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Stephen Armstrong's verdict on Eddie Izzard's return to stand-up
Eddie Izzard sits astride a stool at the back of the Apple store on Regent
Street, London. In front of him is a crowd of eager fans who have queued for
hours for this iPod Q&A session, chaired by the compere of Never Mind
the Buzzcocks, Simon Amstell, and they are pushing him on the widest range
of topics — from the second world war through the nature of rebellion to the
timing of any possible economic turnaround.
Izzard seems unfazed by the German kid who hands him photos of family members
in uniform, or by advice on investing in Anglo American, the mining
conglomerate, until a girl asks him if he’d prefer a screw-off head or
teapot arms. He opts for the head, and she warns him people would run away
with it, which he complains changes the question just a little, and then
asks for a different questioner. He delivers his replies so affably and
honestly — instead of searching for old semi-relevant routines to get quick
laughs — that he’s able to make the low quality of 1980s motorway service
stations as casually acceptable as his argument that capitalism needs
complete restructuring. “I’m a creativist,” he tells the crowd. “I want
money so I can create things. I think that’s always been the way. That’s
what global trade has been about for thousands of years. Somewhere, the
capitalists came along and wanted to create things just to make money. Then
they started that entire bookmaker dealing that nobody understands. So no, I
wouldn’t say I’m a capitalist.”
These are difficult times, so maybe it’s only to be expected that worried
people would offer up their woes to Izzard rather than ask him to repeat the
old Death Star Canteen routine. He handles them well, but like a
serious-minded entertainer, rather than a meet-the-people politico handling
a town-hall meeting. Yet that, the politico, is the direction in which he’s
heading. After conquering street performing, stand-up, the stage, television
and now the big screen, with a hefty role alongside Tom Cruise in Valkyrie,
he’s turning his attention to democracy.
“I’m going to stand for something in about 10 years’ time,” he says when we
meet before the gig. He is dressed down today, in trainers and a tracksuit —
clearly in full “boy mode”. “I’m just going to get more and more political.
I have no mandate, but I have a platform, because I export British comedy
around the world. Hopefully, I can come up with a commonsense attitude,
being a transvestite with a career. I don’t know whether it’ll be a
Schwarzenegger place, where you actually hold power, or a Bob Geldof place,
where you protest and organise.”
He considers for a minute. “I might be able to do more by staying outside,
because you get locked into a constituency and you really want to help your
constituency as much as possible. And will I have to dump all the work I’ve
done to date — my creative work? I might be able to keep stand-up, but it’s
taken me almost three decades to get here. . . ”
He trails away. You sense he’d like to have every string to his bow. Could he
really walk away from his three decades of trying, from Covent Garden street
act through years of honing his stand-up until Edinburgh, the West End and
finally Broadway beckoned? Then his careful targeting of Los Angeles —
“because Hollywood is the hub from which everything flows around the world”
— which is paying off, after years of cameos in slick flicks such as Ocean’s
Twelve, his television drama The Riches, pulled after the writers’ strike
but critically praised, and finally with Valkyrie, which he’s proud of
because it’s the first film British and German kids can watch where they’re
both out to get Hitler. “It is weird seeing my face on the poster on
Leicester Square Odeon,” he smiles. “Now I just need to get my name higher
up.”
It’s hard to see Izzard letting that work go completely, and you sense a
half-hope that, having defied every rule so far — from transvestites
becoming sex symbols to stand-ups joining Cruise in war films — he can pull
this one off as well. Is he angling to be a character from a dream sequence:
the politician with stage and screen within easy reach, who can finish his
speech on the floor and slip into the limo for the gig at the O2 before
shooting starts with Brad and George tomorrow? He shakes his head. “I don’t
know. But I’m just going to get more and more active, and more and more up
to speed on the intense detail that there is in any argument.” He nods
firmly. “I have emotional or commonsense arguments, I can think about things
from a logical point of view, but when you get right down to policy, there’s
so much more information you need to take into your brain to understand it
and argue it.”
It’s clear, Izzard says, that the Labour party is his natural home. He has
recently donated thousands, and went toe-to-toe over Europe with
Eurosceptics at the party conference. “We didn’t end on bad terms. With one
I said, ‘Where are you on Europe?’ And he said, ‘I like it for certain
reasons and not for others.’ Then he said, ‘There’s a joke about a
Frenchman, a German, an Englishman and an Italian going into a pub. . .’ I
said, ‘You’re not going to tell me that joke,’ and I just talked loudly over
the top of him.” Then he bursts out laughing. “Nobody’s allowed to tell
comedians jokes.” He shakes his head. “People go, ‘Here’s a joke you can
use’, and I say, no. It’s a really strong rule. It’s legal. If someone tells
me one, and I do anything like that in my act, I could be sued.” I’m not
entirely sure I believe his legal point, but decide to let it pass. “Anyway,
we’ve heard everything and judged everything — and I get very judgmental.”
Again with the Europe, Eddie. It’s been his drum for such a long time — for
almost 20 years, through no-votes to referendums and currency rejections,
through anti-euro campaigns and low-turnout elections. Why does a man born
in Yemen to a travelling BP auditor, who, while at a British boarding
school, mourned his mother’s untimely death (hiding porn mags under the
mattress and vodka in a piano stool), and has climbed America’s stairway to
stardom, still think he might give it all up for this fractured continent?
“Because the stakes are so high — if we can do it, there’s hope for the
world,” he says in a flurry of earnest energy.
“We used to kill each other. Two and a half thousand years.Alexander the Great
to the second world war. Every 50 years, we’d stop and say, ‘We haven’t had
a murderous killing spree for ages — let’s kill these people. What hats do
they wear? Let’s kill the blue hats.’ Then we’d make the spinning jenny, and
roads, then we’d kill people again.
