Good news Brighton fans. I have re-arranged the gig to the day before (Saturday 7th) at the slightly unusual time of 5.30pm in a different venue - The Corn Exchange. So if you've bought a ticket already that will still be valid, if you need to get a refund cos you can't make the new time then that's cool, but if you haven't got a ticket then buy one NOW! It's a smaller venue and over 100 tickets already sold, so don't leave it til the last minute.
Today I avoided doing all the work I have to do (you don't understand I was very tired after squash and after working so hard at the weekend) by looking at myself performing old sketches on youtube. They have mostly been put up by one fan
robboblin So thanks for that Rob. Or Mr Bobblin. Or whatever your name might be.
They are mainly pretty funny still and there's something quite enjoyable about watching all the Histor's Eye sketches back to back. Stewart Lee is very funny in them. In many ways I regret his decision to become a brooding and cool stand up comedian and wish he had stayed doing what he is really good at. Doing very bad puns in a funny voice, using a puppet as his mouth-piece. Hopedully he'll go back to this eventually. But the sheer relentlessness is something beautiful to behold. In the one where Pliny is killed he manages to make nearly every word into "egg", but (and this is where he is a puppet genius on a par with Patrick Marber) not every word. A less skilled comic would have thought it was funny to have every word being egg, but Stewart Lee correctly recognised that if 90% of the words were "egg" and a few words remained unchanged that was actually funnier. As if Pliny was thinking, "No, there's no way to turn that bit into egg".
I remember we filmed these sketches very quickly and were extremely tired and fractious. Sometimes that comes out on film. It doesn't really matter. It's meant to be bad. The mistakes and pauses just make it better. But watching one of them I can see where I forget my lines or just go blank for a second (we may have been reading it, but we were also operating the birds- again very amateurishly, but it almost looks like skilled deliberate amateurishness which I am very pleased about). I haven't seen this one up there, but I wish we hadn't done the one where me and Stew pop up and argue about something between ourselves. It didn't need to go that far and spoils it. It's good when the seething resentment is underneath and when the performance shows the antagonism going on between the two performers (Mark Gatiss does a great job of the mental break down of Greg Evigan in When Insects Attack, which are also well worth a look).
Of course after all these years there are things that I have totally forgotten doing. In the Marathon version of Histor there is
an appearance by Bernie Clifton. I had no memory of meeting him at all. When he came on in the sketch, I kind of assumed it was Kevin Eldon dressed up (going for his second bird-based 70s performer impression), but it's really Bernie. How can I have forgotten meeting him? It is nice to be able to enjoy the sketches as if seeing them for the first time though. Although some of the set piece things are a bit long (and believe me they would have been longer if there had been time - we overshot enormously on Fist of Fun. I wonder where all that extra footage ended up) I have to admit that I was surprised how funny all this stuff is. It's sad that we got cut off in our prime and it's a shame there will never be a DVD release, but it's really good to think that all this stuff is up there for people to see.
So many people ask me about the DVD. I have to say that I don't think it will ever happen. It's up to the BBC and they don't seem keen and also there would be a lot of images and music that would need to be cleared or removed which would make it too much hard work. Though having looked at stuff today I still think you could do a little best of Lee and Herring compilation that wouldn't be too shoddy.
For the moment and back in reality you can at least go and see some of it on youtube and I hope it makes you laugh as much as it made me laugh. Write to Stewart Lee and suggest he does his next stand up show as Pliny. It's easily the best thing he has ever done.
And look out for Kelly Brook in the Teachers sketch.
In fact I can't believe the researchers for "Before They Were Famous" haven't trawled through Fist of Fun yet. Early appearances by Sally Phillips, John Thompson, Ronnie Ancona and Alistair Macgowan, Kevin Eldon, Paul Putner, Opera Director Stewart Lee as a puppet bird and doubtless many others.
And if they ever do a show called "Before They Weren't Famous" there's plenty of footage of me on there too.
Ha ha!
