We met Stewart outside the offices of Comedy Central off Oxford Street. He was holding a carrier bag containing a few CDs from HMV that he had picked up prior to the interview. Readers of Stewart’s occasional Guardian column will know that he is not getting paid for the DVDs he supplied to HMV of his last show, Carpet Remnant World. How noble of the man – resisting the temptation to recoup a small part of his losses by pocketing the CDs.

We went up to the Comedy Central offices and found that the room reserved for us had been taken; so we stole some chairs from a workstation and wheeled them into a vacated office. The only thing left in there was a piece of paper stuck to the wall, detailing the notes of a management meeting. Stewart ridiculed the corporate-speak and we got on with the interview.

The first thing I did was make the mistake of referring to The Alternative Comedy Experience as ‘his’ programme –

“Well it’s not ‘my’ programme,” Stewart replied, “I fought really hard to not have my name in the title and not to appear on screen more than is necessary and I managed not to stand near the middle of the publicity photos as well.”

He went on to explain that the idea behind the show started when Colin Dench (producer of many live comedy DVDs) had realised that there were a number of comedians on the circuit that didn’t fit the mould of the ‘television comic’, but were loved by broadsheet newspaper reviewers and other comedians. He then thought about the ways that this lesser-known content could be packaged, and chose The Stand in Edinburgh as a venue to film them in. A spliced together selection of this stand up, along with short interviews with the comedians by Stewart Lee, comprises each episode of the twelve long series.

With The Alternative Comedy Experience; Stewart was also involved closely enough with the production that he had a veto over which comics were to be featured.

Even though a few of the comedians that you will see on the programme you may not have heard of, Stewart still wasn’t completely satisfied –

“There were some slightly more extreme people I’d have liked. As it is, there are a couple of people in it that the people here [at Comedy Central] are utterly bewildered by, and can’t understand why they should be in it, which is really great.”

“If we did it again it would be great to have more people under thirty and more people over sixty in it as well.”
However –
“I’m really pleased with the balance of women – about a third of the acts are female. I’d have liked it to have been slightly higher, because there’s proportionally more women doing good stand-up now than there’s ever been. Five to six isn’t bad at all though, and Josie Long’s got so much stuff she’s basically all over the whole series. It’s a much better breakdown than you get on any other stand-up show or panel show in terms of the gender balance.”

And looking at the show as a whole, Stewart is “really pleased with it”.

“Whether you like it or not, whether you think it’s funny or not, I actually think it’s the most accurate and visceral capturing of stand-up that there’s been on British television since The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club which is a mid-70s Bernard Manning vehicle, but was nonetheless actually quite good at capturing the feeling of what a room was like.”

My next question was regarding the programme that alternative comedians often like to think of as what they are the alternative to. Bland, repetitive and unimaginative, is The Alternative Comedy Experience a counterpart to Live at the Apollo?

“You’re encouraged not think like that by Comedy Central, because they obviously show a lot of those sorts of programmes. Their angle would be that it’s an additional choice to your buffet – you can have this weird show as well as all the square ones. But in the last couple of days I’ve thought fuck it, it really is. Part of what made me think that, is that there’s been a documentary on BBC 2 called Funny Business, about the economics of comedy. If you’ve got a bland enough act, you can make five to forty thousand pounds a night doing corporate gigs.”

“The content of this show and the things that drive the people in it to perform comedy are absolutely irrelevant to ninety per cent of what was said in that programme.”

“So, I actually think, by accident, Comedy Central have been handed on a plate this thing that’s incredibly zeitgeisty in its own way. There’s a lot of talk about how the comedy bubble’s burst, there’s a lot of talk that it’s become very bland. BBC 2 have basically bitten their own suppliers by putting this documentary out showing how bland and boring most of it is at the top level. There’s also a lot of talk at the moment about unintelligent use of taste-related issues, and I think everyone in this that does stuff about contentious issues handle it with real intelligence. So I think its time has really come.”

The next question comes from my co-interviewer, Tom. Has the BBC let down alternative comedy?

“Yes, definitely, I think so. It’s not the BBC’s fault because it’s very difficult for them to know what to do. Firstly, they couldn’t put this programme on, because it wouldn’t get past their lawyers. I don’t think the content’s contentious, but there are certain buzzwords that they’d be paranoid about, which is a shame. But also, if it got seven hundred thousand viewers and good reviews in broadsheet newspapers, one spin on that to bash the BBC is: ‘Why are they using public money to make these minority interest programmes that are only of interest to broad sheet newspapers?'”

We then all agree that the point of a public broadcaster is to provide broadcasting that would be undersupplied in a free market.

“I’m just saying it’s difficult for them. They need a Miranda every three years to justify their comedy department and this show wouldn’t have done it for them.

Stewart goes on to say that he doesn’t think that Channel 4 would be interested in the programme either, because he doesn’t think it’s “heroin chic enough for them”. He thinks that all the people on the program look like comedians should; they look like “the people that would be kicked into the urinal at school, and pissed on, and have ended up doing comedy as a result.”
The Alternative Comedy Experience is truly a series that a large number of comedy fans have been waiting for. A brilliantly eclectic group of comics show the audience how comedy is supposed to be done. No corporate trappings, no cuts to celebrities chuckling, no dry ice, rock music and shouty voiceovers; just an unpolished comedian performing their act in front of a real audience.

The Alternative Comedy Vehicle features Simon Munnery, Isy Suttie, Boothby Graffoe, Phil Nichol, Andy Zaltzman, Henning Wehn, Josie Long, Paul Foot, Tony Law, Eleanor Tiernan, David Kay, David O Doherty, Bridget Christie, Stephen Carlin, Paul Sinha, Alun Cochrane, Sam Simmons, Robin Ince, Glenn Wool, Maeve Higgins, and of course, Stewart Lee.

It is on Comedy Central UK at 11.00pm from Tuesday 5th Feb 2013.

Interview by Rhys Giles, with additional questions by Tom Pearson, from University of Sussex’s student newspaper, The Badger.