The DVD of the fourth and final series of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle was released yesterday (Buy here). Here, the comedian exclusively reveals the genesis of the first three episodes – with notes on the remaining episodes to follow tomorrow:

You can also download a PDF of these to print out & add to your DVD case FRONT | BACK.

Episode 1: Wealth

This episode came together pretty quickly, and I had a lot of fun doing the Baftas bit on tour. There was a ten-minute plank about owning a home and S&M which went missing for time and narrative issues and will be the basis of a big block in the new tour show, Content Provider.

I saw seagulls peck a duckling to death at Camden Lock while men laughed; I assume the unnamed hated Oxbridge comedian in Lee Mack’s autobiography is me; Dominic Cavendish at The Daily Telegraph left one of my shows at half time, openly lied about it, and gave it a no star review; I actually won a Bafta once but had to ignore that to make my faux-resentment of the awards work; James Corden comes to my gigs in little pubs and sits secretly in the dark, which I don’t mind, but the stage version of me is consumed by resentment of his noble patronage; the council have promised CCTV to tackle the prostitute punters on the street where I live. I wonder where the girls will go then?

I was a school with the original line-up of Napalm Death, though I wasn’t friendly with all of them, and I did go mountain walking with Rat, Simon, Daryl and Robbo.

My initial idea for the film item was a Michael Bentine’s Potty Time style thing of tiny metalers moving around a landscape. Then I asked Tim Kirby, director, what he would do if asked to direct an orienteering-themed extreme metal promo video. He came up with a superb storyboard. We shot the extract in real time, with patient lookalikes, as if for a three-minute clip, then sped it up to match the Napalm Death track.

Episode 2: Islamophobia

Right-wing columnists moan that we liberals don’t do enough anti-Islamic jokes, and so does James Naughtie on Radio 4. This episode was an attempt to do just that, on my own terms, whilst also making fun of the idea that I was obliged to do so by The Daily Mail.

In the summer of 2014, having visited a site in East London as part of the Chelsea Garden Festival Fringe, I was on the 149 bus with the kids and a saw a veiled Muslim woman sit on a copy of the Jehovah’s Witnesses magazine Watchtower.

I used an old bit from the Carpet Remnant World tour as a frame to hang new ideas about religion on, from which only the running around bit, and the basic idea of the Roy Chubby Brown riff, actually survived into the programme.

Ridiculous right-wing reactions to a Muslim winning Bake Off in 2015 bled into the material.

In reality a Sikh man got on the 149 bus and made the Muslim woman move up, and then he or she sat on the Watchtower, I forget which, but when I told this story it never seemed quite funny enough. One night I changed it to a Quaker and the whole closing bit started to come together, I think because no-one in the world could realistically have any kind of grudge against Quakers.

The film item was inspired by John Carpenter’s The Fog. Our old friend the Irish comedian, writer and activist Tara Flynn is woefully underused.

Episode 3: Patriiotism

This show started to take shape in January 2015 as a long routine about UKIP and patriotic symbols. The previous November the Labour MP Emily Thornberry had ignited a row about flying the England flag, and loads of spineless creeps who knew better were forced to pretend it is never used as a fascist symbol. Indeed, right now Theresa May is again using the idea that the ‘liberal elite’ are ‘unpatriotic’ as a shit-stirring device.

But, after Cameron absorbed UKIP supporter’s anxieties in the spring 2015 election, the party suddenly seemed irrelevant and uninteresting, and it seemed weird to even be talking about them. Key elements of the bit were salvaged and made into a show about Jeremy Corbyn, which didn’t work quite as well. Sadly, for me and the world, within months of the show being recorded, UKIP again played a major part in British politics in the run up to the Brexit crisis, as if they had never been away.

I did win a hamster in a drawing competition in She magazine in 1979. I drew it as if it were an astronaut in a space-suit. The magazine sent me a voucher. I called the hamster Ray Bradbury, after the science fiction writer I was reading at the time. This never got a laugh until I changed it to Karlheinz Stockhausen. I don’t know why. Comedy is alchemy. And our dachshund did break its back, jumping up at the hamster.

I did not have a dog named after Matthew Broderick, but I did see Matthew Broderick through a doorway at the Four Seasons Hotel in LA in 1999, sitting alone, looking sad, waiting to be interviewed about Inspector Gadget. I was trying to fund a film I wrote that never got made.

Live, the cat defecation routine had a musicality to it, and an unpredictability, that regularly created waves of hysteria in rooms of 500, 1,000, or 2,000 people. In the smaller space where the series was recorded it seemed far more provocative.

I knew I wanted the film item to be a montage of news but couldn’t get my head round it. Tim Kirkby suggested Zak Snyder’s 2004 remake of Dawn Of The Dead as a reference, Jon Culshaw did some brilliant voices, our researcher pulled out some fantastic clearable footage, and the whole thing came together.

Episode 4: Death

I had been chasing down a routine about the death of my pet hamster, the aforementioned Ray Bradbury [see yesterday’s guide to episodes 1-3] since I began writing series 3 in 2012, but could never make my memories on stage as funny as they seemed in conversation with friends.

I saw Dara O Briain and Brian Cox talking about the eclipse on TV in a Glasgow hotel room on March 20, 2015, and had the idea for the opening gag immediately. I walked down to a bridge over the Clyde to watch the sky. Oddly, Wilco Johnson was there, and he recognised me and talked to me. I changed to location of the joke from Glasgow to Dundee. Loads of tragic things kept happening in Glasgow during that period and the name of the town made people nervous. Dundee is an inherently funny name anyway. I learned that from Jerry Sadowitz.

