Stewart Lee: ‘I am road-worn, shapeless and undignified, a relic, revelling in my own irrelevance’ Since I started touring my latest live stand-up show, Content Provider, now laid to rest, in the summer of 2016, […]

Since I started touring my latest live stand-up show, Content Provider, now laid to rest, in the summer of 2016, I’ve been describing the post-referendum landscape as a “chaotic inferno of hate” in the punchline to a bit about the EU’s bendy banana legislation.

In February, the phrase “chaotic inferno of hate” appeared in a political report in The Independent, and last week it began to appear on Sky News to describe the Brexit House of Commons. Luckily, a film of the show is to be screened on BBC2 this Saturday, just as journalists leak its language into the zeitgeist and give its most choice phrases a second-hand feel.

My TV show, Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, was cancelled by the BBC comedy department in the spring of 2016. Its four six-episode series of live stand-up are newly installed on the BBC iPlayer. The first series, from 2009, sees me stuffed against my will into a restricting and inappropriate TV show suit, as I chop existing routines around unnecessary film items. I was lucky it was recommissioned.

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I wrote a live show, Content Provider, flexible enough to keep on the road for a couple of years, intending to monetise the cash cow of a level of profile I was unlikely to ever enjoy again, after a decade of TV exposure

The second and third series remain a comfortable meeting point of accessibility and experimentalism, road-worn bespoke half-hour routines creating room for genuine improvisations and appropriately obtuse film items, the latter series winning two British Comedy Awards and a Bafta (though I was cut from the Bafta TV coverage for being modest to a point of apparent indifference, while actors whooped either side of me).

Experimental routines that rocked packed theatres on tour often floundered before the small club-size audience at the series four recordings, at the end of 2015, and the room seemed to contain a disproportionate number of bored spouses, phone-fondling young people, and merely curious TV executives. Material that had generated playful hysteria live read as wilfully obscure on camera, and the axe soon fell.

I’d had a good run and couldn’t have asked for a more supportive team. Far greater talents than me never get a shot at their own TV show. I’d been disproportionately lucky.

Envying my own freedom, I instead wrote a live show, Content Provider, flexible enough to keep on the road for a couple of years, intending to monetise the cash cow of a level of profile I was unlikely to ever enjoy again, after a decade of TV exposure.

Then I could slow my work rate in my fifties in an attempt to re-establish friendly relations with my children, my sofa and the version of myself that didn’t live in a perpetual state of stage-induced sleepless psychosis.

The original pitch for Content Provider was that it would tackle our over-exposure to an ocean of digital content, but three weeks into the writing process Brexit hit, and then Trump

The original pitch for Content Provider was that it would tackle our over-exposure to an ocean of digital content, but three weeks into the writing process Brexit hit, and then Trump, neither of which could be ignored, but neither of which I assumed would still top the news agenda when the tour wound down in nearly two years’ time.

I tried to block out two clear but flexible sections in the two-hour show that would enable me to talk about Brexit and Trump, from my perspective as a member of the now discredited metropolitan liberal elite™, but which would also enable me to hang on to the main thrust of the show without derailing it.

Little did I know that two years later the sense of political paralysis attached to both topics meant that the initial material concerning them, which I assumed I’d have to change weekly, only became more relevant, to the point where it finally had the flavour of prophesy.

The main change in the two years I toured Content Provider was in how the Brexit result emboldened right-wingers and libertarians to attack snowflakes like me.

In specific terms, Breitbart, the Daily Express, the Daily Mail, Spiked and The Daily Telegraph all ran groundless news stories suggesting I was haemorrhaging audience members nightly for doing anti-Brexit jokes, while individual commentators were at pains to point out that I was the voice of a now culturally obsolete viewpoint.

Individual commentators were at pains to point out that I was the voice of a now culturally obsolete viewpoint

The TV archivist Ewal Street wrote for the Chortle comedy industry website this week that “the same ongoing worldwide Culture War that gave us Brexit and Trump has seen the liberal comedy cabal Lee once called home under siege from the bedroom demagogues of the Alt Right”.

And the writer Brendan McCarthy observed on Twitter: “Stewart Lee is an archaic left-wing relic. Milo Yiannopoulos is more on the zeitgeist. I don’t agree with all of his views, but at least people like Paul Joseph Watson can be funny about subjects that Lefties like Stewart Lee are s**t-scared to go anywhere near.”

Obviously, as Brexit continued to polarise society, the ever-shifting show had to take my apparent obsolescence on board.

As the tour gathered steam, there was an unexpected development. The new head of BBC2, Patrick Holland, asked if it would be possible to film the show. I was grateful to him, as documenting the shows before disowning them has become a part of my process.

I filmed the show in Brexit-voting Southend-on-Sea, Essex, for which the BBC paid me 0.16 per cent of the fee Ricky Gervais received for his poor-quality Netflix special

I had my doubts. Content Provider covered Brexit, featured the C-word at least six times and could not be

edited down from its unwieldy two-hour running time.

Nonetheless Holland remained enthusiastic, and so I contracted the same team that had covered the Comedy Vehicle series to film the show at the end of its 214-date run before a volatile crowd in a lovely Victorian theatre in Brexit-voting Southend-on-Sea, Essex, for which the BBC paid me 0.16 per cent of the fee Ricky Gervais received for his poor-quality Netflix special.

I’m very happy with the team’s work. I watched some mid-period Comedy Vehicle as a point of comparison. A presentable comedian performs precision-engineered material in a controlled environment.

At the Southend show I am road-worn and shapeless, a 50-year old man shouting and running around in an undignified fashion, a relic revelling in his own irrelevance.

Between now and the age of 65, I propose five tours. That’s 10 hours of material and for me that is only 20 jokes

Between now and the age of 65, I propose five tours, one every three years, with fewer dates but in larger rooms. That’s 10 hours of material, and for me that is only 20 jokes.

The end is in sight and Content Provider represents the beginning of the end.

‘Stewart Lee’s Content Provider’ is on BBC2 on Saturday at 10.45 pm, and then on BBC iPlayer