Stewart Lee is nearing 60 and, after a rocky few decades, says he is finding contentment at last. In an interview, the standup discussed his divorce, his adoption, and the twisted children's poem that he says explains his life.
Lee is currently tidying his kitchen after returning from tour. He says he has come back with records that need to be alphabetised, which is stressing him out. His house is full of posters for spaghetti westerns, avant-garde Welsh harpists, and the Fall.
Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf and a treehouse in Scotland
In his recent show, Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf, the 58-year-old lefty enters into dialectic with toxic masculinity in werewolf form. He says things have got worse in the 18 months he has been doing it, and he needs to amp the werewolf up, making him more explicitly racist, homophobic, and transphobic, but without upsetting people in the room.
Lee also went with his girlfriend to a treehouse in Scotland that he found on Airbnb. He was surprised to find it was an actual treehouse, with a slide to get out. He says it was quite good, although you couldn't really cook there, but it had a bed.
Family, adoption, and the meaning of Pea Green Boat
He was there to join his half-sisters, who had instructions to put their father's ashes in a river in the west of Scotland where he used to go fishing. The village was the location base of The Wicker Man, and Lee says he went and looked at its feet, which are still in the cliff.
His other project is Pea Green Boat, a book based on a show he devised in 2001, with illustrations by David Waywell. It is a retelling of The Owl and the Pussy-cat by Edward Lear, in which the mince the owl eats is actually the deceased cat.
Lee has written an essay about the state he was in when he first wrote it. He says he was on the brink of screenwriting success when his toilet broke down, and he was shitting in plastic bags that he left in bins in Finsbury Park. He says it was about 500 yards from where he lived above a shop. After his divorce, he has ended up living close to where he lived in the 90s, but in the whole house rather than one bit of it.
Lee and the comedian Bridget Christie married in 2006 and separated in 2021. They have two children, aged 15 and 19. He says he was miserable for a lot of this century, until a few years ago. He likes his kids, and they are good fun.
In the essay, Lee writes: "We drift through life. We impose our hopes and desires on others, hopes and desires of which they are often unaware, or care not to reciprocate, or cannot reciprocate in the way we would wish. And then we die. Alone. But the journey to that ultimate destination can be beautiful, full of weird sights and strange creatures. And we should not wish it to be any other way."
Career, controversy, and the road to contentment
Lee was adopted at the age of two, having spent his early life in foster care. He says he is from the exact centre of society because religious charities engineered adoption in those days to place you in an entirely neutral environment. His adoptive mum left school at 14 and worked her way up to being a GP practice manager. His dad was a rep for a cardboard company.
Lee's route to Oxford came via a part-scholarship to Solihull, a private school, with the shortfall made up by a masonic charity that provided educational help for orphans, waifs, and strays. He says he technically was an orphan, waif, and stray because he spent the first two years of his life in care.
He didn't give much thought to his origin story until he was about to become a dad in 2006. He says he thought he should find his mother to tell her he was all right. He has been in touch for 15 years with his two half-sisters, his father's children, and is really glad he met them.
In the 90s, Lee had a successful double act with Richard Herring and a TV series, Fist of Fun. But he says they were in a weird loop, and the last tour they did as a double act in 98 lost money. The TV series didn't get recommissioned, and it was just over.
By 2000, he was miserable. He had stopped standup and was scratching a living reviewing music. Then he started working on Jerry Springer: The Opera with Richard Thomas. The musical won a huge number of awards, including Evening Standard, Critics' Circle, Laurence Olivier, and Theatregoers' Choice. When the Christian right came after it for blasphemy, legal actions against the BBC were given short shrift, but activists put pressure on local councils to pull it from theatres, and a tour became impossible.
Lee says that after that, he thought things can get banned, and it's important that the things you say are worth saying. He started to think there should be something important in this.
Brexit reradicalised him, and out of that came his Observer column. He now writes a column for The Nerve, an online magazine funded by Carole Cadwalladr and others. He says he learned that you couldn't afford to leave room for doubt about what you meant, because bad faith actors on the right would take legal action.
Returning to Pea Green Boat, Lee says The Owl and the Pussy-cat seems to be about a pair of characters of indeterminate gender, going to a place where normal laws are suspended. He thinks it's about the tragedy of Lear's own life, as he could never live openly as a gay man. He says, "When I read it now, having lived a life, it's also a little bit about me. I don't really seem equipped to do certain sorts of things in life."
He says the owl doesn't know how to deal with another person and ends up eating their decomposing corpse out of a bag. There's something in that about a failure to relate to people. He spends most of his life on the move on motorways, and found lockdown difficult. He says being on the road was an escape hatch from intimacy, and once he lost it, he found himself not up to the job.
Mindful that he'll be 60 soon, he wants everything he's done to be compiled into some kind of physical media package, 13 DVDs with the same spine design, numbered. He says he went round the bend between about 2005 and 2015 because he wrote about 15 hours of standup in eight years. He also went round the bend in Covid, but says it was different, worse. There was no period between 2015 and 2020 when he was the right side of the bend.
Pea Green Boat by Stewart Lee, illustrated by David Waywell, is published by Ebury on 3 September (£16.99).
