That presenter was the comedian Stewart Lee, whose recent tribute to punk singer Robert Lloyd, King Rocker, has, so far, been one of this year’s most entertaining films. Radio 4 should use him more, pronto.

“Chroniclers have been lying to us since the first troglodyte daubed an exaggerated bison on a French cave wall,” he deadpanned. As a documentarian, Lee shares much with Jonathan Meades: a truculent contrarianism, a deep hinterland of high and pop culture, and an eye for the oddest bits of the British psyche.

His tour of untrustworthy voices began with the book that made King Arthur famous: The History of the Kings of Britain, written around 1136 by Geoffrey of Monmouth. Geoffrey was “a bit of a leg-puller,” admitted a British Library academic. Lee quoted the words of William of Newburgh, who in 1190 put it less politely: “Everything this man said was made up [...] either from an inordinate love of lying, or for the sake of pleasing the Britons.” Cue embarrassed laughter in the hushed and “lie-packed” British Library vaults.

There followed a web of false endings, red herrings and uncanny impressions (was that really Iggy Pop reading Edgar Allan Poe?). Keen-eared listeners may have noticed that the song used to introduce a segment on Bob Dylan’s untruths was actually by forgotten Sixties psych rock band Mouse and the Traps, who found brief success by copying his style. Even the picture of Lee advertising this show on the BBC Sounds app wasn’t of Lee, but of lookalike Terry Christian.

Yes, it was all too clever by three-quarters. But what gave it depth was a palpable love of the sometimes recondite material chewed over by Lee and his interviewees. Poet Rob Auton offered a sweet tribute to Ivor Cutler’s writing, explaining why he felt close to the Scottish eccentric: “My imagination is one of my best friends, and it’s like he’s friends with it as well.”

Lee spoke to the reclusive satirist Chris Morris about how algorithms are skewing our sense of reality. It prompted a final dramatic reveal: by doctoring Wikipedia pages that he knew Lee would visit, Morris had essentially been this programme’s shadowy puppet-master, spoon-feeding the hapless presenter his own alternative facts. (Or had he?)

In the middle of a week of record temperatures, as if unaware of the irony, the business community celebrated the consolidation of its attempts to force the government’s hand to agree to a third filth-generating runway at Heathrow, tipping all species on Earth towards extinction. Everything will die soon, except for cockroaches, and Glastonbury favourite the Fall, who will survive even a nuclear holocaust, though they will still refuse to play their 80s chart hits.

In Norfolk on Thursday, the tarmac melted, and ducklings became trapped in sticky blackness. When a lioness whelped in an ancient Roman street, Caesar thought something was up. Here, solid matter transmuted to hot liquid and swallowed baby birds whole. How surreal do the signs and warnings have to become before we stop in our tracks? Are whales required to fall from the sky? Does Tim Henman have to give birth to a two-headed cat on Centre Court?

CBI director John Cridland says: “The government must commit to the decision now, and get diggers in the ground at Heathrow swiftly by 2020.” Head of the Institute of Directors Simon Walker says: “There can now be no further delay from politicians.” And Segro chief executive David Sleath merely bellows: “Get on with it!”, like some selfish Top Gear presenter demanding his steak dinner after dawdling, the planet itself the powerless BBC employee he punches in the face.



The business community has thrown its executive toys out of the pram, and now there are chrome ball bearings on strings everywhere, tripping up unpaid interns and making life difficult for immigrant cleaners scrabbling under desks on less than minimum wage. David Cameron, an electoral promise to oppose the third runway sticking in his throat like an undigested salmon bone, can only duck his cowardly head and hope some terrible atrocity or a Wimbledon win wafts our attention away.

When I was a child, my grandmother always referred to our pet dog’s excrement as “business”, so to this day, when I envisage “the business community”, I imagine a vast pile of sentient faeces issuing its demands while smoking a Cuban cigar, an image that seems increasing accurate as the decades pass.

The destruction of all life on Earth is inevitable if fossil fuel use continues unabated. (Legal. Please advise. Are we allowed to say this now without being shouted down by Nigel Lawson?) The business community’s genius move in the third runway debate has been to change the dialogue from an argument which should have been between building a runway and not building a runway at all, and trying to restructure our society to avoid the need for a third runway, into an argument about where exactly it was best to position this massive portent of our world’s forthcoming doom. It’s like offering an innocent man who doesn’t want to be hanged the chance to be poisoned instead.

As with fracking and the academification of all schools, decisions have already been made behind closed doors by forces beyond our control. Heathrow’s third runway will happen. Assurances about air quality are meaningless. The UK has already been threatened with £300m a year fines by those meddling Brussels bureaucrats for our terrible British air, and Boris’s solution in London was to spray adhesive around the city by night to try and stick the pesky pollution particles to the pavement, like a lazy duplicitous boy pushing his mess under his bed rather than tidying up his room.

And in 50 years, will there be anyone left to remember what it was like before a sterile and toxic environment gradually became the norm? Can it only be four decades ago that every summer holiday trek along A-roads to South Devon caravan sites left our Morris Marina windscreen smeared thick with now-disappeared invertebrates, that sparrows swarmed around morning milk bottles, that sticklebacks and minnows spawned in every park pond, that hedgehogs gathered at night in suburban gardens and lay flattened in their thousands on roads every morning, and that an actual hare ran out of the encroached common land of Palmers Rough, on the fringes of Birmingham, to be chased by my grandfather along Arnold Road in that same Morris Marina, a sight that would seem as surreal today as escaped hippos wandering the streets of some collapsed eastern European capital?

The absence of abundance is already accepted. The metaphors of the nature poets, mapping human hearts through once commonly understood imagery, are irrelevant and impenetrable. “The sun of Winter, / The moon of Summer, and all the singing birds / Except the missel-thrush that loves juniper, / Are quite shut out.” I’m sorry. The missel-what? Can the juniper be monetised? Is this missel-thing for sale? Our children already have no stable baseline from which to calibrate the loss of all that lives. It’s game over.

Bearing this in mind, I finally find myself reluctantly agreeing with the business community. There is no time for delay. Let’s build the runway. Let’s choke the Earth. Let’s get this damn thing over with, for what can be avoided, whose end is purposed by the mighty gods of business? Hasten our demise, let our children be the last of their sorry line, and spare their unborn descendants any further suffering. We will not save the rhino. We will not even save the hedgehog. How can we save the world?

