Read How I Escaped My Certain Fate Online
Authors: Stewart Lee
How I Escaped My Certain Fate (42 page)
So you don’t know. And the problem is 84 per cent of people apparently, of the public, think that political correctness has gone mad.
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Now, um, I don’t know if it has. People still get killed, don’t they, for being the wrong colour or the wrong sexuality or whatever. And what is political correctness? It’s an often clumsy negotiation towards a kind of formally inclusive language. And there’s all sorts of problems with it but it’s better than what we had before, but 84 per cent of people think political correctness has gone mad. And you don’t want one of those people coming up to you after the gig and going, ‘Well done, mate, er, well done, actually, for having a go at the fucking Muslims. Well done, mate. You know, you can’t do anything in this country any more mate, it’s political correctness gone mad. Do you know, you can’t even write racial abuse in excrement on someone’s car without the politically correct brigade jumping down your throat.’ And you don’t want those people coming up to you after gigs, ’cause that’s Al Murray the Pub Landlord’s audience, missing the point and laughing through bared teeth like the dogs they are.
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This statistic is based on my aforementioned unprofessional appearance on David Baddiel’s Heresy in May 2007, when 84 per cent of the clever Radio 4 studio audience thought that political correctness had gone mad.
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I hope I didn’t upset Al Murray personally by saying this, if he was ever made aware of the joke, as his nineties shows as the Pub Landlord were amongst the greatest stand-up I have ever seen. Back then, the Pub Landlord was a bulletproof satire of the soft right, with a prominent back story that informed his prejudice, played out to packed Fringe festival attics of adoring liberals. I am sure Al had legitimate artistic worries about the point of preaching to the converted, whilst also wondering how to broaden his appeal to achieve the premier-league position he craved (Al was subsequently to cook a high-profile fish pie on a celebrity chef show, which helped secure his Pub Landlord character a wider audience of ITV viewers). But the places the character appeared and the attitudes of the punters who flocked to see him in the noughties have
inevitably
changed the way the material is received. Some might say it’s patronising to assume that not all the audience get Al’s joke, but I wanted to be able to talk about race, for example, onstage without any risk of racists thinking that, covertly, I was trying to agree with them.
Even in my carefully filtered crowds, to which I attempt to apply the most thorough social-screening procedures, there could be trouble. When I did this bit in Hastings, where a sixteen-year-old Qatari student was randomly murdered by a white gang in 2008, some guys started shouting out ‘rag-heads, rag-heads’, and it was hard to plot a course back to the core of the routine as I saw it when the vibe of the room had been thus altered. They apologised, embarrassed, at the end, and I think they were just overexcited. In the words of the alleged murderers of Stephen Lawrence,
justifying
their racist language when interviewed by Martin Bashir: ‘It was just banter, Martin, harmless banter.’
’Cause I’m forty, like I said, I was forty last week, and I can remember before political correctness, that’s why I think it’s better. I remember … It’s better now.
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I remember when I was twelve, there was one Asian kid in our class, and every day when he read the register out, for a year, the teacher, instead of using his name, called him ‘the black spot’, every day for a year.
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The street I grew up in, just south of Birmingham, there was I remember, 1972, a black family that wanted to move in and all the white families put pressure on the guy not to sell the house. And eight years previous to that, David Cameron never mentions it, but the Conservative Party won a by-election in
Birmingham
and they sent out little kids with leaflets that said, ‘If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Liberal or Labour.’ And if political correctness has achieved one thing, it’s to make the Conservative Party cloak its inherent racism behind more creative language.
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But …
§
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The following routine, about examples of pre-
politicalcorrectness
racism, is more or less what I said on David Baddiel’s Heresy show. I just got a tape of the rant, transcribed it, cleaned up the factual inaccuracies a bit and spared the blushes of people I’d mentioned by name, and slotted it into 41st Best. It was a rare example of something you say on the spur of the moment being worth repeating.
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I have seen people online saying I made this up. I didn’t. And this sort of thing was common at the time. When the old-school comedian Mike Reid hosted the ITV kids’ game show Runaround, I
remember him routinely referring to black children, to their faces, as ‘little chocolate drops’, in an avuncular fashion, meaning nothing by it really. And I don’t think my teacher meant any malice at all by saying ‘the black spot’ either. He liked the boy. I think he was being friendly in his pre-PC way. But I noticed one of my old schoolmates from the same class just popped up on the leaked BNP
membership
list, the twat. These two facts are, of course, related.
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For the TV series, Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, I was obliged to tweak this line, legally, to ‘… it’s to make racists in the Conservative Party cloak their beliefs behind more creative language’. Again, I’ve seen people online saying this slogan was never used, and as it was before my birth how could I remember it if it was. It was used, in 1964 by the Tory candidate Peter Griffiths, and I remember it still being used by grumpy Brummies where I grew up in the early
seventies
while they were out shopping for bananas to throw at black Aston Villa players. The granddaughter of Patrick Gordon Walker, the Labour MP who lost his seat to Griffiths as a result of his racist campaign, contacted me having seen the show live to say how much she liked the bit.
The reason young people assumed these bits were made up was because, I think, nobody under thirty would believe that they ever could have happened, living as they do in a society that has, at least cosmetically, benefited from political correctness.
