DOCSLIB.ORG

PDF EPUB} Content Provider by Stewart Lee Stewart Lee - Content Provider | Belfast

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
PDF EPUB} Content Provider by Stewart Lee Stewart Lee - Content Provider | Belfast Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Content Provider by Stewart Lee Stewart Lee - Content Provider | Belfast. Stewart Lee - Content Provider | Belfast Waterfront and Ulster Hall | Thursday, 28. September 2017. After four years writing and performing his TV show Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, Content Provider is Stewart’s first brand new full-length show since the award-winning Carpet Remnant World. “The most consistently funny show of his brilliant career… I laughed till it hurt.”★★★★★ The Times. “Characteristically twisty and frequently brilliant”★★★★ The Guardian. “Venomously funny”★★★★ Standard. “The delusional ravings of a man who has lost his way in the world”★★★★★ Mail on Sunday. 'A majestic creature in slow, obvious and painful decline' Stewart Lee had promised to write an article for Chortle about the imminent airing of his stand-up special on BBC Two. But his publicist told us he was far too busy doing the washing and the ironing to submit anything. So instead we have secured the services of comedy archivist Ewal Street, of www.goodbyemotherinlaw.com, to assess the show… In his new television stand-up special, Content Provider, Stewart Lee hurls himself around a rubbish-strewn stage in Southend-On-Sea for two patience-draining hours, visibly struggling for breath as he rages against digital media, Brexit, Trump, his own audience, all other comedians, and ultimately himself. Employing his trademark neuro-linguistic crowd manipulation, and all the camera-savvy tricks he developed for his TV series Comedy Vehicle, Lee achieves a four-dimensional rendering of the stand-up experience never before seen on the flat plane of television. So why do I find myself, a dispassionate observer of his erratically variable output in the medium for three decades now, worrying about him? As a child in the Seventies, I was taken on holiday each year to a secluded cottage on the West Coast of Scotland. There was no television reception there, which was torture to me. You can perhaps imagine how excited I am about the forthcoming box set of the complete Goodies, which will allow me to finally make notes on classic episodes I was prevented from documenting in my notebook the first time around by my heartless holidaying parents! One summer night, as I lay awake reciting Monty Python sketches to myself and doing all the voices, a great whale, (I do not remember the exact species as I have always struggled with the natural world and its infinite and unknowable variety), beached itself in the small hours and its mournful, and all too human, cries drew my mother, my father and I, dressed in John Pertwee pyjamas, down to the moonlit shingle. The leviathan’s breathing was heavy and laboured, its distress obvious, and we were too weak to roll it back into the churning black sea. My father set off to drive the thirty miles to the nearest phone and my mother and I watched, hand in hand, as the mighty beast slowly expired in front of us in the dim light of the gathering dawn, moved by its majesty, edified by its obvious suffering. By the time the RSPCA arrived the whale was dead and I knew that one day I too would die. I can only attribute my inappropriate response to this revelation to panicked hysteria. Reader, I laughed until I cried. I had forgotten the exact emotions this experience stirred in the six-year-old me, until I downloaded a press preview file of Stewart Lee’s Content Provider, due to be screened on BBC Two this Saturday, July 28. For here was another majestic creature in slow, obvious and painful decline, yet nonetheless capable of communicating, perhaps accidentally, some profound truths, not least the certainty of our mortality, the frailty of our flesh, whilst simultaneously finding new ways of exploring the limits of the TV comedy format. After a strong start as a rule-breaking solo stand-up in the late 1980s, even popping up on the forgotten cable channel BSkyB’s The Happening in 1990, Lee eventually went on to spend the best part of the opening decade of this century in the wilderness, by which I mean he didn’t appear on television. During this period Lee built his stand-up reputation with acclaimed live shows, and eventually, in 2008, he secured a BBC Two series which saw him stuffed, at his executive producer’s insistence, into an unsuitable suit, (think Jack Dee circa 1989), his filleted leftover material interrupted by often underwhelming film items, which aped The Day Today, The Fist of Fun, and Asylum without remotely equalling them. The first series of Comedy Vehicle’s relationship with the three series that followed recalls Blackadder’s tentative debut, which nonetheless saw a confident subsequent flowering, a process I have written about in my book on the ‘alternative comedy’ TV movement of the 1980s, Goodbye Mother-In-Law, and subsequently in my online blog of the same name. It can only be the unprecedented acclaim heaped on Lee’s contemporary live shows that saw the somewhat uneven series re-commissioned by an openly reluctant BBC. And we are lucky it was, for Lee’s undoubted Indian summer was the four-year period from 2009 to 2013, encompassing a sustained and substantial period of work, totalling ten hours of stand-up in four years; namely series two and three of his BBC Two show Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, for which he developed