But, if you can purge cheap sentiment from your mind, how exciting and fascinating it will be to watch as the world becomes uninhabitable. It’s almost worth going on a health kick to survive another 60 years and see everything immolated. How many humans have had the awe-inspiring opportunity to witness such spectacle: the end of all that is?

But something of us should be preserved, I think, for posterity. Perhaps the village of Harmondsworth and its residents, instead of being demolished and paid off at 125% of their homes’ market values, should be sealed within a vast dome and shot spacewards, to drift on the solar winds as a museum of mankind, saving something of our society at the point where it finally became unsustainable.

Under a vast skein of convex glass Harmondsworth floats beyond Orion’s Belt, its ancient tithe barn, Betjeman’s “cathedral of Middlesex”, still and safe under the stars; local resident Graham Wibrew, his once imperilled kitchen extension complete, watches the comets and thinks of home; and the bells of 11th century St Mary’s toll the eternal hours silently in endless empty space. “But far more ancient and dark / The Combe looks since they killed the badger there, / Dug him out and gave him to the hounds, / That most ancient Briton of English beasts.” Edward Thomas, The Combe.

If The Byrds or REM had joined the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood maybe they'd have played the baroque folk-pop Seattle's Green Pajamas have pushed since 1984.

Still stalked by dark ladies and ghost lovers, The Pajamas' 30th album in an apparently infinitely sustainable career satisfies regular customers' expectations of effortlessly hummable guitar pop - Supervirgin's McCartney bass runs and the controlled rush of Carrie - but offers enough new moves to justify the band's persistence.


The Queen's Last Tango, for example, is a Balkan-sounding polka that becomes an incendiary twin guitar burn-out.

The Rough Guide to Cult Fiction pictures Albert Camus smoking a cigarette on the cover, and struggles to define its terms. A cult writer should have died, ideally in mysterious circumstances, leaving behind one seminal work and a whiff of wasted potential. The obscure Welsh mystic Arthur Machen, (1863-1947) almost qualifies as a cult, but soon the man his American publisher described as ‘the flower-tunicked priest of nightmare’ may be too well known to maintain the epithet. Just look around you.

The director Guillermo del Toro cited Machen’s The Great God Pan as an inspiration for his anti-fascist fantasy Pan’s Labyrinth, which swept the board at this year’s Academy Awards. For a moment, Machen’s hellishly degenerate 1890 novel was tenuously linked to the Oscars’ host Ellen Degeneres. Machen's supernatural first world war fiction The Bowmen is the real story behind the forthcoming film, The Angel Of Mons. And Machen is a quiet influence on a new album of retro-electronica out today, We Are All Pan’s People, by The Focus Group.

Meanwhile, Machen’s band of devoted followers continues to spread the word. Last month Mark E Smith of The Fall told The Independent, “MR James is good, but Machen's fucking brilliant”. Barry Humphries remains a professed devotee, as does the Archbishop of Canterbury. And the comic book writer Alan Moore, author of Watchmen and From Hell, has allowed Machen minor roles in many of his works, and sees him as a template for contemporary approaches to the literature of landscape. But who was Arthur Machen, and why is he suddenly leaking into your life?

A vicar’s son from Caerleon, Machen arrived in London in 1881 at the age of eighteen, bent on becoming ‘a man of letters’ by sheer force of will, denied a University education by lack of funds. His first novel, The Great God Pan, was eventually ignored in the wake of the scandal surrounding Oscar Wilde’s homosexuality, as the public turned away from the decadent themes it expressed. The Guardian described it as “the most acutely and intentionally disagreeable book we have yet seen in English”, while The Observer declared, “one shakes with laughter rather than dread.” 1907’s The Secret Glory explored Christian symbolism and was dismissed by The Morning Post as ‘too formless to be brought with in any literary mode’. Machen’s genre-resistant qualities continue to fascinate admirers. His next major work, the semi-autobiographical study of mental collapse, The Hill Of Dreams, is regarded his best, but Machen was most famous for the short story, The Bowmen.

This morale-boosting tale of First World War soldiers receiving supernatural assistance gave rise to the popular folk-myth of The Angel of Mons. In an ironic twist of fate, Machen eventually found himself pilloried by the credulous public for claiming he was the source of the story. Even today, the press release for Chocolate Chilli Films’ forthcoming Angels Of Mons movie ignores Machen’s role in the yarn. Between 1922 and 1926 Machen enjoyed an upsurge in popularity that saw his previously dismissed work published in Jonathan Cape’s Travellers’ Library alongside DH Lawrence, HG Wells and James Joyce, all of whom survived the decade rather better remembered.

But by the 1930’s, Machen’s fortunes were in decline. 1933’s The Green Round was knocked out for a quick cash fix as part a series of ninepenny thrillers, but it captures the strange ordinariness of city streets, its narrator haunted by a miniature man in the environs of The British library, anticipating existential literature and prefiguring the rise of ‘psychogeography’. In the end, it was only an appeal sponsored by TS Eliot and John Masefield that ensured Machen some financial support for the last five years of his life. Today, you won’t find Machen in Waterstones, but he echoes around the edges of mass culture.

Jim Jupp and Julian House run the record label Ghost Box, home to primitive electronica and a faux-folk music derived from The Wicker Man and weird 70’s children’s television. “Machen is a constant background influence on the Ghost Box label,” explains Jim Jupp, “Julian and I grew up near Caerleon, where Machen was born, and used to spend a lot of time drinking there. Cosmic horror from the likes of Machen, Algernon Blackwood and HP Lovecraft is a big part of Julian's design work for the label and we like to refer to gateways, thresholds and "thin places" in track titles for our various projects.”

House’s Focus Group release We Are All Pan’s People today, nodding knowingly towards 70’s cultural ephemera and Machenalian mysticism simultaneously. Jupp’s own band, Belbury Poly, have just issued The Owl’s Map. The cd’s accompanying booklet details the fictional border town of Belbury, with photo inserts of pagan Sheela Na Gig sculptures alongside 70’s civic architecture. It’s an approach to landscape and environment that Machen would recognise, with different eras overlapping as the sacred slots in amidst the secular. Is it this aspect of Machen’s work that explains his increased near-visibility?

