As a boy, in 1977, I made a stupid monkey face at Queen Elizabeth II as she drove past us in Solihull’s Mell Square on her silver jubilee perambulations. “You aren’t funny, Stewart,” my gran said of the subsequent photograph, unaware that I would one day be declared “the world’s greatest living standup comedian” (the Times).
But like Nick Cave ™ ®, whose best work we now realise was a glorious mistake made while smacked out of his brain in a baby’s nappy, I too was moved by the brown tide of history that flowed over the Queen’s funeral; I enjoyed the warm congratulations of Princess Michael of Kent at the 1984 National Lifesaving Championships in Coventry, where she clearly enjoyed watching my lithe teenage body repeatedly rescued as a volunteer corpse; and a minor royal recently attended one of my performances, where he was pleasant and polite when getting me to sign a DVD afterwards, despite having witnessed his relatives being ridiculed. They’re not so bad, I thought.
