TV Review: Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle,

BBC Two, Monday, 23 March, 10pm Posted by mofgimmers on March 24, 2009 - TV Scoop

Stewart Lee. It's good to have you back. It's good to have anyone like you back. Even though there's no-one quite like you. But your ilk. Brave, confrontational, sharp, smart and dangerous. Comedians stuck on the box are, by and large, filled with a Family Friendly angle or, worse still, employ a 'Let's Make A Rape Joke To Appear Edgy' schtick, with one eye on hosting aggregated clips shows hopefully a panel show on Channel 4. Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle (BBC Two, Monday, 23 March, 10pm) is a stern rebuttal to the people writing funnies on the back of sensational rohypnol attacks.

There's a certain brand of comedian (and satirist) that TV execs both love and hate in equal measure. People like Doug Stanhope, Chris Morris, Bill Hicks and Stewart Lee are all from the same school of thought. Attack the stupid. Attack your audience. Attack the people who give you the TV gig in the first place. No-one is off limits.

Now, many stand-up comedians and the like, think that 'no-one is off limits' means making jokes about disabilities or maybe tittering at the word paedophile. It's that misguided notion that a taboo broken is a good thing, despite the fact that someone smashed that very taboo years before, and better.

Personally, I love it when a comedian comes along and makes me reassess. Challenges not only my line of thinking, but also, the very space that I'm in. Stewart Lee does that with incredible and uncomfortable verve. With a normal routine, a comedian will stay on-mic, upright. So familiar is the scenario that we can detach ourselves from the stream of thoughts tumbling from the stage. This. Is. A. Show. Clap. And. Laugh. Along.

Stewart Lee veers off-course, throwing himself to the ground, leaving the stage bare and empty while he curls up like he's in therapy, repeatedly banging his head on the ground. He casts aside the microphone to shout his routine at the audience, making them acutely aware of the fact that this is a person, in the room, pointing and accusing. It stops being a show to nod along with, it becomes something else. Something to make your ears go red and painfully aware of your personal space being invaded.

This makes Lee sound like hard-work, huh? Well, the fact is, in amongst all this Theatre Of Cruelty* line, he's got some really good joke. Extended and often surreal situation laughs. On watching The One Show, Stewart Lee spits: "It's like being trapped in the buffet car of a slow moving train with a Toby Jug that somehow learned to speak."
Lee looked at TV as a whole and treated it with the contempt it often deserves. "Channel 4 is like a flurry of sewage that comes into your house unbidden, whereas E4 is like you constructed a sluice to let it in" The cut-away sketch of said slurry was a complete joy to behold, repeating itself over and over and over, until the metaphor itself becomes desensitised and beyond farcical. Just like TV.

Lee takes his ideas further, and weirder than the average. His pent up anger takes strange forms. Somehow, he takes 'Del Boy Falling Through The Bar On Only Fools And Horses' into Pagan festival territory, with a huge erected wicker Del Boy and bawdy cheering drag queens. It's sensational stuff.

However, away from the sketches and the anger, it's the rhythm and beat of his delivery that continually dazzles me. The repetition, the manic peaks and the crushing lows make for scintillating performance. The way Lee whispered "foreign insects" during his Kilroy-Silk skit was indicative of a man in complete control of the audience, even if he wasn't in complete control of the thoughts that volleyed out of his mouth.

It's abundantly clear why so many fellow comedians adore Stewart Lee. Everything about his work is acutely observed and taken to places that outreach your average comedian. Even when you don't necessarily agree with his targets, it's great to follow him down. With the world seemingly becoming more infatuated by bogus comics like Russell Howard or The Irritatingly Wacky routines of Tim Michin, we need Stewart Lee. We need him more than ever. Yet there's something nagging that tells me that he's not long for "The Idiot's Lantern" and that, ultimately, he'll prove too much for the commissioners.

Cherish him while he's here.

*The Theatre of Cruelty is a concept in Antonin Artaud's book The Theatre and its Double which essentially means that the audience should not be in pain, but rather, the performer should portray a violent, physical determination to shatter the false reality which, he said, "lies like a shroud over our perceptions." High brow, eh?