What do Meat Loaf, Walt Disney, Oscar Wilde and Burt Reynolds have in common? Yes, they achieved success in their chosen fields but that’s not the answer I’m looking for. Give up? They have all been declared insolvent. I should surely take some comfort in being member of a club that has such established and varied members.
I’ve recently finished putting together a radio series about debt. It is the culmination of an Arts Council England project I have been working on that was prompted by my own attempts to understand and talk on stage about my insolvency. Over the past eight months I have been speaking to economists and academics as well as writers and performers to see what their views are on economics and debt as well as how one might talk about such subjects in an artistic way.
It turns out the latter isn’t easy. Talking about the economics of my trip into negative equity and trying to be entertaining at the same time is pretty difficult. It’s why – among many reasons – you don’t see stand-up economists. The abstractness of modern day economics pulls in the opposite direction to being interesting and fun on stage. But that’s not to say it can’t be done.
To look at how to do that I talked to some of the most successful performers, academics and writers who engage with politics and some aspect of economics in their work.
In a recent attempt to do this I spoke to the comedian Stewart Lee about how he approaches political material in his act as well as what he thinks about the cuts to arts funding announced in 2011 and, amongst other things, the current trend to put an economic price on art.
You can listen to the show, originally broadcast on Resonance 104.4 FM, below:
Sean Gittins is a stand-up comedian, writer and broadcaster. You can find out more about his Arts Council England project Til Debt Do Us Part and his other work at www.seangittins.co.uk and @sean_gittins.
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