Never heard of this guy, but I’m enjoying all the videos you all have linked.
Not strictly Sean Lock, but this Johnny Vegas bit with the big head that just cracks Sean up is really endearing (but really, the whole video is great…lots of good Vegas/Lock bits).
Joe Wilkinson’s poem is the time where Sean looked like he was going to die of laughter.
Well that didn’t just make me laugh out loud, it gave me hiccups. I don’t know what it is, but seeing a comedian you love just lose it is maybe the most infectious thing on the planet, call it the Paul F Tompkins effect. And that Johnny Vegas video showed that there was an episode of Countdown with Vegas, Bob Mortimer, Kathy Burke and John Cooper Clarke?! Dear god I’ll be tracking that down next.
The remembrances are starting to appear
Carrot in a box is my favourite thing. Just perfect.
He had some great moments on QI, too.
They’re on the Tube
And here’s Jon and Sean Go West
Ah, well found! Thanks.
Stewart Lee wrote about Sean Lock in his email newsletter today. I’ll paste it below because I’m not sure there’s any way to link to it.
Stewart Lee on Sean Lock
I’m going to end on a note about Sean Lock, as these days not posting anything on Social Media, due to not actually being on social media, can be taken as callous indifference, and there tends to be a rush to comment in the light of any loss.
My condolences to his family and friends. S Lock always felt like he was in the year above me, due to me starting as a regular circuit comedian in 1989, and him being about 18 months ahead of me, so I never knew him in the way I did contemporaries like Harry Hill or Simon Munnery.
I liked the way S Lock combined whimsy and surrealism with casual arrogance and furious belligerence. He did a routine - only once I think - at the Red Rose circa 1991 that is one of the funniest, most scatological, most surreal, and curiously the most humane, I ever saw and it made me weep with laughter, alone. It was about him doing stools in the shape of genitals, and then masturbating over them as they bumped together in the toilet bowl, an incident he relayed to the audience as if it were regrettable but also somehow understandably inevitable. S Lock thought this new bit was rubbish and never did it again, and whenever I asked him about it, and said it was the best thing he ever did, I think he thought I was being sarcastic, which often happens when I am being sincere. I thought 15 Storeys High was brilliant, one of the great British sit-coms, and like many I despaired of the BBC’s poor treatment of it.
I loved it and yet I could rarely find out when it was on due to sudden unpublicized rescheduling, back in the pre-iplayer days. I remember saying to S Lock that I couldn’t believe how radical the camerawork was in the 1st series and couldn’t quite believe they had had the guts to submit it. I think Sean despaired about what happened to the series too, and so did the co-writers Mark Lamarr and Martin Trenaman I expect. I remember Armando really lobbying for it in the press.
Its white working class world was exactly the sort of landscape the BBC now beats itself up about not accommodating, but 15 Storey’s towerblock vistas were more Vladimir and Estragon than Danny Dyer and Eastenders.
It suits my view of things to think that it was this despair that drove S Lock into arms of panel shows, but there he stood head and shoulders above the form, like a tall man in a ditch. It suits my view of him to think that, having found himself shipwrecked upon panel show island, he chose to beautify it as best he could, often coming close to subverting the genre. I doubt he liked me especially and on the few occasions we did meet we always seemed to be talking at cross purposes, usually ending in some misunderstanding, though we barely encountered each other this century. S Lock would not be drawn into criticizing other lesser but better known talents’ debt to his work, even when it was painfully obvious and borderline criminal.
He once advised me at length on his methods of avoiding post-show drinking, which involved hot baths and camper vans respectively, and I wish I had paid more attention. Like a lot of the free jazz types I know, and despite his dabblings in art with the film maker Andrew Kotting in the '90s and his avowed desire to make 15 Storeys look like a Nordic art film, S Lock would not discuss the idea that his work was anything other than entertainment, not with me anyway, but I have been told that I do tend to over-analyse things.
The amount of effort S Lock (and his writers) put into his panel show appearances, which left me astonished in my naivety the only time I ever tried to fit the square peg of me into the round hole of 8 Out Of 10 Cats (I thought it was all improvised!), contradicted this apparent casualness. In about 2005 I was trying to escape Avalon management, a solid career move of which S Lock was an early pioneer (“You’re breaking these kids’ hearts”, I remember him saying to the company’s promoters in Edinburgh in '95 or so as they ran another hapless 20-something hopeful into insurmountable debt). I was in an Indian restaurant in Nottingham with S Lock and D Kitson and I was trying to persuade D Kitson to manage me as his ‘client’, as I wanted to be able to reach the small but discerning audiences he did, and without doing any television or publicity. S Lock said we were a pair of fucking idiots. I don’t know why he was so annoyed, but wonder if he took my attempt to eschew popular mechanisms as a personal criticism. My favorite of S Lock’s stage outfits was a green Riddler costume he wore in Edinburgh’s Pleasance cabaret bar, but he always looked cool in a proto-Britpop Jarvis kind of way.
My favorite routine of his remains the aforesaid one where he masturbates over genital shaped pieces of excrement which are floating in a toilet. My favorite anecdote concerning him comes from Leicester Sq Theatre stage manager Jason Tribe, via tour manager James Hingley, and concerns a tramp, a dog, an open fire escape, and Liam Gallagher, but it is not mine to share.
S Lock was on the list of comedians to take my kids to see when they were old enough so they knew what good stand up was, which we have already begun working through, and which just got one shorter. I wish he had done another project like 15 Storeys High and whoever kept fucking up its scheduling should be ashamed, but it is hard work to build a world from the ground up twice. The last time we saw S Lock, out for a walk on a Spring day, he looked very unwell indeed but told us it was long covid.
The first two heavy reggae UB40 albums, on which the saxophone of the also recently departed Brian Travers was the lead instrument, are also superb in a way people who only know their pop career won’t believe.
But when UB40 went mainstream they sadly didn’t do it with any of the style and subversion S Lock, the rat in panel show comedy’s kitchen, did.
Is that an old video that they’re finally putting on YouTube now? Because they keep talking about Sean in the present tense.
It’s just the critic’s present tense. They reference his death, not to mention citing a book published last year.