Stewart Lee

things get decontextualised you know he's never filmed he never has allowed himself to be filmed and he in fact there was an allegation that some of the workers at an Edinburgh venue found his material offensive and he was cancelled yeah well I think what happened there difficult because I don't really like to talk about shows that I didn't see you know but

Sadovich started in the 80s when there was a liberal orthodoxy and he took a position against it for comic effect.

He took a position against everything for comic effect.

And his famous line was to go out and open with, Nelson Mandela, what a cunt.

You lend some people a fiver and you never see them again.

What's different now?

Yeah, he's allowed, isn't he?

But I think the difference is now that if he's doing racist material about hating immigrants, he's doing it against a backdrop where that's a mainstream political position now.

So it's sort of that material he was doing about Islam, which I didn't see,

would probably have read differently to young Muslim men who'd perhaps come from a, you know, were new into the country and weren't aware of the history of Sadovich's position as opposed to, in opposition to an 80s liberal consensus, you know.

So it's a difficult thing.

Yeah, and a perpetually bleeding scab on his nose.

For real?

Which has bled since I've known him in the 80s.

I used to be his support act and it was a fascinating time.

Then he stopped speaking to me for some reason.

I don't really know why.

He wouldn't speak to me if we were in the same venue.

And he also asked me to stop going to see him because he said that...

It's not you, he said, it's me.