“Over last ten years there’s been a rise in people writing about place,” explains Alan Moore, “Iain Sinclair, for example, was influenced by Andre Breton and the surrealists’ jaunts around Paris, but also by Arthur Machen. Machen was travelling around London making observations of his surroundings, and making fictions from those impressions. When artists focus on a city they are also constructing it, building their vision into it. There is still a Machenesque imprint on London.”

The literary appreciation society, The Friends Of Arthur Machen, don’t need excuses to pursue their stated aims of “encouraging a wider recognition for Machen's work, providing a focus for critical debate, and enhancing the social lives of members.” It was the latter that was most evident on the first weekend of this month, when a diverse group of two dozen Friends met for their annual dinner at the Three Salmons Hotel in Usk, Monmouthsire. Gwilym, the goth librarian, issues the journal Machenalia twice a year. Ray’s Tartarus imprint specialises in luxurious editions of Machen’s books. Nicolas’ London Adventure organises literary guided walks around the city. Erik co-manages The Fantasy Centre bookshop on the Holloway Road, and remembers the Roundhouse and Arthur Lee’s Love. And, unusually for such an event, there are even four women present.

The Friends are, thankfully, friendly. Their dinner is refreshingly free of the internecine squabbling that often divides such special interest groups. Wine was paid for by the proceeds of an auction of Machenalian texts, donated by members, that took place earlier that day. And at ten o’clock the lights went down, significant figures were toasted, and extracts of Machen’s work were read by flickering candlelight. Then the party staggered into the streets of Usk to watch a fortuitously timed eclipse, which almost, but not quite, turned the moon blood red.

But would Machen have approved of the evening’s events? For the society’s secretary Mark Samuels, the social side of the Friends is essential; “Machen held that the average tavern was often a more sacred place than the average church,” he maintains, “since he despised the notion that the purpose of the Christian faith was to promote a series of prescriptive moral codes rather than revealing itself, without preconditions, as a profound source of mystical tradition and symbolism. To Machen, a pint of foaming ale was a sacrament as deserving of awe and wonder as the Latin Rite.”

While Machen’s interest in place seems like the most obvious contemporary resonance for his work, each member of The Friends Of Arthur Machen finds something different to love. Theologians admire Machen’s spirituality, secularists his rationalism. There’s enough skill in his writing to make a case for it as literature, and it’s shocking enough to consume as first rate pulp. “My theory, for what its worth, is that Machen specifically appeals to those who suffer from the nagging sense that they're outlanders in a strange world,” explains Mark Samuels. “I don't think this necessarily indicates any spiritual or religious predisposition, just the sense that our essential nature is to seek after mysteries.” Alan Moore makes a more dramatic claim for Machen’s resurgent popularity. “Machen was like Blake in that he used the irrational world of romantic visions to find something meaningful at the heart of human existence. The public’s belief in The Bowmen shows that after World War I people yearned for something spiritual. It’s the same today. Machen is ripe for revival.”

It's 7.30 and Stewart Lee is grumpy. Late comers (perhaps a result of the show's incorrect listing on the Corn Exchange website) are holding up his introduction, and his microphone isn't working.

The famously curmudgeonly comedian can barely contain his glee, telling us the show is already ruined, and he'll never manage to win us back around.
Analysis of his audience is a signature trait of Lee's, and he frequently highlights which areas of the crowd are failing to laugh.
Throughout Vegetable Stew, there's room for him to improvise; he shouts at spectators who choose ill-timed moments to leave the room, or points out that while the Cambridge crowd laugh knowingly at a joke about tax evasion, we aren't as mirthful at the idea of celebrities not giving enough to charity, teasing: “I don't know how you filled a room this big with so many people who don't agree with what I think."

Lee unpicks his show bit by bit, forewarning us that it will “contain four jokes and a song". The absence of traditional jokes barely matters, as Lee's turn of phrase and rage-fuelled persona lead to non-stop waves of laughter from the crowd.
Vegetable Stew covers charity, Adrian Chiles, and the government, with each section taken from an upcoming episode of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle.
He tells us the BBC warned him that 25 minutes talking about Adrian Chiles counted as a sustained personal attack, “It wasn't, but it is now," he says, his eyes glinting, before describing him as “a man who would be cast as a pig spirit in a Japanese fantasy film."
Other attacks are in store for Russell Howard (responsible for world famine), David Cameron (and 'Chihuahua' Nick Clegg) and Al Qaeda (not as polite as the IRA).
Support came from the delightful Simon Munnery, whose true confessions of Sherlock Holmes and football chant for Sainsbury's had everyone in a jovial mood before the interval.

Lee has such a natural wit, which shines through in moments of improvisation, that he has his audience eating from the palm of his hand. His style may not be to everyone's taste, but Vegetable Stew is a meaty enough show for any true fan - and he wouldn't want anyone else there anyway.

The percussionist Clare Moore of blues punks The Moodists, and the pianist Kaye Louise Patterson of alt country pioneers Acuff’s Rose, are grand dames of Australia’s underground. Moore offers four arch negotiations with the downward gravitational pull of kitsch, Barry Adamson’s filmic mix reimagining cocktail lounge muzak as a psychedelic formica.


Patterson pounds baroque pop from the piano with shades of Billy Joel or Ben Folds.

A sinuous version of John and Beverley Martyn’s languidly sinister Auntie Aviator takes wing on the meshed guitar muscle of Dave Graney and Matt Walker.

The Fall's 29th studio album, in 35 years, finds Mark E Smith fronting a kind of amphetamine drone rock band. The 2011 model grooves on two or three chord riffs, pounding bass booms, and Eleni Poulou's retro keyboard blips, like some ancient krautrock legend, but pin-eyed with punk intensity, spattered with Smith's kaleidoscopic shards of dog-growled observations, and serrated throughout by Pete Greenway's stuttering guitar skree.


And when Poulou takes the mic to intone Nico-style over the bittersweet Happi Song, it's one of The Fall's most successful changes of mood.

Dear me.

Now all other rock music suddenly seems rather silly. The Fall remain our most vital group.

Stewart Lee said in an earlier broadcast that “no one is equipped to review me”. That’s me told, bless him. The alleged theme of last week’s Comedy Vehicle was patriotism. He could so easily have been lazy. Stew is many bastarding things, but lazy isn’t one.

Somehow, he managed – mouth-farting into a mic – to turn a full three minutes of the sounds of a cat’s diarrhoea into the most plosive and gorgeous argument against deference. It was wonderful, and I still stand and applaud its sculpted perfection. A man mouth-farting into a microphone, while mumbling the national anthem badly and talking about cat shit shouldn’t have been subtle, but somehow it and its wider points were, and clog-brained oversentimental deference might want to pipe down for a bit.

