Saturday: It is just under a week until my TV series Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle starts on BBC2.
I’ve been a stand-up comedian for 20 years, and it’s the first TV I’ve done for more than a decade. But filming is all over now, so I take my two-year-old son out for the day.

First we ride on the bus from Hackney to St Pancras, where I buy rail tickets for next weekend’s escape to Europe. We’re planning to be away for the whole run of the series in case of an unforeseen Jonathan Ross-gate type scandal, or a repeat of the largely groundless fuss which attached itself to Jerry Springer The Opera, which I co-wrote, four years ago.

Next we walk to a Caffè Nero in Camden to meet my live producer David Johnson, and sort out some paperwork about a stand-up tour I’ll be doing in the autumn. I have to sort the dates out now, and think of a title, even though I don’t know what the show will be about yet and, rather worryingly, have no ideas.

Since I became a parent I love Caffè Nero, as they will always microwave the little pots of risotto or mash potato chicken mush we mix up for the kid. Today I also have a Caffè Nero loyalty card full of stamps, which I aim to cash in for a free coffee.

But Caffè Nero will not accept my loyalty card. Two of the nine Caffè Nero logos, an “N” in a circle, have been stamped using blue ink, not red ink. They are only allowed to accept the red ink stamps. I wonder what they think I have done? It’s obvious to me that the stamps are at least from a branch of Caffè Nero somewhere, or else they’re saying I have gone to the trouble of fabricating a Caffè Nero stamp of my own, but for some reason only used it to steal 2/9th of the price of a cup of coffee.

I feel like registering a serious complaint and then I realise – this sort of incident is a perfect framing device for an hour and a half of stand-up by a middle-aged comedian complaining about his frustrations with the world. I put the Caffè Nero loyalty card in my wallet and the tour show begins to write itself in my head.

Sunday: My wife and fellow stand-up is currently preparing previews of her August Edinburgh Fringe show, about her time working on the The Daily Mail’s gossip column. She feels that the painting “The Singing Butler”, by the Scottish artist Jack Vettriano, in which a selfless butler uses an umbrella to shelter a pair of waltzing sophisticates on a windswept beach, echoes one of the themes of her show – that the hired help can only look into the world of wealth from a distance. I am dispatched, along with our son, by bus to London’s West End to buy a print of the picture, which is apparently the top-seller in Britain today.

As you may know, Vettriano is irked by the refusal of the British art establishment to acknowledge him, despite his popularity. And, searching for his painting along Oxford Street, where ideas of taste and aspiration blurred and bent, I begin to sympathise with his annoyance.

None of the major department stores stocks the Vettriano print. One home furnishings expert reacts rather stuffily when I ask about it – as if I’d said I was going to hang that old Athena poster of the lady tennis player scratching her bum in the Sistine Chapel – and directs me to the store’s own range of prints: images of boats and harbours and flowers and cats created with no higher purpose than simply filling space and matching fabrics. And yet these stores seem to think that Vettriano was beneath them.

Where will I find him in London’s West End? Perhaps around Leicester Square, in poster racks in tourist tat shops, alongside life-size images of Lily Allen and a pot-smoking alien saying “Take me to your dealer”? Is that his constituency? It appears not. It’s cold and raining, and I head up Charing Cross Road for a final search.

And there’s “The Singing Butler”, in a proper swanky print shop, selling alongside Monet, whose status has transferred over the years from outrageous provocateur to chocolate box lid content provider, and Munch, who gave us “The Epic of the Slavs”, but also dozens of nightclub posters and soap tins.

I phone my wife to see what size print she wanted. Later, I wonder why I did this. Was I being cautious? Or, despite my newfound sympathy for Vettriano, did some unresolved part of me not want the print seller to think I was buying “The Singing Butler” for myself?

On stage that night, upstairs in a Camden pub, my wife is doing a show and tell about the print of “The Singing Butler”. Initially, people laugh at the image – it’s so familiar, and the shabby stage is such an odd context in which to see it – and then gradually it starts to mean something quietly profound, that makes one wonder how it could ever have become such a mass-consumed item in the first place.

Monday: I spent four years working on the new TV series. I’m very pleased with it. It’s a record of the kind of comedy I’ve been doing for the past decade or so, caught on film before it withers and I, inevitably, lose my knack. It’s also the first time I’ve ever actually really been paid anything substantial for anything, which matters more now than it did when I had no responsibilities. Soon we will be proper London middle class. We will go on holidays. We will eat cheese. One day, the baby will sleep in his own room.

I should be relieved. All the work is done. So why then, do I wake up frozen and shaking, feeling crushed and terrified? My head hurts. I can’t stand up.

When I was a teenager, neck deep in A-levels and Oxbridge exams, I used to get similar psychedelic fevers, often depending on which album I’d listened to before I went to bed. After Black Uhuru’s Red I woke up in a hallucinatory state being crushed by millions of falling Rastafarians and even more of them tipped on to me off the top of the doorframe when our Jack Russell terrier ran into the room.

What am I afraid of? Why do I feel sick? I suppose it’s all very well, being an abstract quantity, getting good reviews in broadsheets for live shows that most people will never actually see; being the kind of person that Newsnight Review contributors are obliged to fabricate an opinion about, whether they have seen me or not. But now there will be an actual piece of work out there, which anyone can watch. Will the bubble burst? I was hoping that the TV shows might, even if a second series isn’t commissioned, push my live audiences up above the 200 mark. But what if, having seen me close up, and learned all my little linguistic tricks, no one ever comes again?

The boy came home from nursery and gave me a kiss. We had pork chops for tea. I lay on the sofa in a kind of coma and watched Julia Bradbury on BBC4, walking along a disused railway line.

The first episode of ‘Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle’ is on BBC2 on March 16 at 10pm. Stewart Lee’s ‘41st Best Stand-Up Ever’ is available on DVD

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009