"Thank you, thank you, thank you." "Hello." "I'm Stewart Lee." "This is Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle." "Let's off-road." "Now, tonight I wanted to talk about the global financial crisis, but there may be a problem with that." "Basically, this won't go out until about three months after it's recorded, and the speed at which things are deteriorating, the viewer at home may not have a home to watch this in by the time it goes out." "In fact, the likelihood is that you're pressed up against the window of an electrical goods shop, just going "ugh" and shivering, and wondering how someone could be so insensitive as to do jokes about the global financial crisis." "Meanwhile, look at these people in the past, happy." "The sophisticated London audience out of their mind on eels and whelks." "Look at them." "They're all right because it's now, here." "You are now, so you're happy, but in three months' time, when you watch yourselves in the past, you could be profoundly depressed as you remember how much happier you were now." "Right?" "For example, look at you, sir, in your shoes." "If it's not a rude question, how much did your shoes cost?" " They cost me nothing." " They cost you nothing." "You vain, arrogant man." " How did you get here tonight?" " The Tube." "The Tube." "You vain, arrogant man travelling on the Tube." "You'll be looking at yourself in the future and seeing your past self as an insult to your future self." "And for those of you watching at home who haven't seen me on TV for 10-15 years and are thinking, "He's put on weight,"" "um..." "I'm not fat, I'm merely inflation-proofed." "Or as it was known before the global financial crisis, fat." "A fat sod." "Money's lost its value, property's lost its value." "Even Woolworths gift vouchers have lost their value." "You try and spend a Woolworths gift voucher now, you will be laughed out of the shop." "You will be laughed out of the shop that isn't even there any more." "Trying to spend a Woolworths gift voucher now is like trying to spend a Scottish banknote in a grocer's in Hastings." "It can't be done." "The only thing less welcome than non-English currency in a grocer's shop in Hastings is a non-English customer." "But it's the credit crunch, and suddenly that boring bit at the end of the news about the FTSE Index, that's as exciting as war reporting." "REPORTER:" "You join us here in the City of London, literally the beating heart of the financial world, where all around me stocks are falling, the economy is collapsing and commodity markets are crashing, literally." "You must be some literal, metaphorical representation of the problem," " money literally running out." " That's correct, yes." "Where are you rushing off to?" "We're putting ourselves in an Irish bank till all this is over." "Top of the morning to you." "If we turn our heads skyward, yes, we can see a dozen or so bankers literally being airlifted out." "Here on the ground, I'm joined by a rat who is also fleeing." "Oh, 'ere we go." "We expect you to make yourself scarce at the first whiff of trouble." "Oh, yes, the old " rats deserting a sinking ship" thing." "Look around you - there's bankers, insurance brokers, office workers, stock market traders." "But pick on the rats, why don't you?" "Rattist." "(EXPLOSION)" "And even as we speak, this satirical item is literally collapsing under its own weight." "(MASSIVE CRASH)" "Now, before all this happened, all that was on television all day was programmes about how to buy a house, do up a house, sell a house for more than you paid for it, or all three simultaneously." "And these programmes were invariably presented by vile, shallow women whom one couldn't help but find strangely attractive... despite despising them and everything they stood for." "And in between these programmes about how to buy a house or do up a house or sell a house for more than you paid for it were adverts telling you how to get money to do this, money that wasn't really yours, by taking out a loan" "or by suing someone for something that happened to you that was obviously your fault." ""Did you slip in some cheese?" ""Did it make you hate cheese which you had previously loved?" ""Why not sue a cheese maker?" "Sue him for all the cheese he's got." ""Drive him out of the cheese-making business."" ""Did you burn your face with an iron?" ""Why not sue Prometheus, the god that invented fire?" ""Or an Iron Age chieftain, for having the