Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle (2009) s04e06 Episode Script
Childhood
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 Uhhe 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, thatfirst 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 yourwhat 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'veand not at a joke .
.
aboutflies, 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 thegoing 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.
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.
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 Uhhe 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, thatfirst 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 yourwhat 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'veand not at a joke .
.
aboutflies, 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 thegoing 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.
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.