As I continue the two-year tour of my current standup show, Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf, I find my audience of predominantly Guardian-reading teachers usually agree with me on most things, and their laughter joyously affirms our mutual and blinkered worldview. Unusually, in Cheltenham a Reform councillor, who once followed me around in a bookshop, always comes to see me, and queues up at the end to tell me he is a Reform councillor, and that he enjoys my comedy even though he doesn’t agree with it. In contrast, I don’t enjoy the Reform party’s leader’s comedy and I don’t agree with it. Gas the Jews! Gas the Jews? Really? Banter, Martin, harmless schoolboy banter!
But, as a former in-law who runs a fascinating and fun cabinet of curiosities in a neglected forest, one which nevertheless includes a significant amount of teacups that formerly belonged to Hitler, once said, when I asked him if he had a problem with Nazis visiting his attraction: “No, there’s no problem. They pay their money the same as everyone else.” And so it is for me with the Reform councillors attending my shows. And if performing the show for two years, night after night, to nearly a quarter of a million people can make just one Reform councillor change their mind, then it has been a poor return on the time and effort I have invested.
Aberdeen has often been a slight outlier in my usual evenings of manufactured liberal consent. Sometimes the theatre is disproportionately packed with tough oil-smeared men who have come in from months on a rig, and just want to see something, anything really, that wasn’t oil, sea or a mixture of both. But even so, they probably didn’t really want to see a middle-class Englishman talking for two hours about different pieces of food being spilled on different body parts of the rightwing newspaper columnist Rod Liddle.
This year in the granite Athens there was a muted response to my otherwise resoundingly endorsed material about climate change and oil extraction. Before going on stage at His Majesty’s theatre, I hadn’t factored in that the continued mortgage payments of many of Aberdeen’s citizens are directly dependent on the oil industry being allowed to continue to accelerate the death of all life on Earth unchecked. It’s a tough choice for the Aberdonians and they have my genuine sympathy. Jam today. Or no jam tomorrow. And tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Until the last syllable of recorded time.
Burnham’s decision to prioritise fossil fuel extraction over a man describing pieces of food being placed on the body of the late Rod Liddle is typical of the way the arts are undervalued in this country
Andy “Burn Them” Burnham has decided to open Aberdeen’s Jackdaw gasfield and speed up the extinction of everything on Earth in order, in the words of the energy secretary, Miatta Fahnbulleh, “to create 27 jobs [and] secure 273 jobs.” I have seven people working on my tour full-time, and every night I do a theatre show about two dozen more people get a day’s work. That’s 31 jobs. So let’s just get nine two-year standup comedy tours on the road and employ the same amount of people as the Jackdaw death cult will, without helping to destroy all life on Earth. Burnham’s decision to prioritise fossil fuel extraction over a man describing pieces of food being placed on the body of the late Rod Liddle is typical of the way the arts are undervalued in this country.
Apparently, according to Fahnbulleh, the decision to drill Jackdaw will also “support the country’s energy security with homegrown gas this winter and help minimise the UK’s use of imported higher emission fuels as we continue our transition to renewables and nuclear”. But according to Tessa Khan, the executive director of the anti-oil campaign group Uplift, “Jackdaw will provide around just 2% of our gas demand for roughly 10 years. It has been oversold and won’t stop the overall decline in North Sea jobs as it will be largely unmanned and operated remotely.”
Operated remotely? Wow! Oil rigs aren’t Uber cabs! This month, Andy “Burn Them” Burnham confirmed Russian bots boosted Brexit and the head of M15 warned we are all being manipulated by online propaganda from hostile states. And this week, all the websites in the world got exposed at once by a massive AI-driven hack. What if the remotely operated oil rig gets hacked by the Russians and made to walk up on land, like one of HG Wells’s Martian war machines, and just start drilling into areas of historic Scottish cultural significance? The site of the Battle of Culloden! The Old Course at St Andrew’s golf club, where golf was invented!! The Belleville Hotel, Dunfermline, where the Skids played their first show in August 1977!!! Only Donald Trump’s Ayrshire Turnberry resort will be spared. And yet it should be the first place to go, on aesthetic grounds alone, for looking like a cross between Liberace’s idea of ancient Rome and a cubist version of Hobbiton.
But who cares? Drill, baby, drill! Andy “Burn Them” Burnham’s enthusiasm for the ongoing use of oil will create opportunities too. “What we need is a war to reset the world and start everything all over again,” said my Brexit-voting, Reform-supporting relative last week, like a man who, unable to do his jigsaw, has decided it is best to just throw all the pieces up in the air and hope they land in a pattern that vaguely resembles a famous National Trust property or a painting of Mousehole harbour. But he may yet get his wish.
As fossil-fuel-accelerated global heating opens up previously problematic Arctic seaways, so Russian ships and submarines probe and prod their deep sea communication cables. On Thursday, Tan Dhesi, chair of the defence select committee, made clear our inability to protect them: “The UK needs to be willing to address a hard truth: it does not currently have all the capabilities to operate successfully in the high north. Publicly available evidence of low availability among destroyers, frigates and attack submarines calls into question whether the UK can meet its commitments.”
So yes, drill, drill, drill and burn, Andy “Burn Them” Burnham. But our Arctic vulnerability is just one example of the way that rapid climate change, driven for example by a newly opened Jackdaw – which only creates the same amount of jobs as nine midscale comedy tours, and surely earns less than a deepsea cable cut would cost us – will alter our world. And I haven’t even scratched the surface. The world is a Jenga tower of interconnected consequences. Open Jackdaw. Get a Russian-engineered communications blackout. Am I reading this correctly?
Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf tours everywhere in the UK and Ireland until the end of the year, with a final November and December London run.
Stewart’s new book, Pea Green Boat, is available now, and so is a DVD of his last live show, Basic Lee.
He will perform Pea Green Boat with Mariam Rezaei, and John Cage’s Indeterminacy with Steve Beresford and Tania Chen, at Newcastle’s Glasshouse on 26 October