Andrew Neil needs to be more Vorderman, less Voldemort - April 2024 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - April 21st, 2024

The discredited television personality Andrew Neil, formerly the laughing launch-face of the seemingly Ofcom-untouchable, fun-packed, fact-averse, rightwing TV station GB News, floats contentedly in a foaming brown bathtub of bubbling human waste, his Weetabix hair matted with muck, and yet considers himself clean, the nutshell king of infinite filth. On 10 April, Neil told his…

I value Brummie art, but who else does? - April 2024 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - April 14th, 2024

Why should the people of Birmingham have 100% arts cuts imposed on them? Brummies are quite capable of devaluing their own art without official encouragement. In 2020, the director Michael Cumming and I completed King Rocker (“One of my all time favourite rock docs” – Mark Kermode; “the new gold standard for rockumentaries” – the…

The right is as stale as its ‘woke National Trust scones’ gambit - April 2024 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - April 7th, 2024

William Blake wrote that we can see heaven in a wild flower and hold infinity in the palms of our hands. He also thought a massive flea with a bald man’s face and no pants on came into his bedroom at night, and I speak as a fan. But, like Blake would, I think we…

Which will melt away first, the snow or the arts? - March 2024 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - March 24th, 2024

Nineteen years ago now, I was asked to perform my standup high in the Colorado Rockies at the Aspen comedy festival, a trade fair for the American comedy industry patronised by wealthy locals. In super-affluent Aspen, I discovered, to my horror, economically uncompetitive service industry workers were homed in special “employee housing projects”, like castrated…

Cabbies have given me some great lines, but they have nothing on Frank Hester - March 2024 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - March 17th, 2024

I am often accused of fabricating false taxi drivers, to create straw-man mouthpieces to embody easily satirised counter-arguments that I want to kick to death in my standup comedy, from the lofty position of a patronising north London liberal elitist with his own column in the Observer. But there’s no need to invent them. My…

Jeremy Hunt’s budget mixtape is no match for Brexit’s greatest hits - March 2024 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - March 10th, 2024

On Wednesday, I watched Jeremy Hunt unveil the budget live on TV, though a carefully coordinated campaign of leaks to client media outlets meant it held little of the excitement it did in the 1970s. Where’s the fun in that? If Hunt’s 2024 budget was a 19th-century Parisienne burlesque artist, she would have walked on…