Ross Lee: Not A Lot Of Sex, Lies And Videotape

For 15 years, Ross Lee has been trying to make it big in television. As a child, he filmed himself in his garden, dressed in a wig, squirting fake blood on his face and neck. In adolescence he claimed that he was planning to roller-skate around the world, and a local news channel ran a segment about his endeavour. More recently there has been a slew of mid-profile, strange work in the British media. The creative force behind the children's TV programmes Chute and Ghoulies, Lee has managed to sell bafflingly peculiar shows, with a mixture of dark imagery and jokes for toddlers, to the BBC.

It is the infantile, oddly macabre quality of Lee’s stage show that makes it terribly watchable. He looks like a sick man—emaciated, pale, wearing a tie and a belt adorned with skulls—but is ebullient and filled with a grotesque zeal. Lee remains an outsider in the TV industry, and his performance speaks of a genuinely desperate struggle to make a living from appearing on the small screen. The set is peppered with short clips from his life behind the lens, shown on a screen behind him. Whether interviewing Alice Cooper or assaulting a barber in a candid camera scene, Lee has an awkward, perverse presence.

Although difficult to watch, this show is a fascinating glimpse at the strange course of one man’s life. The steady flow of video clips builds to an uncanny crescendo: a one-man aria full of tragedy and the very blackest humour.