Warming Up

Maybe I should go to bed at 7.30 every night. Aside from a couple of quick and inevitable toilet trips I slept until 5am (which is about when I usually wake up anyway) meaning I'd got over nine hours of sleep. A couple more of those and I might be a relatively normal human being again, though tonight I will have the kids back in the house, so am likely to be dragged out of deep sleep for some fake emergency.

It was a surreal morning. Not just because the house was empty and my time was my own and I was filled with loneliness and wishing my kids were around to play with/shout at. I headed off to the Stevenage Park Run. I arrived quite early but was very surprised to see the car park was more or less empty and I could take prime position facing the exit. I had surely beaten the rush. But I listened to my audio book for a few minutes in the car and as I walked round to the starting line I looked back at the car park and it was still more or less empty. There was nobody milling around in the start area either. Was it even Saturday?

I checked the website and it said that the run had been cancelled today, though I didn't click through to find out why. I guessed it must have been pre-planned because I seemed to be the only one who'd shown up and you'd expect more idiots like me showing up if it was a last minute decision. I had been in Somerset last weekend, so maybe they'd announced the cancellation then. 

I decided to do the run anyway and thought maybe I'd do three laps of the circuit instead of two, as I need to build up the kms for the half marathons in October/November. As I got about halfway round the first circuit I found my way blocked by police tape. It seemed the run had been cancelled due to some unspecified but presumably serious crime. It had to be a death or a serious assault (and sadly it turns out it was). Maybe everyone in Stevenage had heard about it, so knew it was inappropriate to run here. But I was here now and a kilometre and a half into things, so I turned round and just kept running in places I was allowed to run until I hit 5km. It felt pretty easy and I thought I was going quite fast, but without the crowd pulling me along it was the slowest 5km of the4 year at about 30 minutes (even slower than both 5kms in the hilly 10km I did a couple of weeks ago).

Once home I thought about doing some work, but aside from catching up with blogs I just watched TV and had a bath and relaxed. 

The kids turned up just after lunch and I was more than pleased to see them. It's just me and them for the next 30 or so hours. They'd been doing some drawings and Phoebe dictated a story about some of the characters that she'd created. She called the story “The Monster Friends” and I think this could be a series to rival Harry Potter. I had hoped that I'd be able to live off my wife's success, but maybe it will be my daughter who makes the fortune for us. Or more realistically and fairly, for herself. 

Someone tweeted me a gif of a youngish Keith Allen making an Oooo face, which I recognised as part of the broadcast I'd done in Edinburgh in 1988. It was pretty triggering. It's a story I've told a bit, maybe even quite recently in the blog, so don't bother reading on if you know it. Allen had come to the Oxford Revue's opening night, heckled from the start, moved the crash mat we needed for the first sketch, shouted “Jump now you fuckers!” (I pushed Ben Moor off the high ledge we were on regardless and hoped for the best, so the show went on) Then he stormed out of the theatre, punched the 22 year old theatre manager and then went on TV to review us saying, “The Oxford Revue, as you'd expect, shit” which seemed a little unfair given he'd only been in the room for one sketch which he'd done his best to sabotage. 

We complained about the coverage and were offered the right to reply, which, it turned out, was just an opportunity for Allen and some other alternative comedians to bully us further. Malcolm Hardee was on the panel, which is about all I remember of who was there. Both of these guys are considered legends for their take no-bullshit anti-establishment comedy, but Allen was 35 at this point and Hardee 38 and we were just kids really, up at the Fringe, trying to make our way in comedy. Although to them, we represented the privilege of the Oxbridge Comedy Mafia, none of us were actually responsible for any perceived unfairness (and there hadn't really been a successful act from Oxford since the 70s). I pointed out that it hadn't really been fair for Allen to review a show he hadn't seen and suggested he was drunk or maybe on drugs - this was what prompted Allen to make that oooo face, because I was square and he was cool. He said we were all public schoolboys, when in fact two of us were female and only our pianist hadn't been to comprehensive school. I tried to defend us further, but my voice went all high and I think tears might have formed in my eye and I realised we were not there for a right for reply at all, just to carry on the fun of baiting the toffs. Except we weren't toffs. Allen, I learned years later, had gone to public school (he didn't like it and rebelled- of course he did - but he still went). So many comedians in those days were pretending to be something that they weren't. At least Hardee was authentically working class. Within comedy back then (and to an extent still today) selfish arseholes who just thought about themselves were venerated as if they were heroes. I never really got it. 

Ironically it was still quite a good day, because on the way to the studio, Tony Brennan had picked up two twenty pound notes that had been blowing down the road and we split it between us. 

In a totally horrible second Fringe we also got invited to perform at Late and Live and were heckled by a room full of comedians, again for being toffs supposedly. I understand their anger at the old guard, but the truth was that by this point alternative comedy had more than won the battle against student revue. Again, we went back for a second gig because we needed the £10 each that they were paying us.

It was devastating for me, someone who hoped to make a career in comedy to get this reaction. I was never super confident, though I think our success in University comedy had made me think there might be a chance to make it in the real world. These humiliations had a huge effect on me as a performer. I'd been quite a high status comedian - sarcastic and occasionally too mean myself, but a decent actor and I think this experience really shook me. Maybe not entirely for the worse, but I found it difficult to go on the stand up circuit without this experience looming over me and though I'd been considered more of a performer at University, once in the real world, my confidence shattered by these experiences, I lost my bottle somewhat. I didn't start to feel comfortable on the stand up circuit until about 2005 (and there is still some residual feeling of silent judgement) and still question myself as an actor. The truly terrible thing about it is that it changed the dynamic of the comedy I was doing at University and I stopped being the sarcastic, nasty one and became the vulnerable, bullyable one and Stew became the higher status one in the act, so by destroying me Keith Allen had paved the way for the creation of the character Stewart Lee, a monster so terrible that even Allen would have given pause had he known. 

Thirty-four years on it's still surprisingly raw, though I at least have a perspective on it now. There's still a lot I have to deal with from the 80s and 90s, not all of it somebody else's fault. And Allen had predicted that we'd have our own TV show on BBC2 if we wanted it in five years, which wasn't far out, so maybe he had a point (I mean he didn't really though as a generation had passed since the last Oxford students got a TV show). 

The existence of these photos suggest that the clip is out there somewhere - I think I might have seen it at some point- but don't send it to me. Just seeing the photos brought up a lot. I had once considered having Allen on the podcast, but look, I'm clearly not over it and by all accounts he isn't a penitent man, nor has he changed much with age (not surprisingly given he was like this in his mid-thirties). It'd be an amazing podcast, but not great for my mental health. I found it hard to get to sleep tonight with all this and what followed churning in my brain

I think things turned out OK in the end and I am mainly over it and I write all this just to show how surprised I am that a couple of pictures dredged all this up again. Even I think this is kind of pathetic. I am sure some people still harbour resentment over times I was selfish or even bullied them. None of us are blameless. 

And delighted that Allen's penchant for getting his cock out in public hasn't led to him getting into any trouble with the police or having his career derailed at all… Non-karma's a bitch.

And mainly though, look what a cute 21 year old I was. Even on the point of crying on national TV. If only I'd known.