Will Self

one a fair amount of solo performing throughout my career – in fact, I started out as a stand-up comedian, and from time to time I revisit that sort of shtick, doing little gigs in the upstairs rooms of pubs. But mostly I do “shows” of one sort or another to support the publication of my books. Time was when these public readings were convened in the big chain bookstores: Waterstones, Blackwell’s and – before its demise – Borders. Audiences might be relatively small, but they had usually chipped up because they were interested in the writing; the live act was just an add-on.

But nowadays all bookshops are in freefall and the business of literary promotion has shifted to literary festivals and gigs in small theatres (if, that is, you can put bums on seats). In line with the decline of serious solitary reading, punters demand to be entertained collectively.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I have stared out into dusty velveteen darkness at the rows of upturned faces looming up at me, pale as the caps of poisonous mushroom. At these moments, just before I zing the first one-liner out into the stalls, I try to assay the mood and tenor of the crowd: are they febrile or enervated, in the mood for laughter or tears? And, more to the point, am I febrile or enervated, in the mood for tears or laughter?

Now, I hope you noticed the subtle but important reversal in the chiasmus above: for an audience, laughter is a balm and a restorative, lifting it collectively out of the rut its massed feet have worn throughout the daily go-round: for the performer, however, laughter is always an easy way of gaining acceptance. “Laugh,” as the hoary old adage has it, “and the world laughs with you.” But really this formula should also be subject to reversal; from the isolated performer’s point of view, the important thing is that if the world is laughing, and you’re laughing as well, the world will assume you’re part of it, rather than some weirdo scam-merchant trying to pull one over.

In my experience, an audience will have both a lowest and a highest common denominator of taste and discrimination. Tell a crass joke and you may undershoot an audience’s low point; but craft too artful a witticism and it may zing over their heads rather than hitting them in the eye. In either case, there will be muttering and disaffection, and they won’t even laugh at you, let alone with. Audiences naturally long to become a single psyche surging with the same emotion; and producing this state-of-minds is the desideratum for all performers – yet woe betide he who misjudges it, because then, instead of being enfolded by the group mind, he will be abandoned to die alone in the full glare of the limelight.

Even more serious an error is misplaced seriousness. Adjudge your crowd to be too high-minded and you’ll come off looking like a pretentious prat; assay viewers too basely, and they’ll think, “You patronising dipstick.” And of course, all these judgments have to be made lightning-quick, lest the mood curdle and then go emphatically off. So, the temptation – if you’re a performer – is always to pitch low rather than high, and always to aim for the funny-bone rather than the sensitive one. Nevertheless, the allure of this tactic needs to be resisted: for, though audiences may roar with delight, with each mass contraction of their diaphragms, you’re being repelled – because, in your sad eagerness to be liked, you’ve transformed yourself into just another puppet-cum-clown, jerking about on strings of low self-esteem.

I thought about all this the other evening when I went to see Stewart Lee’s new stand-up show at the Leicester Square Theatre in London. Lee is perhaps the most intelligent comedian ever to tread British boards, and the genius of his shtick consists in large part in his willingness to flout all the rules of mass psychology outlined above. Rather than trade on audiences’ basest inclinations, Lee seeks constantly to raise their game. He does this by denigrating them – and himself. On the evening I saw him, he continually told us we were too slow and stupid to get his jokes, and that we needn’t bother laughing, as he considered us of no account. At the same time, he presented a portrait of himself as a deeply insecure man, fed up with the thankless cycle of touring mid-sized venues, who feels an affinity with prostitutes because, like them: “I do something for people they desperately want, but they’ve nothing but contempt for me.”