This massively expanded version of Skullflower’s 1988 debut e.p. is the addictive noise fix your nan warned you about.


Dumb ugly titles christen filthy dirges of militaristic pounding, unmanly retching, and tidal swathes of space rock guitar sewage.


Often recorded in rehearsal rooms on audibly overburdened dictaphones, Skullflower’s youthful stirrings suggest an obsessively single-minded British Sonic Youth, unencumbered by redemptive hippy dream hopefulness.


Skullflower still exists, though guitarist Stefan Jaworzyn soon split to ply more utilitarian scuzz jazz with the obscurely influential Ascension.

Luminaries of the Melbourne mafia gathered around the multi-instrumentalist Murray Patterson to soundtrack found ‘70s super8 footage of the New South Wales coastline. Patterson’s lap steel, its swooping sweeps familiar from Tex Perkins’ pellucid Dark Horses records, lends a rustic flavor to the group’s quietly expansive compositions, though there’s an empty space in the shape of some gruff Australian alt-rock troubadour at the centre of each track, satisfyingly occupied by Hoss’ Joel Silbersher on three of the pieces.

Having spent most of his career performing in low-key art centres around the country, Stewart Lee now has the misfortune of enjoying relative commercial success. As he acknowledges at the beginning of ‘A Room with a Stew’, Colston Hall is packed out with two very different audiences for his show.

There are the liberal middle classes in the front stalls who have been getting off on his sneering comic persona for years (‘the vegetarian restaurants of Bristol will be empty tonight’), but there is now also a new batch of fans to consider as well: the people who saw him for five minutes on television and decided to come with their friends, the kind of people who otherwise ‘go to see Lee Nelson live’.

what does an alternative comedian do once they have made it mainstream?

Of course, Lee vastly exaggerates this audience divide – some of the evening’s biggest laughs are drawn from these ‘new fans’ whenever he mockingly gestures to them in the dress circle – but the problem he poses seems real enough: what does an alternative comedian do once they have made it mainstream?

Drier than a Sainsbury’s Basics roast chicken, this identity crisis is placed at the very centre of ‘A Room with a Stew’ and explored with an ultra-self-consciousness bound to surprise even the most seasoned fans. ‘No one’s equipped to review me’, that is, no one except Stewart Lee himself. His routine is littered with introspection, self-parody, and analysis of jokes both before and after they have been made: ‘See, what these young comics don’t understand is that you’ve got to do the apology before the joke… not two weeks later on Newsnight in a turtleneck’.

No one can escape the cross-hair of his comedy

And causing offense is certainly an issue which occupies Lee as a ‘politically correct liberal’. The first half of the gig is geared around a very carefully constructed and deliberately longwinded joke meant to appease his Daily Mail critics who complain that there is ‘not enough Islamophobia in his act’. Lee knows he is tiptoeing along an ideological tightrope, but it is a gag diluted with so much irony that he manages to place both raging bigots and wincing progressives at its butt: ‘That’s what I want; a whole arena of uncomfortable fans saying “I’m not sure if that’s okay. It’s a very complicated issue”’.

Is there is a line which comedians have to remain cautious of not crossing? If there is, then Lee dances on it, crosses it out, and redraws it elsewhere before leaping right across. No one can escape the cross-hair of his comedy; not the fans; not other comics; and especially not ‘the Paul Nuttalls of UKIP’. Whilst the self-deprecating, existential crisis material never fails to solicit a response, Lee is much better as a social commentator with a sense of humour. Such material has built up his reputation as chief literati funnyman and, assuming he sticks with it, will guarantee that he never plays a half-empty regional art centre again.

Stars: ★★★★

IF EVER a stand-up comedian divided opinion, then Stewart Lee is that man.

Opinion is heft right down the middle, as suggested by two contrasting quotes Lee puts on his website - “One of the top three or four living stand-ups" (Time Out) versus “The worst stand-up I have ever seen" (Graham Simmons, Chortle).

I would guess that Lee is not unhappy about such divisions for much of his comedy is mined from relentlessly mocking popular culture and dissecting the supreme pointlessness of fame in circular rants seemingly spun from nothing. In this, he is in a sense the anti-Michael Macintyre, for he has no wish to please, unlike the supremely successful MM, one of Lee's targets and a man perfectly shaped for popularity.

Lee, conversely, is awkwardly shaped: an intelligent, relentless comedian who uses aggression and tension as comedy tools, and does not necessarily make matters easy for his audience.

A packed Theatre Royal was treated to a master-class of edgy comedy, with special attention given to Caffe Nero loyalty cards, Top Gear (and in particular Lee's loathing for Richard Hammond, brilliantly put) and, in a madly extended sequence, an advert for cider made from pears, which saw Lee leave the stage and run up to the dress circle, while still ranting.

A Steve Earle song was dropped into the satire blender, too; all very rewarding, in a vaguely unsettling sense.

Simon Munnery, who did the opening slot, was less tense and amused greatly with his meandering tales.

 

It's a set list you could hardly predict. First, there'll be a section of Islamophobic comedy. Then, says Stewart Lee, "I'm going to talk exhaustively about urine for half an hour". Of course.

A Room with a Stew is labelled as work in progress, each block of material building towards an episode for the next series of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle. What Lee has got is already very progressed, however. There's hardly a spare word as he does his usual knowing dance.

He's part craftsman and part torturer as he reels his audience in, and out, and in again, like alternative comedy's grumpy burlesque act, a precision tease before the punchline is delivered.

The core components of Lee's act are well known: the knowing sneer, the wilful repetition, the stretching of the boundaries both of ideas and the conventions of comedy. What is exhilarating is how many surprises he still throws in and how deft his jumps are from one tone to another.

His first section is essentially a riff on a Daily Mail article in which Jan Moir called for comedians to joke more often about Muslims. As Lee delivers his 30-minute riposte, the impact is fiercely biting, yet he's unafraid to also be gloriously childish, using one of his extended rants to belittle the journalist Rod Liddle as a man "with all gravy down him", among other things.

The section about urine takes several U-turns: from a story of Lee being bullied at school to a playful deconstruction of the phrase "water off a duck's back". Then, just when you think Lee's lost control, he reaches a climax in which he tackles the suicide of comedians including Robin Williams and directs his anger against the audience themselves.