and road-tested twelve bespoke half hour routines, and the 2009 and 2011 stand-up shows If You Prefer A Milder Comedian Please Ask For One and Carpet Remnant World. Post Bafta and two British Comedy Awards, the more extreme approach of his fourth Comedy Vehicle series, however, tested both his suddenly suspicious, BBC staff stuffed, studio audience, the viewers at home, and presumably the patience of Shane Allen and his BBC comedy department to boot, who soon asked Lee to vacate his spoiled slot, with some sympathetic fans appearing to view the series as an elaborate and deliberate career suicide note. But Lee’s ghost continued to haunt the cathode ray tube, a spectral presence speaking through the bodies of others. In the last year the avant- comedy stylistic tropes Lee popularised, though admirably never claimed to have pioneered (seek YouTube for Kevin McAleer on Friday Night Live in 1988 or any Ted Chippington footage for proof), are also evident in the television work of newer acts, praised for the very processes the younger Lee was once condemned for. These youngsters, in turn, have gained worldwide acclaim on the stack-‘em-high global content platform of Netflix, which understandably deems Lee himself, with his bloody-minded half hour routines about obscure right-wing British tabloid journalists, Hackney Weight Watchers, and varieties of English crisps, ‘too parochial’. Meanwhile, 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. Indeed, the Judge Dredd and Mad Max 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 shit-scared to go anywhere near.’ Even his fellow comedians seemed to tire of the now acclaimed Lee during his golden years, much as I refused to see Mamma Mia on principle, solely because I was sick of my Mother telling me it was the best film of all time (It isn’t by the way, mother! I think you will find that that particular honour belongs to our old friend Mr Spinal Tap!). For the outrageous Frankie Boyle, Lee was ‘irrelevant and flabby’; for last year’s Edinburgh Comedy Award winner, the XFM DJ John Robins, Lee was ‘a part of the same hypocrisy he’d have you believe he exposes’; for the controversial rasping comedian Andrew Lawrence he was a ‘rancid fucking imposter and Oxbridge cunt’; while the TV comedian and music theatre star Jason Manfield blames his own perfectly creditable three star Guardian reviews on the fact that he ‘isn’t Stewart Lee’. To cap it all, the ongoing campaign the once presentable Lee fought against physical decay for the last decade has suddenly, and convincingly, been lost, and he has become, in the words of the acclaimed writer-producer Armando Iannucci, ‘a human bin bag’. Where does this leave the man described by the character comedian Al Murray as ‘the Grand Poobah of stand-up’, seemingly both too young to be a has-been, and not quite old enough to be a legend? Well, it left the suddenly unemployed Lee doggedly monetising his new Content Provider live set, a show he hoped would hold together in the face of the most volatile political climate of our lifetimes, for 18 months and 214 dates, until finally filming it in Leave-voting Southend On Sea last April, at the unexpected request of the new controller of BBC Two, Patrick Holland. While he’s unlikely, in the changing climates of both television and politics, to ever benefit again from the baronial largesse that allowed him four BBC Two series, it would nonetheless be a sadistic pleasure to be allowed to watch Lee’s physical and mental decline at biannual intervals in TV special sized chunks culled from his tours, as he clings to an outmoded value system in the face of a world that considers him a relic, Lee positively revelling in his own perceived irrelevance.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • A Conversation About King Rocker Between the Quietus, Stewart Lee, Michael Cumming and Robert Lloyd
    No Image: A conversation about King Rocker between the Quietus, Stewart Lee, Michael Cumming and Robert Lloyd. It looks like a music documentary. Look, there’s a famous person [Stewart Lee] walking out of a train station telling viewers where they are and why it’s important. Now they’re telling us what is going on and why we’re here. It feels like a music documentary. And King Rocker, Michael Cumming and Stewart Lee’s film about Robert Lloyd and The Nightingales is one. It’s also not. You’d expect a film by the director of Brass Eye and Toast of London, and the comedian behind some of the most brilliant stand-up ever to come from these shores to be funny and smart but the experience of King Rocker explodes those expectations. It’s not hyperbole to say this is one of the best music documentaries of all time. Hilarious and brilliantly knowing about the form of music documentaries and caustic about the music industry and fame, at its moving heart it’s a wonderful homage to and portrait of a true outsider artist and inspiring comeback story that in the already boiling maelstrom of 2021 feels profoundly necessary. The film follows Stewart Lee and Robert Lloyd as they talk about Lloyd’s life as front-man and creative driver of post-punk favourites The Prefects and latterly The Nightingales. Through a series of funny and insightful conversations as they hunt down a famous 1970s public art sculpture of King Kong that is central to both men’s stories, the pair and assorted friends, acolytes and naysayers including the rest of the band and family members plus Frank Skinner, John Taylor (yep, of Duran Duran), Nigel Slater (!) and Robin Askwith (!!) discuss the past, the ups, the downs and the hazy memories of it all.
