Interview taken ( & edited ) from HermAphrodite #9.

“Suppose conventional wisdom to be a forest. I am chainsaw. You are squirrels.”

And thus you are introduced to the mind and works of The League Against Tedium, a techno-freak and one-man tinpot loon, the master of 99 languages and the inventor of 98, who wields a Sword of Truth and Shield of Irony with deadly skill and poise. Simon Munnery was once known as Alan Parker Urban Warrior, but now he is known as The League. He sells promotional underwear emblazoned with his face on. ( Actually, he makes his girl-friend dress up as a monkey and sell the pants. But the effect is much the same. ) Simon Munnery is fond of declaring ‘I am TV’, both onstage and off. He’s won awards. He’s also run off with other people’s. Comedy was at the heart of both of these actions. ( Oh yes. It was. ) And tonight, in his sandwich-strewn dressing room in The Arc, he will be sharing his plans for global domination with me...

And so to start.

me – “Would the world be a better place if we all learned your dance while guessing the colour of your pants ?”

Simon – “Yes. Yes, I’m sure.”

me – “Good.”

There’s a slight pause.

me – “And what exactly did the Atlantic Ocean do to you, or is it better that we just guess ?”

Simon – “I think it’s best if you just guess.”

And after that, and Lynsey & myself have mourned this evening’s absence of

The Sword of Truth and Shield of Irony ( he didn’t think the Arc would have the necessary projection capabilities to support it ), we move on to enthusing over his hat. A black Lincoln-esque affair, with a white stripe up the front. When he breathes into a small tube, the top of the hat rises, to reveal it is a multi-layered affair, and the single stripe becomes an exclamation mark.

me – “Did you make that yourself ?”

Simon – “No, I had it made.”

me – “By a professional hat-person ?”

Simon – “Yeah. It was about five hundred quid.”

Yikes.

Simon – “It’s really nicely made - I’d made one before, out of cardboard, but I kicked it to bits.”

me – “So it was worth it ?”

Simon – “It’s not five hundred quid’s worth. But I suppose the prop makers have kids to feed...”

And no, the hat itself was not a childhood dream. He didn’t begin onstage-entertaining until he got to college. Simon Munnery was not a stage-child, although he was in the Nativity.

Simon – “Everyone was in the Nativity. I was Reindeer One, or something.”

In Bethlehem ?

Simon – “I wore tights, I remember that, because I ended up crying over them.”

And made a vow at the age of four ( ? ) to never return to such shennanigans. Well, tights-wearing. The stage he did not leave forever. As in 1988, vice-president of Footlights, and starred in a production called Sheep Go Bare, with Mel Giedroyc. (http://www.footlights.org/past/1986.html ) At the revelation of such knowledge, Simon declares himself impressed with my research / stalker skills. I tell him I also saw him on the ‘Edinburgh Or Bust’ programmes, gleefully running off with The Perrier Award. He grins. It was a proud moment in his life...

Simon – “They give it to you to hold, and tell you to ‘smile like you’ve won it’...”

And if you win, they will use that press picture.

Simon – “And when they came to get it back, I just ran off.”

I don’t see how he planned to get away with it though – surrounded by journalists, photographers, other comedians, and a film crew from Channel 4.

Simon – “It was publicity, that’s all. The thing is of no value anyway. It’s just a blob of metal. It would be great as a court case though...”

Alex Zane – “You took it again at the Perrier Party, didn’t you ?”

Simon – “If the joke works one, do it again.”

He had actually been planning to run off with it before he got to the Festival, he was just presented with too many opportunities.

Simon – “I just thought; I’ve been going up there for eleven years. I’ll just nick it’. Everyone must have thought of something like that at some point – most years I just think ‘well, why not just break in and nick it’. But once you’ve been nominated it becomes really awkward – it’s SO MUCH pressure. The whole place is like a goldfish bowl, and every single person you meet wishes you luck, you can’t not think about it. But to then steal it would be really nasty to whoever actually won it. This year, I WAS going to steal it, that was my plan, I’d arranged it with the techies, we were going to get smoke bombs and everything. And then I get nominated.”

And then he gets to live it all over again on Channel 4.

Simon – “In Edinburgh, I used to watch the Edinburgh or Bust documentaries.”

me – “Just top remind yourself what you’ve been doing ?”

Simon – “Well, yeah; watching yourself two weeks ago. And its such a bizarre thing, because so much had happened in two weeks – Edinburgh is such dense time. But Channel 4 invited us to a party where lots of people who were in it were watching themselves in it, it was very funny.”

Freakish is the word I would use. Particularly given the time-delay on broadcasting...

Simon – “I watched the last one when I came back, and it was just like nostalgia.”

Alex pipes up that the first time he saw Simon on TV was on this year’s Glastonbury coverage, and so from there, talk turns to that glorious festival.

Simon – “I’m going to keep going there, even after I almost got killed one year...”

me – “By ? A big hippy ?”

Simon – “By the crowd.”

me – “What did you do ?”

Simon – “I got a list with Harry Hill.”

No, that doesn’t explain it. Yes, there is more.

Simon – “Harry was leaving, on the Saturday night, in this big hired car, at about eleven o’clock. We were trying to drive out, and they mis-directed us, and we ended up on one of those narrow bridges with just thousands of people being crushed against the car, really crushed. And really angry, obviously, and all very pissed, yelling ‘FUCKIN’ CAR!’. Because a car is a bad thing anyway. And they smashed the lights and got on the roof and tried to roll it. I got out, and tried to calm people down at the front. But by the time you’ve calmed one person down, theres another one, yelling ‘FUCKIN’ CAR !!!’ It was a HELL situation. We couldn’t move forward or backward, we couldn’t move either way, and it was getting worse. It was absolutely terrifying. D’you remember that thing were off-duty soldiers drove into an IRA funeral by accident, and were surrounded, dragged out and killed ? It felt like that... In the end, the way we got out was that some guy recognised Harry, and he was the most mental of anyone. So he went round the front and went ‘AAAAARGH, GET OUT OF THE FUCKIN’ WAY’ and got this little gap for us. We only got out because he was more mental than the rest of them !”

>>> Part 2

Last revised: 26/07/01