Mocking observational comics, Lee concludes: "It's not enough is it? You've got to have something to say." Lee still has plenty to say and it's invigorating to watch him say it.

Separate Motorhead's 20th album from the Lemmy legend, and it's a set of effective punk metal belters.

But the 67 year old frontman's ravaged growl remains unique, unexpectedly suggesting a speed-damaged Louis Armstrong on the contemplative Dust And Glass.


Keep Your Power Dry sees enduring outlaw truisms coagulate into the gnomic, but the album's fatally fractured by formulaic splayed sneaker guitar soloing.

The Motorhead machine still runs, if rather too noisily, but deserves a reputational retune of the kind Rick Rubin once gave Johnny Cash.

In 2003, at the mid-point of their career, superstardom winked briefly at New Jersey's Fountains Of Wayne, when their hit single Stacey's Mom achingly anatomised adolescent trans-generational lust.

But their fifth album finds them back in the box marked ‘underappreciated guitar pop classicists', where their understatedly sharp, and wryly witty, portraits of suburban survivors' mid-life muddles pan out in thirteen perfectly structured songs. With old school moves like middle eights, key changes, vocal harmonies, and guitar solos, in all the right places, Sky Full Of Holes won't spook the horses, but engages instead both the heart and the head.

Lucinda Williams is one of the finest living exponents of the well made song, making sceptics into country rock apologists, and her uncommonly lean and literate lyrics inevitably inspire speculation on the influence of her father, the poet Miller Williams. Now in her mid-50’s, Williams is a sand-blasted frontierswomen, her voice coarsened into richer colours. The Shepherd’s Bush Empire’s sold-out crowd of forty-something men rightly adore her, over-compensating for her apparent unease with great, soft, warm surges of stage-bound love. But where once Williams’s shows rode Alternative Country’s first wave with raucous unruliness, her current set has hardened into routine. A production manager turns the pages of a ledger of lyrics. Crass lighting dictates appropriate emotional responses, rather than allowing her subtle songs the luxury of ambiguity.

Doug Pettibone delivers stillborn guitar solos, their endings evident in their very beginnings. It all sounds just like the record, tonight mainly 1998’s breakthrough Car Wheels On A Gravel Road, newly re-released with extra tracks. As Bob Dylan knows, the only way to deal with a weighty back catalogue is to ignore it, or abuse it and see if it still comes up shining, but Williams is cautious and tentative with her litter of songs. In the closing minutes, a blistering Real Live Bleeding Fingers.. picks up the pace before special guest Bruce Springsteen arrives to help bludgeon L’il Son Jackson’s blues Disgusted to death. Apart from a perfunctory drum solo, the closing number Joy allows the band to loosen up and hit an energy level that Williams’s shows used to start at and build from. Ten years ago, at this same venue, Emmylou Harris showcased her groundbreaking Wrecking Ball album to visibly distressed fans, who ultimately learned to love it. Williams could be a similarly bold elder stateswoman, but tonight she looks like she’d rather be Sheryl Crow.

In the '80s, Dan Stuart's Green On Red played punk in a Crazy Horse style, a hardcore era heresy, dissolving messily in bad drugs and bad business.

His 1994 comeback, Can O'Worms, sounds even better here than twenty years ago; a heady country blues fever dream, with spicy Mexican flavoring, and Carveresque deadbeat lyrics, painting a socio-geographic landscape straight out of Breaking Bad's sun-blasted borderlands.

A second disc covers Stuart's more lighthearted collaboration with Tucson lo-fi legend Al Perry.

Before Stewart Lee starts his three hour set he issues a warning to any mobile phone users: if he sees anyone taking photos or texting he will “smash the phone with the microphone stand, then wank on it, and then take it to the backstage toilets and shit on it too”. He needn’t bother, though. He’s playing a home crowd; there’s no danger anyone’s going to miss a word.

In many ways a three-hour Stewart Lee gig at the Royal Festival Hall is a middle class comedy fan’s cummy sleep-wank heaven. This was not lost on Lee. He attacked the venue’s patrons immediately, calling the audience at the Southbank Centre “Guardian reading cunts”. It was the first in a long line of many shrewd, apt and hilarious put downs throughout the night. Looking slimmer of waist and less red of face, he looked healthy, seeming to move with more energy across the tastefully lit, bare stage.

My concerns about the RFH being too large for Stew’s muttered performances were unfounded. As much as he’d like you to think he doesn’t know how to do a huge room he does – the 2,500 seat venue quaked with laughter throughout, the jokes travelling from front to back. He employed a tactic familiar to his fans, dividing the room up based on how skilled, liberal and discerning they were. I was on the slow side of the room (the majority) and he expertly played to those seated behind him, turning them into High Command coven of Stewart Lee elites.

He seemed a man utterly relaxed within his craft. Stew, who I do not know well enough to address with such informality, played throughout the night with the crowd’s expectations.

A joke about your inner-tabloid-voice became an extended schizophrenic running gag; sabotaging his measured and reasonable diagnoses of a world besieged by bigoted rhetoric. That interplay of high-concept satire blended with the straight faced social justice makes the jokes hit harder. I am fully aware how glib that all sounds, but it’s his playfulness and great sense of the mood in the room that make it all hang together, seemingly effortlessly.

Politics was the order of the day in this set, although other comedians were the main victims of his painful liberal mastication. It’s something a number of my friends criticise Stew for, the smugness of his character being a thin mask for his genuine Oxbridge pseudery. That and his unrestrained bashing of other acts he’s deemed unworthy.

Personally it’s always been one of my favourite parts of his style; the faux-outrage at the insouciance of an audience failing to recognise his genius. He swept the laughable and tubby James Corden away in a single pithy line, describing the mere idea of his fandom “like a dog listening to classical music”.

These jokes wouldn’t work if you didn’t think that some small part of Stew believed in it. Flawless delivery and a tight performance aid this too, although they are almost to be expected at this point. Putting aside his talent as a performer, it’s the mercurial cross-roads where the real Stewart Lee meets the character that is the most interesting. He must be a bit of a mean genius, surely? Maybe I’m falling into his trap.

Stew seems more comfortable in his fame, too. His acute awareness of the respect and admiration other comics hold for him was underscored with the dismissal of his comedy critics “They’re obsessed with me, the young comics. ‘I hate Stewart Lee, I’ve seen him 800 times.’”

