Stewart Lee's new stand-up show, in Kilkenny next weekend, is a reaction to the pounding his Jerry Springer opera took at the hands of Christian groups in the UK, he tells Brian Boyd.
Comedian and writer Stewart Lee knew "things had just got really ridiculous" when he was surveying a group who had arrived at a regional UK theatre to protest at the staging of Jerry Springer: The Opera. Lee, who co-wrote and directed the contemporary opera, was startled to find that members of the far-right political party, the British National Party (BNP), had joined the ranks of Christian protesters.
"The incorrect accusations of blasphemy levelled at the show, I could sort of understand," he says. "But members of a racist political party protesting about the work, I just couldn't understand. Then it struck me: because all the protests about the opera were all over the news, maybe the BNP were trying to climb aboard in an effort to rebrand themselves away from being a racist party to a "family values" type of party. It was then the whole ridiculousness of this project became apparent to me."
The project began back in 2001 when Lee was finding himself an isolated figure on the stand-up circuit he had been treading for the previous decade. He was offered a chance to do something entirely different by the comic and opera writer, Richard Thomas, namely: take television's lowbrow Jerry Springer Show and turn it into the highbrow art form, opera.
JSTO - which, simplistically speaking, is a TV chat-show row between Satan and Jesus - was a major success at the Edinburgh Festival in 2002, so much so that it transferred to the Royal National Theatre (the British equivalent of the Abbey) and then to the West End.
"Because it had been staged at the National, this left-field piece of art had been approved by the establishment," Lee says. "It was never seen as a 'threat to decent values' back then."
However, in January 2005, in advance of a nationwide tour, JSTO was broadcast on BBC2 and attracted a record 65,000 complaints. "To put this in context, from my own point of view I had worked really hard on this for four years for next to nothing and the work would only pay out in terms of royalties when it toured nationwide," Lee says. "Following the BBC broadcast, a grouping called Christian Voice targeted theatre-owners around the country who were due to put the show on and pressurised them to pull it. Many of them did. There were two interesting things here: first it appeared that Christian Voice were borrowing tactics from US right-wing Christian groups in terms of targeting the theatre-owners. Second, a play in Birmingham called Behzti was cancelled after protests by Sikhs saying it offended their religion. It seemed to me that Christian Voice thought that the Birmingham Sikhs had stolen a march on them and they were determined to get JSTO cancelled also.
"There was something else also, although this is more recent. When Tony Blair talked about how God would be his judge on the war in Iraq, I think a lot of these groupings took encouragement from that in terms of how they saw their fight against 'blasphemy'."
The opera attracted criticism from Christian groups for its depiction of God, its ribald plot and its profanity. The Daily Mail noted that the work had "3,168 mentions of the f-word and 297 of the c-word". According to Lee, who wrote it, there are only 174 swear words in all.
"I used to read the Christian Voice leaflets that they distributed when they were protesting outside the theatres," he says. "On one of them, it said that we refer to God as a tyrant. Yes, those words are in it, but they are spoken by Satan and it's quite consistent for Satan to refer to God as a tyrant. A lot of the lines in it were influenced by my readings of medieval mystery plays and in fact the 'God is a tyrant' line is taken from Milton's Paradise Lost.It was things like this that began to confuse me. Then I would read how the press reported the protests and I couldn't believe what both broadsheet and tabloid papers were saying was actually contained in the work. There was no connection with the truth at all."
The debacle took its toll.
"Apart from the 65,000 complaints, there were also death threats against us and a possibility we would be taken to court on blasphemy charges. I started thinking about ideas of taste, ideas of freedom of expression, what you can and cannot say, and ideas of freedom," he says.
OUT OF FRUSTRATION, Lee wrote a stand-up show about his experiences. The result, 90s Comedian, is an enthralling piece of work, not just about ideas of freedom of expression but also about what constitutes good taste - and why.
"In the show, I think of the worst possible thing and try to find a context for it," he says. "I'm making jokes about things you can't make jokes about."
Throughout his career, Lee has always shown himself to be an original and thoughtful performer. He began by writing scripts for the early radio incarnation of Steve Coogan's character, Alan Partridge, before teaming up with Richard Herring for two television series: Fist of Fun and This Morning with Richard Not Judy. He has also written for, and directed, such talents as Johnny Vegas, The Mighty Boosh and Simon Munnery.
His latest venture is another opera, but this time one that deals with the rise and fall of "alternative comedy".
"It's set in an English comedy club but written and performed entirely in German," Lee says. "I wrote this big long essay to explain the thinking behind it and basically it's how the comedy scene has moved away from its countercultural roots and how the term 'alternative comedy' is now something used to describe a breakfast radio show more than anything else. It is a bizarre idea doing it in German but what I found was that there is a certain rhythm to comedic performers. You don't really need to know exactly what they're saying. Kevin McAleer would be a good example.
"It has already been performed in Germany. It will be translated into English eventually. With a lot less fuss, I hope."
Stewart Lee's 90s Comedian is at the Smithwick's Cat Laughs Festival (Cleeres, Jun 4) which runs over the June bank holiday weekend in Kilkenny. www.smithwickscatlaughs.com