This seemed like reverse psychology: what we were meant to feel as Lee berated us was that we were perspicacious enough to see through his act and appreciate his real message: namely, that we were sufficiently wise and witty to appreciate how wise and witty he is. But actually, Lee is a good enough actor to keep the other possibility open. In line with Papa Sigmund’s dictum, he isn’t joking at all, but hoodwinking us with his own ironic sensibility as he kvetches and badmouths in plain sight, cackling internally all the while. Now, the Venn intersection between these two, quite high audience denominators markedly reduces Lee’s likelihood of laughs. Not that this seems to bother him … Or then again, maybe it does …

Justin Welby still looks like exactly what he is: a superannuated Old Etonian oil executive from west London with a sideline in religiosity

The most important thing about Justin Portal Welby, the 105th Archbishop of Canterbury and Primate of All England, is that he’s not Rowan Williams. How we all miss Rowan Williams! The whole point of the Established Church is that its ministry is for all Britons, not just confessing Anglicans; and Dr Williams achieved this difficult task brilliantly. That he did so was, in large measure, due to his appearance: the most fanatical adherent of sharia law hearkened to his fluting emollience, because, resembling as he does a fictional wizard straight out of central casting, they assumed he was either Gandalf the Grey, or Albus Dumbledore, or possibly both.

With Dr Williams’s successor we must bear witness to a marked decline in the archiepiscopal phenotype. Far from resembling some wand-waving sorcerer, and despite all the rich caparisoning, Justin Welby still looks like exactly what he is: a superannuated Old Etonian oil executive from west London with a sideline in religiosity. His is not a bonny countenance; rather, he resembles a constipated tortoise with sunburn. Frankly, he could do with a beard – the more patriarchal the better – simply to cover up that sourpuss.

Doubtless Welby’s supporters will find such a description rude to the point of impiousness – but for those of us who live in an uncloistered world, the most significant indicators of his true nature lie first in his appearance, and second in the manner of his ordination.

Welby is one of Sandy Millar’s men. (And I say “men” advisedly.) When Welby heard the call to be ordained in the late 1980s he was initially rejected by the then bishop of Kensington, who said: “There is no place for you in the Church of England.” Prophetic words, indeed. It was Sandy Millar, one of the founders of the evangelical – indeed, charismatic – Alpha course, at Holy Trinity Brompton, in London, who came out to bat for Welby. The evangelicals must have been delighted when they got one of their own into Lambeth Palace, yet ever since he took up his crosier he’s been insidiously sticking it to them. I’m going to explain why, but first a word or two about evangelicals.

It’s disconcerting the first time it happens to you: you’re standing up in church, ready to groan your way apathetically through another fusty Victorian hymn, when instead of the moaning of a clapped-out organ, an electric guitar strikes a resounding chord and the worshipper next to you bursts into enthusiastic song. Worse is to follow: for, as she warbles, she slowly raises one arm, extends it, and begins to wave it about like a tree bough while the other arm remains rigidly at her side. Looking around you, you see that the congregation is like unto a forest: so many raised and undulant limbs are there. Yes, you have fallen among evangelicals – and if you thought ordinary Anglicans were a bit too nice then you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Purely to show open-mindedness, my wife attended an Alpha course run by one of our son’s schoolfriend’s parents, who was an evangelical minister. After a few weeks she began to seem a little – how can I put it? – spiritually pained, and when I asked her what the matter was, she said she was having something of a crisis of no faith. “It’s just that they’re so very nice,” she said, “and the God they believe in is so very nice, too. They make me feel anxious I might be upsetting Jesus by not believing in Him as well.”

Nice as he may be, Welby remains an evangelical, and evangelicals have a tricky time when it comes to homosexuality, because although not exactly fundamentalists, they nonetheless cleave strongly to the Word of the Lord, rather than chipping up to the church fête from time to time to buy a few tombola tickets. So, simply by looking into his own heart, Welby knows the situation is intractable: those homophobic Africans and redneck Americans cannot be appeased, and though he personally is opposed to gay marriage, he has said he’s “always averse to the language of exclusion when what we are called to is to love in the same way as Jesus Christ loves us”.

Welby seems to feel Jesus loves us by letting us go, because he is now making noises about a “looser relationship” between the various Anglican churches: one in which – while they all remain attached to the Church of England – the connections between them become more attenuated. Some of his evangelical chums must be swaying with anxiety rather than enthusiasm but they should rest easy; on all other important matters the archbishop is behaving in an exemplary fashion.

Not a week goes by without him making some anodyne statement or futile gesture condemning food banks (then asking people to give to them), offering refugees tokenistic accommodation in the grounds of Lambeth Palace, and generally mithering on about the scourge of poverty while giving spiritual succour to those who’re doing very nicely out of the status quo. ’Twas ever thus: our Established Church may well be for all Britons, but, in Justin Welby, we have a prelate who speaks eloquently for the … few.