    [Show full text]
  • Analyse the Extent to Which Controversial Theatre Can Be Accommodated on a West End Stage
    Analyse the Extent to Which Controversial Theatre can be Accommodated on a West End Stage. Olivia Rook Jane Milling asserts that London’s West End (WE) is familiar to tourist audiences for its ‘remarkably stable’ repertoire, consisting largely of ‘literary musical adaptations’, ‘musical adaptations of films’ and ‘compilation musicals of popular musical trends’.1 This suggests that the WE is almost entirely motivated by the commercial successes of the megamusical. Audiences have a ‘horizon of expectations’ when they visit a WE theatre, as they associate the area with a particular cultural experience.2 New work is measured against the audience’s expectations and ‘The closer it correlates with this horizon, the more likely it is to be low, pulp, or ‘culinary’ art’.3 This disparaging perspective is shared by many in the industry; indeed, Peter Brook argues that during the mid-twentieth century, shows had become ‘weak, watery, repetitive, drab and silly’.4 However, there have been challenges to these long-running musical productions, leading to the development of more innovative theatre. This essay will focus on the work of the Royal Court (RC), in particular, Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, and the journey of Jerry Springer, The Opera from scratch theatre to the WE. Citing Frank Parkin’s model of ‘social democracies’, it will be explored how far and in what ways these examples of controversial theatre abide by the ‘dominant system’ established in the WE: of palatable, long-running musicals.5 By focusing on modes of controversy, the idea of celebrity, processes of production and critical response, this essay will determine whether Springer and Jerusalem abide by a ‘subordinate system’, and thus comprehend and comply with the dominant, or whether they are being ‘radical’ and oppose any sense of a normative status, deviating too far from audiences’ ‘horizon of expectations’.
    [Show full text]
  • Fist of Fun Press Release
    Fist of Fun Press Release Fist of Fun was on TV in 1995. And since then, despite the popularity and artistic credibility of its writers and stars Stewart Lee and Richard Herring, it has never been repeated, never been released, and never been included as part of those 100 best sketch programs that turn up from time to time. So finally, on 6th December 2011, Go Faster Stripe will be gambling its economic future by putting that right, and releasing a four disc set of the first series. Late last year GFS heard that the BBC’s DVD making department had a meeting where they decided “neither Sales nor Marketing believed that Lee & Herring had much sales potential in the current market” leaving the door open for an idiotic independent producer to licence the material. So Stew and Rich clubbed together with Go Faster Stripe and stumped up the money and bought the rights. And they have made a beautiful thing. The set contains all the episodes, each with commentary tracks from Rich and Stew. And there’s a couple of commentaries from Kevin Eldon and Ben Moor too. There’s the unbroadcast pilot episode, a modern day interview with the pair as they go though a box of 90s memorabilia, and there’s even the disappointing live show recorded at the height of their TV fame. On discs 3 and 4 – in what they think is a first – they have included all the surviving studio tapes from the show recordings. That’s all the retakes, all the between take banter as well as a load of deleted scenes.
