Eddie Izzard - Crimes

Also, I got done for jumping a 20p tube fare! This is my whole crime sheet, right? Which is quite an interesting read… 20p! This is not Don Corleone, this is Don Crap.

I jumped a 20p underground tube fare, and I was waving a pass at the time, you know, it was drawn on a Rizzler or something; it was a Bishop of Durham pass. “I’m the Bishop of Durham… And the guy said, “Bless you my son, bless you my son” “You’re not Bishop of Durham! He wears a bigger hat than that!” 

So he got me. “I got him! I got the 20p kid! You’ve caused us £1.60 worth of trouble, you have, in your time. I’ve got him and I’ll be promoted in the underground system. I’ll get my own darkness!” 

Then an off-duty policeman came, and he had a pot plant and a camera, on his way home for a good night photographing pot plants, I suppose… This is all bizarre, but true; this is what he had, and he said, “I’ve got him too! Oh, I’ll get promoted… King of Metropolitan Police!” And I thought, “I’m going down for 20p! No, I’m gonna run for it! I’ll run for it like Mel Gibson in the film “Gallipoli,” and… other people in running films. So I run, and I run, and I run, and I run, and after five inches, they caught me… 

They called for backup, and now 20 policemen are coming down, thousands of pounds worth of police work – “We’ve got the 20p kid! 20ps are safe from now on…” And three policemen pulled me for five minutes! I don’t know if you’ve ever had this, they grab one leg each, and I don’t know – obviously, they were working together; they thought I was struggling like crazy, I’d given up at this point. one over here was going, “Don’t struggle, there! Don’t struggle!” People over here going, “Eh! Don’t you fuckin’ struggle!”So it was a continuous machine of them pulling against each other, had one hand free, I was going, “Hi! How are you? I’ll talk about this in many years…” 

And then they put me in Bower Street overnight, and that became assaulting a police officer! Surely it was stretching a pedestrian! It was! I got down for assault, and I was running away! Assault is motion towards, I feel…it takes an accusative. Very rarely in war, they go, “Assault that hill over there!” “Let me do a bit of stretching here…” I should have been done for deserting a police officer. 

There’s a shop in South London which was a very… it’s still there, apparently. It’s in Tooting High Street, and it sells two very disparate items. On one side of the shop – they put them on different sides, it’s great! One side is guns, and knives, and harpoons and fucking- really mean fucking weapons. On the other side, there’s banjos, and violins, and bassoons, And you know about it, don’t you? Yeah! It’s fucking there! And what’s the guy doing? “Oh, we’re way down in weaponry, but up on banjos this week… That’s good, people are getting lighter these days, in tough times. They shift to music like crazy at the moment! Way down on bassoons!”