temerity to popularise the metal."" "Or else you could take out a loan, or else you could consolidate all your existing debt into one single, more manageable but equally massive debt." "Never seemed to make sense to me." "Could I just point out at this juncture that I am not fat?" "I have merely consolidated all my existing fat into one single, more manageable but equally massive unit of fat." "But the property market has crashed." "There's no need for those programmes now." "All Channel 4 should do is make programmes which encourage us to turn our luxury houses back to the valueless state they were in before we did them up, in the hope of escaping negative equity." "Destroy Your Home on Channel 4." "PRESENTER:" "Colin Deakin spent literally years making his dream home a reality." "But thanks to the credit crunch, his massively improved property is now worth less than it was before he began work on it." "(SCREECHING)" "Well, Colin, it's bad news, isn't it?" "Colin, what shall we do now?" "My aim is the destruction of all I have done." " Ooh, destruction!" " The annihilation of the self, in the hope that I can somehow turn back time, back to before." "Before?" "Before you invested all your savings in the property." "Before." "Before you borrowed heavily against the property." "Before." "Before your wife left you." "(YELLS) Before!" "Before." "It's taken you just under an hour, but you have managed to completely wreck your dream home." "How does it feel?" "(BREATHES HEAVILY)" "Cheers, Colin." "(GLASS SMASHES)" "(CHUCKLES) Cheers." "But it's dangerous to mess with these abstract ideas of the financial value of things." "No-one understands the abstract financial value of things." "It's incomprehensible." "When they try to explain it on the news," "I half expect an expert to come out and say they're gonna destroy debt for ever by shooting debt down a massive underground tube in Switzerland and smashing it into credit." "Everything's on credit now, isn't it?" "Are you watching this, perhaps, on a flat-screen television which you've bought on HP, that's not yours - a massive, flat-screen television you don't really own?" "Round television's not good enough for you." "A massive, flat-screen television with its three times the normal emissions rate, driving up the sea level, drowning people in the South Pacific." "On a television that you don't own." "You make me sick." "If you're watching this on a flat-screen television that you don't own, turn it off and read a book." "(SCATTERED APPLAUSE)" "Yes, they're applauding you." "They're applauding you for your crassness." "They're applauding you from the past in whatever problematic situation you're in now in the future, but you'll be able to look at them from the future and go, " I expect they're all worse off now."" "You can't escape the fact that things aren't worth what they were." "Buildings previously worth millions are now not even worth the paper that the property developers selling them previously covered in outright lies." "Miles Piles is a property developer." "His world has fallen apart." "The global market has crashed." "But Miles has a new scheme which he hopes will turn his plummeting fortunes around." "Have a seat." "What can I do for you?" "Well, it's about your advert." ""Small, intimate space, may suit young family."" "Would you like to see it now?" " Um, yeah." "If that's all right with you." " Oh, great." "Oh..." "Sorry, if you could just hold..." "Yeah." "Right." "OK." "I'll just get this..." "Just..." "There." "You're offering your own anal passage as a possible home?" "Yep." " And we'd live in there?" " That's right." " How old is it?" " 29 years." " How many bedrooms?" " Three." "Three?" "It's not as small as it looks, then." " It's deceptively big." " Is there room for extension?" "Once you're in there, you can do what you like." "You'd like to live in a property developer's duodenum, wouldn't you, Leon?" "Can we just have a look round that corner on the right?" "(AUDIENCE GROANS)" "That'd be great for storage space, wouldn't it?" "I have to say that a man's actual anal passage isn't the kind of place we'd normally consider for a family home." "OK." "It's very tempting, but there's one thing." "If we were to live there, would your anal passage be functioning as an anal passage?" " Functioning?" " Yeah." "Would it be working as an actual anal passage?" "I mean, what I'm trying to say is, would your human excrement be coming down