    [Show full text]
  • British Comedy, Global Resistance: Russell Brand, Charlie Brooker
    British Comedy, Global Resistance: Russell Brand, Charlie Brooker, and Stewart Lee (Forthcoming European Journal of International Relations) Dr James Brassett Introduction: Satirical Market Subjects? An interesting facet of the austerity period in mainstream British politics has been the rise (or return) to prominence of an apparently radical set of satirists.1 Comedians like Russell Brand, Charlie Brooker and Stewart Lee have consolidated already strong careers with a new tranche of material that meets a widespread public mood of disdain for the failure and excess of ‘global capitalism’. This can be seen through Brand’s use of tropes of revolution in his Messiah Complex and Paxman Interview, Brooker’s various subversions of the media-commodity nexus in Screenwipe, and Lee’s regular Guardian commentaries on the instrumentalisation of the arts and social critique. While radical comedy is by no means new, it has previously been associated with a punk/socialist fringe, whereas the current batch seems to occupy a place within the acceptable mainstream of British society: BBC programs, Guardian columns, sell out tours, etc. Perhaps a telling indication of the ascendancy of these ‘radical’ comedians has been the growing incidence of broadsheet articles and academic blogs designed to ‘clip their wings’. For example, Matt Flinders has argued that Russell Brand’s move to ‘serious politics’ is undermined by a general decline in the moral power of satire: 1 Numerous people have read and commented on this paper. In particular, I thank Erzsebet Strausz, Lisa Tilley, Madeleine Fagan, Kyle Grayson, Roland Bleiker and Nick Vaughan-Williams. The idea for the paper arose in a series of enjoyable discussions with Alex Sutton and Juanita Elias and I am grateful for their encouragement to develop these ideas.
    [Show full text]
  • Heard the One About the Right-On Comics Who HATE the Funniest Man in Britain? | Mail Online
    Heard the one about the right-on comics who HATE the funniest man in Britain? | Mail Online Find a Job Dating Wine Our Papers Feedback My Tuesday, Jul 19 2011 3AM 9°C 6AM 11°C 5-Day Forecast Stories Home News U.S. Sport TV&Showbiz Femail Health Science&Tech Money Debate Coffee Break Travel Rewards Club Debate Home News Board Sport Boards Showbiz Boards Femail Boards Health Boards Money Boards Polls Columnists Login Heard the one about the Quick Find Message Boards right-on comics who HATE Choose Message Board the funniest man in Britain? OUR TOP 10 BREAKING VIEWS PETER MCKAY: Sucking up to the Sun King Nice guy Michael McIntyre is a sign of The Times ANDREW PIERCE: Why Vaz makes a most endures jealousy of rivals unlikely moral crusader By JAN MOIR PATRICK MERCER: Sack the civil servants - Last updated at 2:17 AM on 19th July 2011 not our brave soldiers MELANIE PHILLIPS: If Miliband is such a Comments (0) Add to My Stories Share Like Confirm hero, why won't he tackle the REAL threat to way of life - the BBC? At this very moment, Michael PETER HITCHENS: What do YOU think is McIntyre is Britain’s most worse: Phone hacking or buying votes with successful and popular comedian. blood? Without question, he is the number WILLIAM REES-MOGG: The eurozone has a one funny guy out there. Everyone choice: Split up or die loves Michael. Or, as we shall see, JAMES FORSYTH: After Rebekah, it’s lunch nearly everyone loves him. not dinner at No10 His smiley, currant-bun face and LIZ JONES: Prison is for killers, rapists, floppy hair are instantly bankers - not stupid students recognisable.
    [Show full text]
  • 15.3 Aug20 Rc Changes
    the author(s) 2015 ISSN 1473-2866 (Online) ISSN 2052-1499 (Print) www.ephemerajournal.org volume 15(3): 497-512 The comic organization Nick Butler, Casper Hoedemaekers and Dimitrinka Stoyanova Russell Introduction Humour and laughter have become prevalent themes in management and organization studies over the last few decades (Westwood and Rhodes, 2007; Bolton and Houlihan, 2009). This is perhaps unsurprising as joking is a part of all workplaces, not to mention everyday life. Studies have documented the prevalence of clowning, horseplay, pranks, satire, ridicule and lampooning in a variety of settings and at every level in the organizational hierarchy (Ackroyd and Thompson, 1999). But while joking is certainly pervasive, the meaning and significance of humour at work is by no means uncontested: humour is said to serve variously as a coping mechanism, a subversive strategy and a management tool in contemporary organizations. Starting from this basis, the special issue seeks to explore the ‘inescapable ambiguity of humour’ (Kenny and Euchler, 2012: 307) in culture, society and organizations. The role of humour and laughter in organizations has undergone a considerable shift in recent years. For much of the twentieth century, employers attempted to restrict joking practices within industrial workplaces due to the negative impact on labour discipline (Collinson, 2002). Today, however, humour is coming to play a prominent role in ensuring compliance to corporate objectives. This is most evident in contemporary ‘cultures of fun’, which encourage employees to engage in light-hearted and enjoyable activities in order to secure commitment, improve motivation and ultimately boost productivity (Fleming, 2005). Examples of this have included hiring a ‘corporate jester’ to poke fun at managerial pretensions, integrating wacky ‘dressing up days’ into the working week or installing comic artefacts in the office such as novelty clocks or giant inflatable dolls (Warren and Fineman, 2007).