He was never too self-satisfied though, a mistake many good comics have made.  In recent years Eddie Izzard has looked like he is high on the stink of his own schtick. Jimmy Carr too, his pretend laugh replete with an erroneous assurance that he is “bloody funny ya know”.

It felt good to see that Stew has never stopped embracing the struggle – and it’s that crackle that makes comedy exciting and dangerous. That’s why he divides and taunts the audience so much throughout, because he has to have something to kick back against.

Still, I did feel that three hours is too much of one comedian for me. It’s an audacious idea – a performance of the six half-hour sets that will make up the next series of Comedy Vehicle. Even so, they’re always quite meaty topics and I did feel some fatigue towards the end, most likely caused by lack of time for digestion. If this was the length of a full show it would veer into masturbatory self-indulgence.

Having seen A Room With A Stew in January last year, I was half expecting to be bored as he talked his way down a well-travelled road. I was proved wrong on this count, much to my satisfaction.

Almost an hour of what I had seen at that preview show had been removed, and another twenty minutes expanded upon and changed. In a world where Jerry Seinfeld feels comfortable stating that he gets rid of only 10 percent of his old material each year.

Casting aside a full hour of material becomes a medallion of artistic integrity round Stewart Lee’s neck. The show would have been great with those bits in (they were my favourite part of the earlier performances), but obviously Stew is neither short of material or afraid of self-editing. I hope that little known fact is with people when they watch the program later this year – he chucked two episodes worth, for us!

As always though, the most interesting parts of any Stewart Lee show are the deconstructions, and it’s these points where his genius, yes genius really shows.It is oft-said and for that reason loses its impact, but Stewart Lee is a much better class of comedian than the TV viewing public are ever exposed to. Given the BBC’s shamefully passé taste of late (Mrs Brown’s Boys), it is a small miracle something unashamedly cerebral has made it onto the box at all.

His preoccupation with form is comparable only to the innovations of the jazz pioneers and visionaries that play throughout the intervals of the show. He is so adept at pulling apart the fabric of his comedy, breaking and folding, repeating and cultivating seat-twisting tension. It is jazz-comedy in a very pure, experimental way.

“Miles Davis has arrived”, it’s true, and he said it himself.

Glutton for punishment: Stew’s doing it all over again in March.

Ben Clover finds Stewart Lee's Vegetable Stew a little more silly and a little less ranty than usual, but no less precise.

Stewart Lee isn’t going to let something like gravity interfere with his act. Near the start of Vegetable Stew he says it isn’t a show with an arc like previous 60-minuters, but it’s still done with such precision that midway, after taking a gulp of water, he puts the bottle back on the stool, then carefully lies it flat, just in case it falls over.

It’s as if he’d decided very quickly he had no bottle-of-water-falls-over material and that it would be an event that would have to be acknowledged. After all, there’s no point having finely-crafted material questioning the audience’s own relationship to other material immediately preceding it, if they just want something funny about a bottle of water falling over. Best to just lie it flat, just in case, he probably thought.

Maybe his recent book on stand-up was so analytical that it makes you now pay more attention to tiny details than you should. But he seems more annoyed than amused later when, after much affected tuning of a guitar, the low E-string isn’t actually in tune when he needs it for a song.

The song is about the young Bullingdon Club boys now running the country as they rampaged around Oxford as students. It’s the centre-piece to one of the three subjects Lee introduces tonight, that will presumably form half of the second series of his Comedy Vehicle on the BBC next year.

Alongside politics, there are 30 minutes each on charity and Adrian Chiles. It’s not clear if his story about the BBC’s lawyers banning him from making a whole show about the former One Show presenter, because it constituted a “sustained, personal attack” is true, or whether it is untrue but nonetheless conveys the truth about corporation oversensitivity.

It’s all very clever but at the same time there’s fun to be had with words like “slayings” in sillier bits about Lee’s grandad, “a comic character”. Overall this seems like a slightly more hinged set than those from the first Comedy Vehicle series. Less ranty, a little bit less “inexplicably bitter“, but only a little bit.

He says he is trying to slim his audience down into people who share the same tastes and references as him, but also carps about having to play in a cellar while Tim Minchin tickets at the Millennium Dome go for £100+. But if he did narrow his crowd down to people just like him, wouldn’t they be quite a tough crowd; pedantic, prickly, inexplicably bitter?

So however chagrined he may appear, he should’ve been pleased with the press night crowd he does get, they laugh loud and often on their own, as the silliness take holds of them individually. There’s the same winning combination of repetition, sustained personal attacks and simultaneous director’s commentary as always, and always topped with a brilliant line.

But there is less of the walking into the crowd, sitting next to someone and doing the show from there. He might have decided that kind of thing is best left to Ahir Shah now.

At the start of the second half his pint of Guinness seems to sit fairly stably on the stool.

Albert Ayler’s body was retrieved from the East River in Brooklyn on the 25th of November, 1970, a few months after his 34th birthday. The saxophonist grew up in Cleveland, left to find work as a musician playing in restaurants in Sweden in 1962, and returned to New York, changed and inspired, to take the American avant-garde jazz of the period further from its roots than anyone thought it could, or perhaps should, go. Ayler played at John Coltrane’s funeral, as if the baton were being handed on, but his mysterious death means we’ll never know exactly how he might have developed. For many, the apparent, uncompromising aggression of the raucous free jazz movement dubbed The New Thing encapsulated black anger. But Ayler’s music resisted definition, suggesting euphoric celebration and revolutionary fervor in equal measure.

Ayler’s obituary in the jazz magazine Downbeat struggled to categorise the saxophonist. Was the music he made – a mix of nursery rhyme melodies, military bugle blasts, raging spirituals, funereal dirges, and unrelenting improvisations of the harshest quality – really jazz at all? Faced with confusion, and often outright hostility, in his lifetime, Ayler claimed that history would be his judge. “One day the people will understand,” was his oft-repeated mantra. This year’s London Jazz Festival features two Ayler related performances, - a concert of his music by the guitarist Marc Ribot and Ayler’s bassist Henry Grimes, and a free afternoon show by the American saxophonist and Ayler-fan Caroline Kraabel. This is preceded by a screening of new documentary, My Name Is Albert Ayler, by the young Swedish director Kasper Collin. Does this flurry of officially sanctioned South Bank approval mean that the people do now, finally, understand Albert Ayler?

