Another week, another racism scandal farts out from the dying body politic of this gaseous corpse of a Conservative government
I am often accused of fabricating false taxi drivers, to create straw-man mouthpieces to embody easily satirised counter-arguments that I want to kick to death in my standup comedy, from the lofty position of a patronising north London liberal elitist with his own column in the Observer. But there’s no need to invent them.
My classic “You can prove anything with facts” line, now much beloved by liberal talk radio hosts, was in fact uttered by a driver near the Shepherd’s Bush roundabout on a summer Sunday morning in 1999, while the interminable “If you say you’re English these days you get arrested and thrown in jail” riff was gifted to me by a cross cabman somewhere between Balls Pond Road and Newington Green in the winter of 2013. The routines were already out there, like Messiaen’s birdsong. All I had to do was listen.
Stewart Lee’s Basic Lee is at Portsmouth Kings theatre on 21 March, Cambridge Arts theatre 15-16 April, then touring until 25 April
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