through..." " Through our home?" " Yeah." "Yes." "I don't know." " Really?" " Mmm." "That's a hell of a lot of work for you, love." "Is your anal passage in a chain?" "No, you can move in tomorrow." "We should have known it was all over." "You should have known when Woolworths and MFI and Zavvi all went down in the same week." "If you're of a certain age, you probably have nostalgic memories of Woolworths." "It probably means a lot to you." "You used to go into Woolworths on Saturday mornings with your pocket money and you'd..." "The singles." "They'd have the singles - the 7" singles they used to have in the charts, you remember - on the vinyl, the old vinyl they used to have in the '70s." "All the proper bands from then, when we were kids, yeah?" "The Rubettes and Mud and Chicory Tip." "Yeah." "Not like the bands they have now - stupid, modern bands all made out of wire and electricity." "The proper old bands." "You'd buy the singles, wouldn't you?" "The old singles they used to have in the old days." "The proper ones." "Very nostalgic feelings towards Woolworths." "The pick'n 'mix." "Remember the pick'n 'mix in Woolworths?" "All the sweets individually wrapped." "Proper, old-fashioned sweets, yeah?" "Not like the sweets they have now, all with knives in them and AIDS." "Yeah, proper, old-fashioned sweets they used to have." "Very nostalgic feelings I have for Woolworths." "You used to go in," "Saturday mornings, with your pocket money, and you'd get the old 7" singles they had and the pick'n 'mix and, um..." "There must have been something else they sold." "That was it, wasn't it?" "7" singles, pick'n 'mix." "It's hardly surprising they went under." "And MFI, of course - if you're of a certain age, you probably have very nostalgic feelings... for MFI." "You used to go in MFI on a Saturday morning, with your pocket money... get a bit of the flat-pack furniture - the old flat-pack furniture like they used to have in the '70s - proper flat-pack furniture, yeah?" "Not like now." "Not like the flat-pack furniture now - all the modern, wrong flat-pack furniture, all made of cancer and despair." "Proper, old-fashioned, very nostalgic feelings for the MFI..." "I have." "I used to go in there." "Do you remember - it was a big thing in our house - in the early '80s when MFI amalgamated with the Allied Carpets Group?" "You remember that?" "Everyone was around the television watching that, I remember." "Very..." "It couldn't last, could it?" "Couldn't last." "It was like two cats in a bag, wasn't it?" "Couldn't last." "It was like when Gillan joined Sabbath." "You know, it couldn't last, the MFl/Allied Carpets team-up." "It wasn't gonna last." "Very amazing..." "Very nostalgic feelings for the MFI." "Do you remember in the '80s when, er..." "Currys started to act as a retail outlet for MFI's Hygena Kitchens range?" "Do you remember that?" "Yeah?" "Do you remember?" "You used to go in on the Saturday mornings with your pocket money and you'd get a Hygena Kitchen." "Proper, old kitchens from the past, not like from now." "Kids today, they're not interested in kitchens, are they?" "They don't know what a kitchen is." "I saw it on, er..." "on that... on the Jamie Oliver." "They're not interested in kitchens, the kids." "They don't cook." "They just eat kebabs out of a ditch, apparently." "They're not interested in that." "Very nostalgic feelings for the MFI." "Do you remember, er... you used to..." "Do you remember MFI's Storage Genie range of, er... shelves and cupboards?" "Do you remember them?" "The old Storage Genie?" "Very nostalgic feelings towards the Storage Genie." "Proper shelves, weren't they?" "Old shelves, like they had in the old days." "Proper shelves, like, from the '70s that you might put a gymnastics award on, or a little statuette of a horse." "Not like... not like the shelves they have now, with all hypodermic needles and dildos on them." "Yeah, good old days." "I don't know if you know..." "Zavvi's." "Well, of course, Zavvi." "Zavvi went down, didn't it?" "Old Zavvi." "Very nostalgic feelings I have for Zavvi." "I don't know about you, I remember when Zavvi opened." "I must have been 38, 39." "Used to go in there on the Saturday mornings." "In the Zavvi." ""I'm going up the Zavvi, Mum."" ""Go on, then." "Here's your pocket money."" "Go up the Zavvi, wouldn't you, with your pocket money?" "You'd get one of the singles, one of the singles in the form of a memory stick." "All the proper, old bands they