‘I’d done it once before with impunity; but to go there twice smacks – as Lady Bracknell would no doubt agree – of carelessness’

Guernsey Airport is pretty weird; but then, so is the rest of the island. I was standing in the queue on the stairs leading up to my Gatwick-bound flight, when the young man in front of me – a player for the Guernsey Tigers, according to the patch on his navy tracksuit – jerked his thumb up at the fuselage and exclaimed, “Now that’s what I call a proper plane.” I guffawed, then explained myself: “I certainly hope it’s a proper plane, or else we’re all fucking dead!”

Yes: dead in the waters around Sark, where apparently the piffling politics of this picayune place have been poisonous since the Barclay brothers pulled their investment out of the local economy; or perhaps plummeting from the skies over nearby Brecqhou, the weirdo twins’ own fiefdom – but either way, brown bread, duck food. Dead.

As the plane taxied and turned, I saw the runway rolled out before us, an undulant grey tarmac wave, swooping into and out of a substantial dip. It had been folly to come to Guernsey, I thought – and now I would pay for it with my life. True, there’s nothing wrong with visiting the thinking man’s Jersey once: I’d done it once before with impunity; but to go there twice smacks – as Lady Bracknell would no doubt agree – of carelessness.

The first time I visited it was because of a series I was writing for the aptly named British Airways in-flight magazine High Life. (Aptly, because long ago it used to be said that some BA employees were monged out of their brains on major psychotropics.) The conceit was this: I’d board an early-morning flight from London to some remote location in the British Isles, take a long walk, then return to the metropolis in the evening, thereby demonstrating the perfect fit between their domestic flight schedule and our sceptred isle. It was a crap idea, of course, representing a new nadir when it comes to environmental insensitivity; moreover, by combining two flights and a country walk in a single day, I managed to ruin all of these experiences.

Still, as fly-to-walk outings go, Guernsey had been one of the better ones. I’d arrived on a sunny day, strolled along the southern coast marvelling at the multi-storey gun emplacements that the Second World War German occupiers had built, then turned back towards the dippy airport. I don’t remember talking to a soul all day, which was something of an achievement, given that the island’s population density is 844 of the buggers per square kilometre.

This time it had been different: a nice young man called John met me at the airport and we walked together into the main settlement of St Peter Port. John was born in Guernsey, and despite having tasted the fleshpots of Portsmouth while he was away at university, he had returned to make his life on the island – which was fair enough, although he seemed a little bemused when I asked him if he knew a way of avoiding the main road.

Really, to live all your life on a fly-speck of land a mere five by three miles and not know such a thing defies reason – until, that is, you stop thinking about Guernsey as a physical fact and start considering its human reality. The only island I have ever lived on (besides the sceptred one) is Rousay in Orkney; it is roughly the same size as Guernsey, but there the resemblance ends: Rousay’s population is around 200 rather than 65,000, and the island thoroughfares are so unused that nobody has to pay road tax.

John’s car was parked up at the airport – but on a sunny Saturday morning everyone else had decided to go for a cruise. Car ownership on Guernsey in fact exceeds one per capita, and although no one can actually drive two cars at once, the second you step on to any of the main island routes it feels as if they’re doing just that, such is the density of potentially death-dealing metal. That the speed limit is a mere 30mph throughout the island makes the vast amount of car-flesh on display still more disturbing. Contemplating these cavalcades of tax-dodgers in their dodgems was more than I could bear.

Luckily, I didn’t have to: John led me down a lane into a bosky realm of miniature flowery dells and sidelong views of crystal waters lapping against rocky cliffs. Bees bombinated, butterflies flitted, and we didn’t meet a soul for an hour, besides a rather patrician-looking gent in a fleece who John told me was one of the island’s superstar investment gurus. True, we had to take a bus the last mile in order to avoid swimming in the traffic stream – but if I squinted a little I could still imagine I was in some desert place. And I kept up the pretence the rest of the day, despite the crowds milling around St Peter Port.

John accompanied me on foot back to the weird airport, I checked in, went through security. And there I am: forever waiting to leave Guernsey – just like its 65,000 inhabitants, who, despite their mobility and their wealth, still can’t take it with them.