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Times Review, 24 July 2010

On his deathbed, the Roman emperor Vespasian is said to have made a joke. Acknowledging the strange fact that the Romans deified their emperors after death, his biographer Suetonius says that his final words were, ‘Vae, puto deus fio’. Which means, ‘Uh oh. I think I’m turning into a god.’ And on Tuesday morning, I had the exact same sensation, minus the deathbed. I woke up, and discovered I had turned into a god. Which is especially awkward for me, given that I am a regular contributor to New Humanist magazine.

The organisers of the Foster’s Edinburgh Comedy Awards - which used to be the Perrier Awards before embarking on a series of embarrassing name-changes like a compulsive serial bride – have decided that since this is the 30th anniversary of their awards, they should give the public a chance to vote on their favourite nominee from the last 30 years. The voting screen demands, ‘Who is your comedy god?’ And since, at the time of writing, I am standing in 7th place (thanks to a 2002 nomination, and what I can only assume is a post-modern sarcastic voting base, as I have largely retired from stand-up, and was never one tenth as funny as Al Murray, Daniel Kitson and much of the rest of the list to begin with), I think this puts me up into minor godhood leagues. Although it is some small irritation to my Olympian nectar-drinking that the organisers of the award have called me ‘Nathalie Haynes’, as though I were French, which I am not. Does that mean I will be a French god? Maybe they have nicer cheese.

The idea behind the ‘Comedy God’ poll was apparently prompted by the rise of TV talent shows, and the fact that the public taste often doesn’t coincide with that of the expert judges. ‘As we have seen,’ says the press release, ‘the public doesn’t necessarily agree with Simon Cowell or Andrew Lloyd-Webber’. If they thought this would placate the comedians who believe that Edinburgh should be about something other than awards and baubles, they were sadly wrong.

Stewart Lee has sent an open email to the Comedy Awards’ publicist, detailing exactly how wrong he feels their decision is. ‘Don’t invoke people like Simon Cowell and Andrew Lloyd Webber in an Edinburgh fringe award. What is wrong with you? It's totally inappropriate. This is the place we go to escape them!’ He goes on to suggest, ‘Get a grip. The Foster’s Comedy Awards has not discovered talent over 30 years. Everyone knows that. It was the Perrier. And neither, to be honest, did Perrier. Where now so many of your winners?’

He is, of course, quite right. The Perrier Awards did a fantastic job of picking talent for many years. They recognized the early brilliance of Eddie Izzard, Bill Bailey, Al Murray (eventually) and many more extraordinary comics who went on to prove the judges right. They also picked plenty more acts who sank like proverbial stones and were never heard of again. Perhaps more embarrassingly, they missed their chance to pick Ricky Gervais, Steve Merchant, Lucy Porter, Matt Lucas, David Walliams, David Mitchell, Robert Webb, Jo Caulfield, and others.

Nonetheless, the awards exert a magnetic pull on new comedians: putting on a show at the Edinburgh Fringe is ruinously expensive, psychologically destructive, and usually results in some kind of semi-permanent liver damage. But still comics pile north every year, determined to measure the success of a month-long festival on the final week – did they get nominated, did they win? The belief persists that without a nomination, the festival was somehow a failure, and that with a nomination, it was not.

I remember vividly the night I was nominated. My 2002 festival was, in my view, a disaster. The show had sold well at weekends but struggled during the weeks. The audiences had been a mix of enthusiastic, baffled and hostile. The section on Alan Turing was only working one night in three. The reviews had been, let’s say, mixed. The first Tuesday, I remember getting three 2-star reviews in three different broadsheets and thinking I would never recover. Chris Addison found me in a museum (where I had gone to convince myself that I was at least better off than the dead), and told me I should never read my reviews again. I haven’t since, and he was absolutely right: what you don’t know probably can hurt you, but at least you won’t know it. A few days later, the mighty Jane Mackay read my first good review in its entirety on to my answerphone, and told me to tell my producers to stick that all over my f*cking posters.

But by the final Saturday, I wanted nothing more than to go home in two days and cry for a month. The last thing I expected, when I turned up at the Perrier party, is that I would be a nominee in a few minutes. It had all been such a failure. My boyfriend, who I didn’t know at the time, tells me that everyone knew I would be nominated because I was having such a great festival. When I tell him about the bad gigs, the half-empty houses, and those three 2-star reviews, I think he thinks I am delusional.

But suddenly it happened. My name was read out, and people cheered. Some of them didn’t even work on my show. A few seconds later I lost to The Consultants, who were much funnier than me and deserved to win. People congratulated me all night, and I felt, for the first time in a month, that maybe stand-up wasn’t completely out of my league. The nomination probably pushed my name in front of people who have gone on to give me a career I longed for, writing and broadcasting, so I am rightly grateful to Nica Burns and her cohorts for the break. But on the subject of comedy gods, I am decidedly agnostic.