had then, didn't they, in the old days at Zavvi?" "All the proper bands." "They had the Editors and Scouting For Girls and the Killers." "Not like the stupid bands they have now the Editors and Scouting For Girls and the Killers." "What I remember about those shops, though, is the smell of them - the smell, you know?" "The thing you remember the most - you'd go in Woolworths and Woolworths used to smell of vinyl and toffee and MFI smelled of sawdust and hope." "Zavvi... used to smell of... stickers saying "3 for £10", and of physical objects in a virtual world." "They couldn't have seen it coming." "Everyone said it was best to put your money in bricks and mortar." "Turns out we'd have been better hiding it in plastic bags under our beds like our grans used to in the '70s." "VOICEOVER:" "Banks   putting your savings first." " (CLICK)" "Hello." "I'm a little old man, just like you, and so is my wife." "I can't be bothered with these new-fangled banks and building societies and savings schemes and eyesores and iPods and e-mails and she-males and he-males and Islamics and her-lamics and his-lamics and neither can my wife." "That's why we hide our money all around the house in plastic bags here, in the bedroom... (GRUNTS)" "...here, in the toilet and here, in our pants and in our bras." "We have a saying in Scotland - "Many a mickle maks a muckle."" "Our money is safe from the credit crunch where no-one can ever find it." "(DOORBELL)" "Is yours?" " I've come to rob... read the meter." " (BASS VOICE) You'd better come in, then." "Basically, what's happened is, somewhere along the line, as a society, we confused the notion of home with the possibility of an investment opportunity." "What kind of creature wants to live in an investment opportunity?" "Only man." "The fox has his den, the bee has his hive, the stoat has a... a stoat hole." "But only man, ladies and gentlemen, the worst animal of all, chooses to make his nest in an investment opportunity." "Mmm, snuggle down in the lovely credit." "All warm in the mortgage payment." "Mmm!" "But home is not the same thing as an investment opportunity." "Home is a basic requirement of life, like food." "When a hamster hides hamster food in his hamster cheeks, he doesn't keep it there in the hope that it will rise in value." "And when a squirrel hides a nut, he's not trying to play the acorn market." "And having eaten the nut, he doesn't keep the shell in the hope of setting up a lucrative sideline making tiny hats for elves." "And when a dog buries a bone, he doesn't keep that bone buried until the point where it's reached its maximum market value." "He digs it up when he's hungry." "And if estate agents were dogs burying bones, not only would they leave those bones buried until they'd reached their maximum market value, but they'd run around starting rumours about imminent increases in the price of bones" "in the hope of driving up the market, and they'd invite loads of boneless dogs to all view the bone at the same time in the hope of giving the impression there was a massive demand for bones." "And they would photograph the bone in such a way as to make it look much more juicy than it really was, airbrushing out the maggots and cropping the rotten meat." "Estate agents are in trouble." "Now, there's some Schadenfreude there." "Cos anyone that's ever dealt with one will be going, "Yes!" "They're in trouble!"" "Mention the words "estate agent" to most people, their skin will start to crawl, they may even be physically sick and start smashing their heads into a wall in the hope that they'll die." "But we shouldn't hate estate agents." "Estate agents are living things, just like us, yeah?" "The struggles to survive that estate agents are going through today are a barometer of some of the problems that we humans might face in the future." "And remember, in London, experts say, you're never more than ten feet away from an estate agent." "Under normal circumstances, estate agents keep out of most humans' way, hiding in their brightly lit offices, or sometimes in properties like these, which show clear signs of their presence." "A few years ago, we'd sometimes see the odd one." "But one morning, I was sitting on the WC, doing my business - a poo, actually - and I heard a sort of scratchy noise." "It sounded like it was coming from inside the wall." "So we got someone in to look at it and it turned out the whole house was infested." " With estate agents?" " That's