Collin’s film premiered at the ICA earlier this year. It’s a haunting mesh of old cine footage, paint-stripping live performances, and reflective interviews with surviving friends and family. A strange shot, of a semi-naked Ayler, starting silently into the camera, threads through the film, as if the subject is daring you to dismiss him. “I didn’t want to speculate about things to much,” explains the director, “I wanted to leave it up to the audience to decide.” Consequently, Collin avoids commentary and frames Ayler’s life with impressionistic images. On his first visit to Sweden we see footage of the midnight sun that fascinated him. His closing months in Brooklyn see him again obsessed by the sun, staring into it across the East River. And when Collin goes to Cleveland to meet relatives, his brother and collaborator the trumpeter Donald Ayler, and his sprightly father Edward, they get lost in a cemetery whilst looking for his grave. “The film was produced over a long time. I knew about Albert Ayler seeing the sun in Sweden maybe two years into the project. The film was a process. It wasn’t really scripted. I built it around recordings of Albert Ayler’s own voice. The contrast between his music and his soft, gentle voice was fantastic, because it is not the voice you are expecting.”

For Collin, Sweden is crucial to Ayler’s career. “Scandinavia was important for the development of American free-jazz and avant-garde music,” he suggests. “Albert Ayler felt more relaxed in Sweden. Probably there were some people here who believed in him. It helped him get confident, even If not everyone in Sweden like what he was doing. One big event was in the spring of 1962, when the jazz club The Golden Circle opened, and the had really great acts like Cecil Taylor and Sunny Murray.” Sunny Murray played drums with Ayler throughout the 60’s. A bear of a man whose memories of Ayler often trailed off into happy, helpless laughter, he toured here last month fronting a trio including two British musicians, the saxophonist Tony Bevan and the double bass player John Edwards. At the Red Rose in Finsbury Park, London, the response to their opening set, and the demographic diversity of the crowd, would have convinced Ayler that the people did, finally, understand. Does it seem strange to Sunny Murray that the saxophonist should leave his native land, only to discover the kindred spirits of the American avant-garde in far from home in Sweden.

“No not really,” he says, sat at the side of the stage, rolling a cigarette, “I haven’t figured out yet how me and Cecil Taylor ended up in Sweden, but I first met Albert when he came over to the club, wearing a very handsome cap, dressed very nice in his leather suit. He said he had been playing there in Sweden since he left the army. He said he had been playing his music alone in the forest by himself. Said he had been doing that a year. He asked if he could play with us. Back then Cecil was rather… not shy but… he just wasn’t outgoing at the time. It was such a weight having to carry The New Thing. Anyway, Cecil said, “I don’t know. I don’t think so.” So me and Jimmy Lyons, we said ‘Yeah, go home and get your horn.” So he split and he came back with this beautiful new sax, and that’s always a good sign, so we told him wait until we give him a signal,. Now, he hasn’t met Cecil yet see, and so then in the middle of the gig we said ‘come up’ and it was beautiful. Albert was like a magic streak of light in the air. So Cecil said to Albert “we’re going to Denmark, you can hang with the band if you want”.

“Albert was always saying ‘one day people will understand.’ He was right about that,” concludes Collin. “He would have been very glad that his music is more appreciated by a younger audience, coming to it from alternative rock. It’s not a real jazz thing anymore.”

The Ayler related gigs in the LJF are:
Friday 10 November: Marc Ribot’s Spiritual Unity, which features bassist Henry Grimes who played with Ayler, at the QEH, 7.30pm

Saturday 11 November: There’s a free afternoon gig inspired by Ayler by US saxophonist Caroline Kraabel at 4pm in QEH Front Room venue, after the film screening on the same day (where Grimes will be in conversation with journo Kevin Le Genre beforehand) at 2pm.

"People say I don't have any jokes," says Stewart Lee in his new show – then sends up his supposed inability to crack a gag. But don't be fooled. Lee's entire act is a joke: if his lips are moving, he's not being serious. What's unique is his nimbleness in keeping a step ahead of our sense of what kind of joke he's telling. It's often funny, but at any given point, it's deviously unclear what we're laughing at. Adrian Chiles, or Lee's juvenile dislike of Adrian Chiles? Russell Howard, or the corrupting pact between charity and celebrity? David Cameron, or our poor, benighted selves?

The latter sequence is an extreme example of Lee's shtick – extreme, because his shaggy dog story about hobnobbing with Cameron at university intrigues, but hardly amuses. The routine starts by invoking the leftie agit-comedy of the 1980s. But this yarn, which subtly sends up Britain's romance with the supposedly detoxified Tories – Lee even sings a Bullingdon Club guitar ballad – heralds a new brand of political standup, which meets 21st-century politics on its chosen battleground: character and emotion rather than reason and policy.

The earlier material is out-and-out funnier. There's a dopey riff about Lee's granddad, obsessed with crisps and assailed by Godzilla's adversary Mothra. And a penetrating segment on charity, which digs into the cultural fallout when our most celebrated benefactors are also purveyors of snide gags on panel shows; whether that's hilarious or tragic is up to you. Rather than marshal us to the laugh, Lee lets it ebb and flow – now within reach, now just without – on the tide of his insistent, repetitious delivery. This is satire as neuro-linguistic programming, like a relaxation tape with gremlins, worming Lee's scorched-idealist worldview round the funny bone, and right into the subconscious.

Last night I had dinner with the molecular microbiologist Professor Keith Gull. He discussed the information overload that has taken shape in academia his lifetime, and how it has affected the working methods of his students. Over spinach and egg, Professor Gull identified the need to be able to extract the relevant points from the unprecedentedly vast mass of material now available as a key skill in the contemporary data-dense environment. Tangentially, it seems to me that all 21st century musicians are likewise potentially swamped in a vast range of influences largely unavailable to their recent predecessors.

This World Wide Web that you all have now has made pretty much everything that ever was available, by legal or illegal means. But Wolf People are one of the few groups to funnel this oceanic torrent of endless sonic information into a fine and purposeful point. And that fine and purposeful point is their second album proper, Fain.