§
The ‘but’ here is appended directly onto the end of the phrase ‘cloak its inherent racism behind more creative language’ as a standard stand-up comedy trick known in the trade as Ó Briain’s Truncated Appendage, as it was at its most obvious in the nineties work of the Irish funnyman Dara Ó Briain. If you are unsure as to whether an audience will laugh at something, because it is too
risqué
or contentious, you begin the next sentence immediately, as if you hadn’t intended the line to get a laugh anyway. This relieves the audience of the obligation to laugh, and they then sometimes laugh anyway, as they don’t mind giving you something you aren’t waiting around begging for. It is possible to begin the next sentence with a half-formed word or non-specific vowel sound and then to wait for the delayed laugh, as in me saying ‘but’ in this instance. Or you can do what Dara did for a decade, which is just to make a funny, upwardly inflected noise, a sort of crescendoed mix of ‘ah’ and ‘um’, which, if snappy enough, will also provoke the laugh. Dara doesn’t do this any more, and his clever live shows, which sneak
subversive
political comment and beautifully expressed social observation past hate-filled Mock the Week viewers who would presumably be happy with any old shit, are largely free of the Truncated
Appendages
he helped standardise. But if you find clips of the nineties and noughties Irish TV hits Don’t Feed the Gondolas or The Panel, you will find Dara using the ‘aaaaahh-uuuuuum’ gambit in frequent full effect.
But on the whole, when people say political correctness has gone mad, I think, ‘Well, what do you mean?’ Unless it’s my nan, right. When my nan says to me, ‘Oh, Stew, that political correctness has gone mad,’ I go, ‘Why is that, Nan?’ She goes, ‘Well, I was in the hairdresser’s yesterday, Stew. And they said to me, “Would you like a cup of tea, Mrs Harris?” I said, “Yes please.” They said, “Well, you can have one but you have to drink it in the waiting area, ’cause we can’t have hot liquids at the work station.” It’s political correctness gone mad, Stew. It’s old Red Robbo, Stew, he’s saying that we can’t have tea any more in case it annoys a Pakistani.’
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Red Robbo is the seventies trade-union leader Derek Robinson, a demonised figure in my family when I was a child who was
routinely
tutted at on television, as members of my extended family were employees of the Longbridge car plant, where Robinson
frequently
brought the workers out. To anyone of a certain age, ‘Red Robbo’ is subliminally associated with the now discredited idea of the seventies left, but find some YouTube footage of him and you’ll see a self-taught Marxist locking horns with public-school-educated bosses on an equal footing, and find yourself longing for the days of a definable left and right, rather than the mid-mass mush of today.
Basically, there’s a whole generation of people who’ve confused political correctness with health and safety legis lation.
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‘It’s gone mad. They’re saying I can’t have an electric fire in the bath any more, Stew, in case queers see it. In the old days you could get your head and you could submerge it in a vat of boiling acid. And now they’re going, “Oh, don’t do that, what if Jews see it? Might annoy Jews …” You could get your whole family and you could jump in a threshing machine and dance around. All your arms would fly off and it was fine. And now they’re going, “Oh …” They’ve banned Christmas. They’ve banned Christmas now.’
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I’m absolutely sick of people blaming the restrictions created by health and safety culture, itself exacerbated in turn by a trend towards increased litigation, on the political and ideological
doctrine
of political correctness. They aren’t the same thing, and are not symptomatic of each other. My nan wasn’t especially concerned about political correctness, and none of this is based on anything she ever said. Instead, I made this Nan character a composite of every piece of anti-PC bullshit I had ever heard over the years, and the exaggerated voice I’d do for her left me free to improvise a stream-of-consciousness splurge of different made-up examples of political correctness gone mad every night.
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Did anybody ever really ban Christmas? Edward Stourton, in his brilliant book Living in a PC World, sees this as the ultimate
anti-PC
urban myth.
On the whole, when people say … I mean, there’s a columnist for the
Daily Mail
, Richard Littlejohn, and he’s got two catchphrases. One is ‘political correctness has gone mad’. And the other is ‘You couldn’t make it up’. You couldn’t make it up, which is ironic, given that the vast proportion of what he writes has no …
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And about a year ago, Littlejohn did a whole page on political correctness gone mad. And it’s gone to court now, this thing, but it’s when there was a serial murderer killing sex workers in East Anglia, and the police and the broadsheets at the time routinely referred to – some of them were teenagers – and the papers would call them ‘women that worked as
prostitutes
’, rather than just ‘prostitutes’, and Littlejohn did a whole page on how this was political correctness gone mad, and you should call them ‘prostitutes’ and not ‘women that worked as prostitutes’, and anyway, it wasn’t like any of them were ever going to find a cure for cancer. But it wasn’t political correctness gone mad, it was the papers and the police thinking, ‘Some of these people are really young, you know, and they have surviving family and friends and … and what can we do to cushion this ugly word “
prostitute
”? We’ll blanket it in a, a qualifying phrase,’ you know. It was a nice thing to do.
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Again, nice to leave the preachy line hanging and let the punters finish it themselves, so I look less of a would-be demagogue.
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In one edition of his column, for which he receives upwards of £700,000 a year, Littlejohn did a little skit on the phrase ‘women who work as prostitutes’, while in another on the same case he wrote, ‘in the scheme of things the deaths of these five women is no great loss. They weren’t going to discover a cure for cancer or embark on missionary work in Darfur.’
But for Littlejohn it wasn’t that, it was political
correctness
gone mad and they were prostitutes and should
be called prostitutes. And one wonders how far Richard Little john would go in his quest for the accurate naming of dead women. Would he go perhaps to a cemetery under cover of night, armed with a, a little chisel and a little torch? A chisel and a torch. And he’s there at the grave that says, ‘Here lies Elaine Thompson aged 19,’ and he’s there amending it. [
noise of chiselling
] ‘Prostitute. [
chiselling
] Not a woman who works as a prostitute. [
chiselling
] A
prostitute
. [
chiselling
] P.S. [
chiselling
] I hate women, obviously. [
chiselling
] And I’m glad when they die. [chiselling] Yours, [
chiselling
] Richard Littlejohn. [
chiselling
] Cunt. [
chiselling
] Not someone who works as a cunt.’
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