right." "That one arrived last night, just before I went to bed." "And then, when I got up this morning," " all of this had appeared." " Right." "Well, once one of them's made their mark, the others feel they have to, as well." "They're very competitive for territory." " Fresh droppings here." " Oh!" "I mean, it's not their fault, really." "The current property market situation's made them pretty desperate." " But it's not very nice to have them." " No, it's not very nice." "So we got a pest control man in to come and sort it out." " Oh, here's one." " Not on a chain." "Oh, God!" "(SCREAMS)" " It's sick!" "Oh!" " Don't know how you can stand that." "I missed him." "But it's all right." "I've laid down poison," " so he's probably already dying." " Oh..." "MARTIN BENSON:" "To my mind, estate agents is the worst vermins of them all." "Once, I seen two estate agents fight each other to the death - to the death, mind - over the deeds of a two-bedroom flat in Gosport." "Weren't even double-glazed." "Now, some people say the only good estate agent is a dead estate agent." "I don't know if I agree with them." "(FEEBLY) Off-street parking..." "If anything, they're less use when they're dead." "You try buying a partial loft-conversion off one of them." "(STARTS ENGINE) Can't be done." "Who's to blame for all this?" "Well, we could blame the deregulated economics of the Thatcher-Reagan years." "We could blame Gordon Brown." "We could blame, er... the banks which lent us money we couldn't really afford to have." "But really, we're to blame." "Well, YOU'R E to blame." "I'm not really to blame." "I've always been very frugal." "I've never taken out a loan, I'm not in debt," "I've lived in the same small flat for 11 years." "It's finished to a very low spec, I'm told." "I don't have any light fittings." "Have you got light fittings?" "Yes." "I don't have any door handles." "I put my hand in a hole and kind of pull them back." "I don't have a dishwasher." "Do you have a dishwasher?" "I don't." ""Oh, I can't wash my dishes."" "I don't own a dishwasher." "This suit isn't mine." "I was lent this suit by the BBC, who told me that I didn't own any clothes that were suitable to wear on television." "But we're to blame." "We confused the notion of property with the notion of home and we thought that our homes made us rich, because estate agents lied to us, obviously, about how much they were worth." "Then we spent that money that we didn't really have on rubbish." "Rubbish, rubbish, rubbish." "A new car, an expensive hat, a complete set of all the Planet Of The Apes films on DVD in a box... which no-one needs." "No-one needs a boxed set of all the Planet Of The Apes films." "One and two, yes" " Planet Of The Apes and Beneath The Planet Of The Apes." "Maybe the third one - Escape From - at a push." "But Battle For and Conquest - no-one needs those." "In a bo..." "It doesn't make them any better, putting them in a box." "You can't put a turd in a box." "You CAN put a turd in a box." "Many Liberal Democrat MPs have." "You can't polish a turd." "You can lacquer a turd." "You could make it into a paperweight or a cudgel." "You can lacquer a turd." "That's not the point." "The point is... that our homes, which we don't own, are full of rubbish that we bought on credit and now someone's gotta pay." "You remember that sculpture, the sculpture you bought in IKEA or Habitat." "It was like a copy of an abstract, Henry Moore-type sculpture." "But an abstract, Henry Moore-type sculpture was made by Henry Moore himself with some kind of veiled purpose in mind." "But a copy of an abstract, Henry Moore-type sculpture on sale in IKEA or Habitat was made by an employee of IKEA or Habitat to stand as a sign to say that you should have liked the kind of thing" "that ought to have been there but isn't." "It's a meaningless copy of something that once had meaning." "And in 2009, British homes are full of sculptures of nothing." "Sculptures of nothing in houses of sand." "Sculptures of nothing in houses of sand, artfully back-lit by designer lamps against neutral, beige backgrounds, because that's what estate agents told us would help sell the house." "Sculptures of nothing in houses of sand." "Sculptures of nothing standing nowhere with nothing to say." "And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you finish a comedy show during a financial downturn." "Thank you very much." "Good night." "(WATER HISSING INTO CISTERN)" "(GURGLING)"