Can't Stand Up for Sitting Down (29 page)

I won’t
bother to go into the plot of
Candide,
because you might decide to drop
off, but suffice it to say that the songs were sing-along-y brilliant, it was
funny, moving, interesting, enlightening and sharp as a knife — and as soon as
it finished I wanted to see it all through again and again.

I met
Simon Russell Beale in the corridor of the National Theatre once and I nearly
fainted, because of being in touching distance of such genius. And then he said
to me he was a fan of mine, and I’m not being a falsely modest nana here but I
was struck dumb, so Simon, I’m an even bigger fan of yours.

As You Like It

Shakespeare’s a difficult
one because you do him at school and most English teachers only manage to
instil in you a hopeless antipathy towards his plays, causing you to shy away
from them in the future, because most of the time you have absolutely no idea
what the bloody hell the characters are going on about.

However,
once in a while you see something which underlines Shakespeare’s genius, and
this was the case with
As You Like It
at the National Theatre, once
again starring the incomparable Simon Russell Beale. It was funny (which is no
mean feat with a Shakespearean comedy), I understood it, and lapses into my own
mind, in which I compiled a shopping list, or tried to remember all the Doctor Whos
in order, were rare.

The
same happened some years ago when I went to see Dustin Hoffman in
The
Merchant of Venice.
God bless him, Dustin’s accent wandered round America
and Europe for quite a while until it settled in Italy. but Geraldine James,
who played Portia, was amazing. I particularly noticed that she did the
‘quality of mercy speech with a feeling and emphasis I had never heard before,
and which put the whole thing into the most easily understandable context.
Because it is a speech that drama students regularly trot out with all the
emotion of a tranquillised slug, to hear it done proper by a proper grown-up actress
was an absolute joy.

Art

This play by Yasmin Reza
is a wonder. It’s very funny and it gave comics such as Jack Dee and Frank
Skinner an opportunity to get a foot in the door of West End theatre. The play
concerns three friends, one of whom buys a very expensive painting which is
basically just a white canvas, and the feelings thrown up by the attitudes of
the three main characters is the basis of the drama. Doesn’t sound like much,
does it? It’s a masterpiece though, and if you get a chance …

Now, you may think, having
heard me describe my three favourite hobbies (accompanied by the fourth i.e.
scoffing), that I indulge only in high-falutin’ middle-class pursuits. In which
case I should tell you that I love
Big Brother
and all reality shows, I
read celeb mags to wash my brain and give me respite from having to think too
much, and I am addicted to a stupid game on my mobile called
Bubble Boom
Challenge
which I surreptitiously play in boring meetings in the vain hope
that people will think I’m sending a very, very important text. Since I learned
to play the organ I try and keep that up, but I am like a ten year old: I never
practise apart from the day before I have a lesson and I deliberately choose
things to play that are very easy. so I am not challenged in any way.

I have always been
interested in politics and I owe this to my parents who, I am sure I have
already mentioned, met at a Young Socialists’ event and constantly talked
politics at home. In fact, in 1993 my mum stood as the Labour candidate in the
Ludlow local elections. Given that Ludlow is one of the strongest bastions of
Tory supremacy, she was never going to get anywhere, but we were all really
proud of her. I have never voted anything except Labour, and so I suppose it
was inevitable that I would get stuck into politics as a comic.

I
missed out on the Red Wedge stuff, because it coincided with the very early
part of my comedy career and I was not considered high-profile enough, I
suppose, to be asked to do stuff. If you don’t know what Red Wedge was, it was
a sort of loose music and comedy collective involving such characters as Billy
Bragg, Ben Elton, Madness, Phill Jupitus and the like. It was set up to try and
prevent Margaret Thatcher winning another election in 1985, but sadly didn’t
manage it, and its members eventually drifted apart some five years later.

I never
got involved in local politics, although I was a member of the Labour Party,
because I found political meetings on that level rather difficult to cope with
due to the structure and bureaucracy. It seemed to me that phrases like
‘Subsection B part 14’ were designed to make you go bonkers and so I supported
from the sidelines rather than getting stuck in.

However,
as my career moved on a bit I began to receive calls asking me to support the
Labour Party in various ways.

The
first event I remember being involved in was a party at Brown’s in Central
London (not Gordon, a restaurant), which was a fundraiser for the Labour
Party. Michael Foot, my hero, was there as were Gordon Brown and Neil Kinnock.
I had written a comedy version of
The Red Flag.
This was the Labour
Party’s anthem for many decades, but apparently played down during the Blair
years.

My
comedy version started with the line: ‘Neil Kinnock’s hair is deepest red,
though most of it’s not on his head,’ and finished with a line about Gordon
Brown’s hair looking a bit shit. (Yes, not the cutting edge of political
satire, I’ll admit.) I was aware while singing it that Gordon Brown had come
into the room just as I got to the line about his hair. It flashed through my
mind to drop it, as I didn’t want to offend him, but it’s hard to find a whole
new line to end a song instantly so I carried on and he didn’t seem to mind.
And also, the poor sod’s had far worse abuse since then.