    [Show full text]
  • Anger Management Breaks Records on Uk Premiere
    ANGER MANAGEMENT BREAKS RECORDS ON UK PREMIERE London, Thursday 13th September, Comedy Central UK announces that Anger Management starring Charlie Sheen has broken previous Comedy Central ratings records for a new title on its UK debut; becoming the top ranking General Entertainment channel above Sky 1, ITV 2, BBC 3 and E4. Anger Management premiered on Comedy Central on Wednesday 12th September averaging 344,000 individuals for the first episode while episode 2 of the double bill achieved 310,000 The Anger Management double bill episodes were up +169% on the slot average for 1634 Adults, making Comedy Central bigger than BBC One in Pay TV homes over the hour while versus Adults in Network homes, it was the top ranking GE channel, beating Sky 1, ITV2, BBC Three and E4. Comedy Central UK has grown 82% since launch helped by Sheen’s previous sitcom Two and a Half Men which now stars Ashton Kutcher. Two and a Half Men season 10 returns exclusively to Comedy Central just four days after US TX on Monday 1st October. Chris Collie, Director of Programming, Comedy Central UK said: “We’re glad so many people joined us to laugh along with Charlie Sheen’s latest adventure” Anger Management kick starts Comedy Central’s stellar autumn line-up which includes the second series of local commission, Threesome (Big Talk Productions), alongside the most talked about U.S. shows – The Daily Show, South Park, The Office, Mike & Molly and Two and a Half Men. Anger Management is produced by Lionsgate Television in conjunction with Roth and Totino’s Revolution Studios, Burg’s Evolution Entertainment, Helford’s Mohawk Productions, Inc.
    [Show full text]
  • Just Joking: Speech, Performance and Ethics
    1 Just Joking: Speech, Performance and Ethics by Emma Bennett A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD Queen Mary University of London School of English and Drama September 2016 2 STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP I, Emma Bennett, confirm that the research included within this thesis is my own work or that where it has been carried out in collaboration with, or supported by others, that this is duly acknowledged below and my contribution indicated. Previously published material is also acknowledged below. I attest that I have exercised reasonable care to ensure that the work is original, and does not to the best of my knowledge break any UK law, infringe any third party’s copyright or other Intellectual Property Right, or contain any confidential material. I accept that the College has the right to use plagiarism detection software to check the electronic version of the thesis. I confirm that this thesis has not been previously submitted for the award of a degree by this or any other university. The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without the prior written consent of the author. Signature: Emma Bennett Date: 23 September 2016 3 ABSTRACT Why do people go into rooms to watch other people speak? What is it that is taking place when a performer walks onto a stage, or steps up to a microphone, and, in the silence that has fallen, begins to speak? This thesis considers both the pleasures and the anxieties that attend such public acts of speaking, and responds in particular to the kinds of utterances that announce themselves as in some way ‘non-serious’.
    [Show full text]
  • Comedy and Distinction: the Cultural Currency of a ‘Good’ Sense of Humour
    Sam Friedman Comedy and distinction: the cultural currency of a ‘good’ sense of humour Book (Accepted Version) Original citation: Comedy and distinction: the cultural currency of a ‘good’ sense of humour, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2014, 228 pages. © 2017 The Author This version available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/59932/ Available in LSE Research Online: September 2017 LSE has developed LSE Research Online so that users may access research output of the School. Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in LSE Research Online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. You may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute the URL (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk) of the LSE Research Online website. This document is the author’s submitted version of the book section. There may be differences between this version and the published version. You are advised to consult the publisher’s version if you wish to cite from it. Introduction: Funny to Whom? In January 2011, the scheduling plans of Britain’s biggest TV station, BBC 1, were leaked to the press. After the recent success of BBC comedies such as Outnumbered and My Family, BBC1 Controller Danny Cohen apparently told his team of producers that BBC Comedy was becoming ‘too middle class’, and failing in its responsibility to appeal to working class viewers (Gammell, 2011; Revoir, 2011; Leith, 2011).
