Twenty-three years ago, I stumbled home after doing a comedy gig and found myself lying semi-comatose on a sofa watching The Jerry Springer Show on ITV2. I remember six people were hurling abuse at each other. The drama was ridiculously overblown and I couldn’t understand a word they were saying. It struck me – this is like an opera. I remember the exact moment because I decided then and there that I would make this into a show. Not out of some desire to create a searing social satire on the sordid underbelly of the American Dream, but because the bleeping out of the profanity really annoyed me and I thought it would be funny to hear all the swearing sung in beautiful harmony. I got writing.
I had form in this. I was part of a comedy club called Cluub Zarathustra with Stewart Lee, the Mighty Boosh, Simon Munnery and Loré Lixenberg. Whenever our crowds got boisterous, we would wheel out my great friend Lixenberg – a mezzo-soprano also known as The Opera Device – and there would be a war of insults between the London comedy audience and The Opera Device, who sang her insults at full throttle. When I say insults – they were truly vile. But the crowd used to go wild for it. There was something about the operatic sound that diminished the violence of the words, making them all funny and, very bizarrely, life-affirming.
