oxford.’ ‘Did you?’ said Connor. ‘But you’re not like those wankers, are you?’ he added with all the desperation of a disappointed sex tourist who has just discovered his beautiful Thai prostitute has a penis, and is wondering whether just to try and make the best of it. ‘I like David Baddiel. I think he’s good,’ I said. I’d seen Baddiel in Edinburgh the previous summer. He was the first stand-up who seemed to speak in an idiom that was recognisably aimed at our generation. His distinctive tone of voice was soon to be imitated across all media for the next decade.
    My prize for winning the Hackney Empire and City Limits magazine’s New Act of the Year competition was £500, a booking at the Hackney Empire, a booking at The Comedy Store and a slot on a TV show I can’t remember the name of. I received the money on the night, but the Hackney Empire slot took a decade to materialise, The Comedy Store hasn’t booked me to this day, and the TV show never called. And the winner’s certificate was made out to ‘ Steward ’ Lee.
    Ivor Dembina told me that because of the sort of act I was, stiff and still, I should always have the microphonestand boom set in a vertical position. ‘Who is this guy?’ I thought. Well, he was Ivor Dembina, the Obi-Wan Kenobi of comedy, and he was right. Learning that I needed a vertical boom stand, which I now call Dembina’s Upright Position, was the best thing I got out of being The HackneyEmpire New Act of the Year. That, and an upsurge in circuit bookings, which meant I soon gave up my temping jobs. Since November 1990, I can honestly say, with some degree of pride, I have never done a decent day’s work in my life.
    In 1990, I was taken on by a newly moulded stand-up comedy management agency for Alternative Comedians, run by a failed impresario, the thwarting of whose theatrical ambitions had forced him to apply his enormous brain and Cheshire Cat charm to the blossoming standup scene. There were only two other similar outfits: Off the Kerb, which specialised in the sort of gay, transsexual, animal-based, drag and novelty acts beloved by its flamboyant founder Addison Cresswell; and Stage Left, which managed and booked more overtly hard-line performers such as Jeremy Hardy and a young Mark Thomas. My new agency’s roster made them seem like the future and they did the deal on a handshake, in the days before binding contracts, promising that they were about to set up a national network of money-spinning student gigs. ‘I’ll just pass you to our live department,’ the