    [Show full text]
  • JOKES for JUSTICE 23Rd FEBRUARY 2017 - 7:00 PM @ the BEDFORD PUB (BALHAM)
    JOKES FOR JUSTICE 23rd FEBRUARY 2017 - 7:00 PM @ THE BEDFORD PUB (BALHAM) Nish Kumar, Sofie Hagen, Jonny & the Baptists and Sophie Willan will perform at Jokes for Justice, a comedy fundraiser for South West London Law Centres to be held on the 23rd February 2017 - 7.00pm at The Bedford Pub in Balham (77 Bedford Hill, London SW12 9HD - http://thebedford.com/). Jokes for Justice will raise money for South West London Law Centres and help them protect access to justice in the face of devastating government cuts to legal aid. About South West London Law Centres: The Law Centre’s specialist lawyers help make access to justice a reality for some of the most vulnerable people in the country. We also coordinate fifteen free advice clinics every week across SW London attended by volunteer lawyers to share their expertise with the community. Whether we are helping victims of sex trafficking claim asylum, assisting benefit claimants with appeals or preventing families from facing eviction and homelessness, the Law Centre is committed to making sure every day people can understand and enforce their rights at a time when their lives are in crisis Government cuts to legal aid have had a devastating impact on access to justice, cutting our income by over 40%. Ten Law Centres across the country have closed down since 2013, leaving some of the most marginalised members of society without advice and representation. Jokes for Justice will provide vital funds to support our work and help ensure that we can continue to address the needs of our communities and the people who need it most.
    [Show full text]
  • Openness, Otherness, and Expertise: Uncertainty and Trust in Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle Rob Hawkes in '90S Comedian, A
    Openness, Otherness, and Expertise: Uncertainty and Trust in Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle Rob Hawkes In ’90s Comedian, a live stand-up show recorded for DVD on 10 March 2006 at the Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, Stewart Lee pauses during a long and, in many ways, harrowing story about a drunken encounter with Jesus Christ (which involves the inebriated Lee – “at his apparent insistence” – vomiting “into the open mouth of Christ”) to deliver this aside: Now, right. I’ve been doing stand-up for seventeen years, OK? And I can sense when there’s tension in a room. And I know why it is and I un–, I understand it. Basically there’s a performer-audience bond of trust built up. We have worked on that together over the last hour. And, and, and you think, “Yes, there is, Stew, but you’ve broken that bond of trust. Because we weren’t expecting to be made to visualise this image. There was no warning of this, it wasn’t flagged up. There was no indication that you would do something like this, especially when you opened with all that light-hearted material about the bombings.” (Lee 2010a, 213; see also Lee 2006) As Lee highlights, this moment comes after about an hour of stand-up comedy. It also performs an important structural function in the show, relieving the tension that surrounds the telling of the Christ story and the issues it raises of religion, blasphemy and offence. This apparent diversion allows Lee to return to the story after a five-minute interlude and to push it to an even more extreme conclusion, whilst also referring to a promise made earlier in the show that nobody in the supposedly divided audience (split by Lee into “Team A” and “Team F”) would be left behind by the end of the evening.
    [Show full text]
  • Alex Boardman
    FACILITATORS OF MIRTH Artist biography Alex Boardman Playing age: 35-45 Height: 6’ 1” Weight: 14st Hair color: Brown Eye colour: Brown Build: Average Appearance: White Native Accent: Lancashire/Manchester Accents: Liverpudlian, Cockney, Glaswegian, Geordie, Welsh (South), French, Spanish, German, Standard US, New York, Irish, Northern Irish Experienced in: Stand up, improvisation, theatre, corporates, combined services entertainment and after dinner entertainment, highly skilled in football, basketball and guitar Driving License: Full & clean “A great comic, and a skilled writer” - Sarah Millican Alex’s ability to interact with any audience, his free His skills as a writer have also been in constant demand flowing style and natural charm, means he is currently for Britain’s prime time TV and Radio comedy shows, one of the most sought after acts in the country. most recently writing the script for Paul Hollywood’s A lifelong comedy fan, Alex stormed onto the scene national theatre tour. He is also highly skilled at TV and in the late 90’s, and quickly became one of the most tour warm ups, bringing his warmth and ease to a variety popular choices on the circuit. of audiences. Alex’s sharp writing skills mean if you’ve found yourself falling off your chair in a fit of giggles A lightening quick ad libber, with a charming edge, watching TV’s latest successful comedy offering, the Alex is an established MC. His unique brand of “flattery chances are, Alex is responsible. and abuse” proves ever-popular with audiences, and although often dancing deliciously close to the boundaries of what is considered PC, the lack of malice, and warmth to his approach, means everyone feels they’re in on the joke.
    [Show full text]