The details of my father’s weekend routine are largely unchanged. He was a very funny man to be around and I miss him. The idea of mocking young comedians for doing shows about their dead father is hijacked, and then reworked, from the Carpet Remnant World live show. It is supposed to reflect my own perceived anxieties about my own impending obsolescence. I don’t have any genuine opinion about people doing shows about their dead fathers one way or the other.

When I changed the hamster in the story to a mouse, it somehow started to seem funnier. The story happened exactly as written, except I never saw my pet rodent morph into a member of Slade.

For the Slade/mice/diary thread, Thorin in the art department asked me what my childhood diary was like, and recreated it, even down to the now out-of-print 1970s Marvel Comics bubblegum stickers that he attached to its cover.

Kevin Eldon and Paul Putner clearly studied their characters’ moves far beyond the call of duty; the exteriors and interiors of the home are exactly like the little terraced house I grew up in; the little me was a perfect little me; the mum, somehow, even looks like my late Mum, though no-one was given a photo reference. The whole thing was a bit overwhelming.

The music is Hilary by The Durutti Column.

Episode 5: Migrants

This and the dead mouse episode were the hardest to assemble. This show went wrong for months, during the live shows, because I became hung up on basing it on an Observer column I had written about the migrant crisis happening in my garden which, though enjoyed by executives overseeing the show as a piece of writing, always sounded, to me, too written as a piece of stand-up. I recorded this bit anyway and it’s on the DVD as an extra.

I did take some clothes to a migrants’ charity in Dalston where the hip gear on offer did make me laugh.

I started to become fixated on the inane way newspaper columnists dealt with the crisis. The Rod Liddle poppadom bit again caused hysteria in large rooms, and seemed to me to be an appropriately meaningless response to the ongoing banality of newspaper comment. We had a couple of goes at it in the Mildmay Club. Neither worked anywhere near as well as it did live. In the two months of touring after the show was recorded I introduced little comedy tricks that meant it always landed in a more conventional way.

There was a lot of mess surrounding all this material as it was recorded – glasses breaking in the room, random introductions, cameramen being where I wasn’t expecting them. In the end we decided to include all these, at the expense of the film item (another DVD extra), and the garden routine, and try to assemble the impression of a gig in out-of-control freefall, to capture the real stand-up experience of a room on the edge.

It would have been equally easy to edit it to look like an unqualified success, as Nick Helm revealed they do with acts that go to silence on Live AT The Apollo, but choosing the scrappiest bits and amplifying them seemed more interesting on this occasion.

My initial, and turned down, proposal for Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, in May 2005, had been to record the sets at Pontin’s holiday camps, and cross channel ferry bars, and Speakers’ Corner, in places where I would struggle. In the end, we managed to make an episode of Comedy Vehicle that felt like that, even in front of my own audience.

Episode 6: Childhood memories

My kid was having trouble at school. But I don’t like writing about my immediate family. I started thinking about my own schooldays and remembered that, as a very small boy, I had been kicked into a urinal and urinated on at Streetsbrook Infant School in Shirley. I remembered the ringleader’s name, googled him, and changed it for legal reasons.

I did urinate in my grandad’s face when I was in hospital in Exeter with a fractured elbow, after I had fallen blowing bubbles on the caravan step in Beer; he and I did urinate together on Maltese flies, and he had been an RAF engineer on Lancaster bombers. He did say he liked to pretend the flies were Germans.

Robin Williams had committed suicide, depressed. There were lots of newspaper articles about comedians being mentally unstable products of circumstance. I thought about my childhood. The two ideas came together. In a sudden late-night burst of inspiration, when some shows took years to crystallize, this half hour was written in about as long as it takes to perform.

What wasn’t there on the page was the tension, and the space for intense improvisations around my supposed grief in rooms which often bought into it entirely. In Dublin, a Sunday Times journalist on the front row took camera phone footage and fled to file an exclusive on how Stewart Lee was having a nervous breakdown live on stage, only dissuaded later by Twitter users telling her it was all part of the act. In London, a supposedly psychic woman intervened, offering to help me deal with ghosts that only I could see.

I’m not an actor, and I don’t believe in ghosts or the afterlife, but each night I got through the bit and made it real by remembering a vivid ghost of a loved one that had once appeared to me in Wolverhampton. I was glad when I didn’t have to do the bit any more, and I think it represents the end point of a certain strand of stand-up I had been pursuing.

My wife has a photograph of herself with a very handsome ex-boyfriend on a tropical beach, on which she looks happier than I have ever seen her since. I want it blown up and framed.

I’ve been going deaf since my teens. It’s an inherited condition, I learned, when I met a blood relative for the first time some years ago. I wonder if I genuinely have developed a stand-up style that seemed indifferent to approval as a result of perhaps not being able to hear any, when it may have been there all along? Since I had my hearing aids on stage, I sometimes feel like I am performing on LSD, absorbing all stimuli. It was nice to be able to take them out, and get a laugh.

I decided I wanted to perform an MGM swimming musical style routine in a massive tank of urine fairly early on in the writing process and spent a year trying to get fit enough to be able to dive underwater through rotating hoops of synchronized swimmers.

In the end the underwater cameraman who came with the place in Essex where the tank was had his focus wrong, and, after a day in the water, only one actual underwater shot, of me swimming through the swirling bodies of the 2012 British Women’s Olympic Synchronised swimming team, survives.

Luckily, the rest of the crew had pretty much everything else covered, and the art direction, camera work and editing of this piece were all superb. This episode, which turned out to be the final one, was my favourite edition of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle.