The terrible massacre of innocent Israelis by sadistic Hamas agents on 7 October last year has set in motion a dreadful chain of events, exploited by bad faith actors on all sides to sow division and hate. Last week the campaigner Gideon Falter tenaciously stage-managed a confrontation with the Metropolitan police by demanding to walk through a peace demonstration at a non-designated crossing point. Why did Gideon Falter cross the road? Was it to emerge with evidence that Jewish people were under threat, and that the police were racist? Or was it because he was stapled to the person he had filming him?
Falter’s 55-second framing of his confrontation with the police emerged on Friday 19 April, before anyone had properly looked at an illuminating 13-minute clip Sky was sitting on that compromised his account. But it was too late. Suella Braverman, who’d done no research as usual, was already saying Sir Mark Rowley should resign as police commissioner. The usually reliable shoot first and ask questions later approach backfires again.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m no fan of the police. In 1990, two bored patrolmen pulled me over and searched my car, and, finding nothing but a selection of silly props from my early standup set including some string and a massive painting of some washing-up, made me perform it in its entirety, clearly for their own amusement, at the side of the road in Elephant and Castle at 1am, before telling me I was “fucking shit” and sending me on my way. Everyone’s a critic.
But in the Sky footage, Falter can be seen attempting to manipulate the situation and the police. On some level, like an eco-demonstrator dressing up as a cartoon whale and harpooning themself outside a Japanese restaurant, or Joe Lycett putting a giant inflatable toilet in the Royal Albert Dock, Falter was merely creating a piece of living theatre, passive-aggressively goading police officers into taking a position that vividly dramatises anxieties about the Gaza conflict’s role in fuelling domestic antisemitism. And the fact that the Falter incident was not what it seemed doesn’t mean antisemitism isn’t real. But Falter was, disturbingly, showing how easy it is to create a kind of immersive viral deepfake that quickly bypasses conventional channels and blows up on social media and the political arena, risking a dangerous inflammation of an already explosive debate.
We always need to check the wider picture. Within days, “doing a Falter” had become a thing, and the reliably deranged actor Laurence Fox turned up with his trusty phone at London’s annual St George’s Day festival of street fighting, horse punching, regret and flagrant cocaine consumption. Fox, who also seemed keen to cross a road, filmed himself telling a young and patient policeman to fuck off in a posh voice, though the aims of his staged confrontation were less clear than Falter’s. What was Fox trying to prove? To be fair, at this late stage in Fox’s public unravelling, ascribing motives to his actions makes as much sense as ascribing motives to a smell, a landslide, or a hot bulldog that has been given class A drugs and Special Brew by bored Sunday drinkers in a dodgy East End pub. It took Sky’s footage to show that Falter wasn’t playing with an entirely straight bat. Meanwhile, Fox’s own footage meant he himself revealed himself as an arse. We live in a surveillance society. And sometimes we are surveilling ourselves.
Today, comedians who deal with any kind of controversial material live in fear of being filmed and having their routines uncoupled from the inverted commas that frame our stage work and posted and discussed online without the benefit of context. My next tour, Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf, will be a satirical response to the monetisation of the supposedly unsayable by fake-ass Netflix standups, and will include unsavoury terms. I will have to develop it in venues where I can rely on audience good faith and management support, in case of orchestrated complaints, and I’ll need to police rogue phone usage. I don’t want phone footage of me parroting forbidden epithets to leak out without justifying framing, especially if I am dressed as a werewolf and sporting a tiny prosthetic penis.
During my 2018-2022 Snowflake/Tornado tour, phone use became so problematic and widespread that I developed a strategy of vaulting into the audience, confiscating the phone, inserting it visibly between my buttocks on stage, and handing it back to the punter at the end in a Jiffy bag, culminating in an incident in Oxford and the fabulous Sun headline “Comedian in Bum Fury”. Sadly, various health conditions mean I can no longer make that phone-snatching leap safely, and my colon has become too distended to accommodate even a small burner phone for the duration of one of my admittedly overlong shows.
It was with some relief I finally had my now retired Basic Lee show filmed in Salford last week by Sky. The definitive record of this much-discussed, but comparatively rarely seen, show should diffuse the ongoing online storm in a teacup reflecting its imagined content, which has already resulted in the location of my family home being posted on the guest book of the schools advice, recipes and hate site Mumsnet by a furious old lady.
But how do we ensure potentially controversial footage is not shorn of context? Maybe the answer is to film everything you ever say or do for security, in case you end up on the wrong end of someone doing a Falter or a Fox. In fact, I’m filming myself writing this now, and I am making a very serious and concerned face while doing so, just to be on the safe side.
Stewart Lee’s new live show, Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf, opens in London in December before a national tour. He interviews Iain Sinclair about his new book, Pariah Genius, at London’s Swedenborg House on 2 May
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