I did
many benefits for the Labour Party over the years and supported them in any way
I could. I wasn’t too happy when New Labour got in, but one has to be realistic
about these things. Old Labour was completely unelectable and had not been in
power for years, and politics was turning into a game that was all about image
rather than principles and policies. Sizeable numbers of the electorate, as we
know, are not really interested in the cut and thrust of politics and base
their judgements on selfish local issues, so I suppose Blair in some ways was a
necessary evil.

Margaret
Thatcher was someone I find it difficult to say anything positive about. Her
time as Prime Minister was particularly depressing because it was such a huge
thing that she was our first woman Prime Minister and as a woman I really
wanted to be proud.

But I
found her totally impossible to understand as a person. She seemed humourless,
inflexible in her thinking, schoolmistressy, cold and old-fashioned. I think
some of the really telling things she said over the years marked her out as
someone who was a representative of a culture that encouraged people to be just
out for themselves — and this goes some way to explaining why a new type of
alternative comedy developed. Here are some key phrases of hers:

‘There is no such thing
as society’

Well, what a bloody
ridiculous thing to say. You cannot avoid the fact that there are
interconnections between groups of people that constitute some sort of loose
grouping we call society. I think this was more wishful thinking than anything
else on Margaret Thatcher’s part. This was an attempt to reframe the political
landscape and to encourage people to stand on their own two feet without the
safety net that I consider a truly democratic society should provide for its
citizens. Therefore, she was interested in the state being pared back to the
minimum, and those who struggled with poverty, unemployment, disability, mental
health problems, single motherhood or just an inability to fit in, could either
sort themselves out or pull themselves together or whatever the pointless
instruction was.

In
order to do this paring back, I think that Margaret Thatcher had to shift her
perspective on people with problems and view them as somehow feckless, responsible
for their situation or in some way criminal. I am not denying that there are
always going to be those who misuse the funds the state provides for people in
trouble, but does that mean that all those who are deserving of some help in
difficult times should be denied that help because some scumbags abuse the
system?

Coupled
with that, there are plenty of very wealthy people who prove themselves equally
dishonest and grasping, and who eschew their responsibilities as far as tax is
concerned by hiding their money in foreign bank accounts or creating dodgy
companies to hide their true wealth. We also know, following the uncovering of
the recent expenses scandal amongst MPs, that there is a percentage of people
in every walk of life who will take advantage of what is on offer and illegally
claim money that they do not deserve.

I must
admit, when the whole expenses scandal came to light, it really depressed me,
particularly in the case of Labour MPs. I cling on to a belief that Labour MPs
are the true representatives of the working classes, and to find out that they
also had their snouts in the trough was extremely galling. That’s not to say
that the Conservatives and Lib Dems who cheated on their expenses are not
culpable either. But I’m afraid I think very little of rich Tories anyway and I
expect them to be mean-spirited and grasping; after all, that’s how rich people
get rich, isn’t it — by making sure that their own money is closely guarded and
very little of it goes towards paying their staff extra or to benefit those
less well-off than themselves.

What it
really comes down to is your attitude towards people and how you see the rest
of the world. If you expect the human race all to be selfish,
out-for-themselves undeserving types, then that shapes the way you want your
government to deal with them, by allowing you to hang on to as much of your own
wealth as you can. This is why every time a Labour government looked like
getting into power in the eighties and nineties, there was always a handful of
rich celebrities who said they were going to leave the country. Never did,
though, did they?

Not all
wealthy people are tight-fisted misers though, to give them their due. Bill
Gates, for example, seems to be single-handedly tackling the malaria problem in
Africa with his money. and this harks back to the days of the Victorian
philanthropists who used their money to benefit society (Hello, Margaret
Thatcher), rather than just themselves and their families.

‘What Has Feminism Ever
Done For Me?’

Blimey, what a question. Where
do you start? Well, first of all, if it hadn’t been for the Suffragettes who
were early feminists, Margaret Thatcher wouldn’t even have had the vote or been
able to get into Parliament. That courageous group of women put themselves
through hell in order to win rights for women. It is ironic that had women
not
had the vote, the Labour Party would apparently have got in at almost
every election in the last century. Mmm, a dilemma for left-wing women all over
the country.

And
feminists in the sixties allowed women to be freed up to work, use childcare
and pursue their careers, rather than the no-choice scenario of staying at home
and looking after their families which had been their lot for the preceding
centuries. One might argue that feminism has just created the conditions for
women to work twice as hard as before, by not only doing the bulk of the work
domestically but also taking on work outside the home as well, but that is
another issue.

I do
think that women are in some ways the worst enemies of feminism, especially in
the twenty-first century. Most young women have been scared off by the cartoon
image of a feminist as a ball-breaking harridan who hates men, and it’s going
to be difficult to rid ourselves of the image that the right-wing press has tried
so hard to create.

‘The Lady’s Not for
Turning’

‘You turn if you want to;
the lady’s
not
for turning.’ Margaret Thatcher’s famous play on words is
lifted from the title of the play
The Lady’s Not for Burning
by
Christopher Fry. It was a response to calls from people to do a political
U-turn and was seen by many as a positive character trait that she dug her
heels in and forged ahead regardless. Ironically. she didn’t know the play or understand
the pun. Of course the speech had been written for her by someone else, so how
would she know?