The peripheral early seventies British underground influences that Wolf People acknowledge on their website playlists - Linda Hoyle and Affinity, Arzachel, Tractor, Beau, Thundermother, High Tide, May Blitz, Arcadium and The Way We Live - were all familiar to me as a post-punk fundamentalist teenager in the early 80s, but in name only. Theirs were the already culturally obsolete gatefold albums with gloomily meaningful sleeves spilling out of the racks in the second hand shop in the underpass by Moor Street Station at low low prices, that our generation thrust aside in search of 12" singles by angry ironists on the Rough Trade and Vindaloo labels. This dopey beardo wizard shit was kulturally verboten. It was never coming back, granddad, and without the open-access information experiment of the newfangled Internet, could a band like Wolf People ever have sounded quite the way it does?

"I don't think it could have, or at least not in the form it's taken now", concedes Wolf People's founder, vocalist, and co-guitarist (with Joe Hollick) Jack Sharp. "We were very much involved in collecting records and sampling, and interested in '60's and '70's subculture (as well as hip hop) in the "pre internet age", but things were a lot harder to come by when you didn't have the almost brain numbing instant access to pretty-much-everything-ever that you have now. Getting involved in online record collecting communities around 2002/2003, when we were in our early twenties, had a massive impact on Tom and myself, and it still provides a lot of inspiration and ways of finding music that is still off the radar even now."

Having burrowed out of Bedford in the mid-noughties, Wolf People are a formidable hybrid. Yes, they're crate-digging record collector completists with time on their hands and the sort of international file-trader connections that mean they can legitimately say "There has always been a 1970s Finnish progressive rock influence on our music." But, crucially, they're also dedicated musicians demonstrating, with their zen-mastery of Tom Verlaine type twin guitar starbursts and Pythagorean progressive rock timekeeping, the lost art of what long dead rock scribes used to call 'chops'.

"We'll probably look back and realise what idiots we were being!" volunteers Sharp. "I suppose it's strange that we're using the internet as a tool to reference a craft of music making that would otherwise be extinct or buried." If only Wolf People been able to enjoy the housing benefit scams, generous student grants, aristocratic major label patronage, and communal squat culture that bought their spiritual Seventies forebears endless practice time. Had they been relieved of the obligation to sustain themselves, we'd have seen Wolf People's debut mini-masterpiece, 2010's Steeple, some years ahead of schedule.

I'm worried I've made Wolf People sound like mere historical revivalists, the prog-blues-folk-rock equivalent of those people who dress up as cavaliers at weekends and lose once more battles already lost long ago. Crucially, there's something else entirely going on in their rehearsal room. We know the technology now exists to clone and revive an extinct woolly mammoth from DNA found in frozen specimens perfectly preserved in arctic ice-fields, which is arguably partly what Wolf People have done, referencing artists on the missing presumed extinct Holyground label, for example. But what if we were to take that mammoth and cross-breed it with a similarly re-vivified sabre tooth tiger?

It was on the closing pair of tracks on Wolf People's last album Steeple, namely Banks of Sweet Dundee Parts 1 and 2, that their unique selling point became clear. Wolf People are positing an alternate early Seventies musical reality that nearly, but never quite actually, happened. Yes, Fairport Convention's A Sailor's Life, the extended epics of Trees' unbeatable 1970 album On The Shore, and bits of Carolanne Pegg's '73 solo album, posit a British folk music informed by then contemporary rock practice, with extended modal soloing and driving rhythm sections.
And yes, the title track alone of Traffic's John Barleycorn Must Die album, and The Battle Of Evermore from Led Zeppellin IV, and bits of the and the inexplicably English sounding German band Carol of Harvest's eponymous 1978 release, suggest a more densely entwined, more fertile, future for this unlikely crossbreed. But it was a future that was never quite fulfilled, Traffic wandering off into a flutey jazz fog, and Led Zeppellin climbing the Giant's Causeway to an immortality not tainted by folksy flavors.

"I think subconsciously, we're trying to make the type of records we would like to find," says Jack. "I love Trees and Fairport and Mr Fox, but I find myself thinking that there aren't enough groups like that, and sometimes I want it to be heavier. So we've tried to stretch both the folk and the heavy element as far as it will go in either direction and see what happens." I think the modest Wolf Person is selling the band short. Fain doesn't sound stretched. Its eight substantial songs sound, given the incompatible diversity of its sources, implausibly integrated.

Empty Vessels skewers California '60s folk rock rhythm guitar with Hollick's insurgent soloing; All Returns' truncated hairy funk licks, from bassist Dan Davis and drummer Tom Watt, suddenly bristle into the red, finally unable to contain themselves, bursting free of a psalmodic structure, like The Stooges' We Will Fall re-tooled by jazz monks; When The Fire Is Dead In The Grate is the album's first stone classic, a funky folk-metal workout that trails off into a compellingly extended coda, both guitarists circling and dovetailing and spiraling; Athol is a downbeat minor key boogie, like an uncommonly reflective Canned Heat gone native somewhere in the Suffolk fens.

Massed witches' sabbat backing vocals swell and rise under the arching leads of the painfully disciplined Hesperus, the song dissolving into a peat bog superfuzz sphagnum moss sludge; Answer drapes hop-harvest harmonies over pointillist pin pricks of lead guitar; Thief's Can-style atomic bomb blast opening spills over analogue synth noise into an all-but unaccompanied plaintive folk ballad vocal, that breaks down into collapsing arpeggios of twin guitars; and NRR sounds like it was written to make Hell's Angels, and their molls, attending an outdoor blues-rock/rock-blues festival in a disused WWII airfield in 1973, do that dance where they bend sideways and bump their butts together, the rather self-conscious set closer that would once have provoked mass applause and the ritualized discarding of bras.

Music fans like to speculate on what-if's. What if The Fall had followed Hex Enduction Hour with more of the same, instead of switching track to escape expectation? What if The Buzzcocks had held on to and harnessed the high art aspirations of Howard Devoto alongside the pop art punch of Pete Shelley? What if Jimi Hendrix had made that album with Miles Davis? What if Television had run in the songs for their belated 3rd album live, and found all the jumping-off points they discovered in the years spent woodshedding Marquee Moon? What if all the great songs the final line-up of The Byrds squandered in half-realised solo projects had made one last brilliant band album? And so on.

If you've ever listened to those furtive early '70s fusions of folk and rock and wondered if there was another way those superficially incompatible genres might have intertwined, then Wolf People offer an answer, with Fain's patchouli-scented stews of perfurmed garden pre-punk, each shadowed by a creeping deep country darkness of backwater occult imagery, utilitarian King James Bible lyricism, and knowing nods to primordial melodies, that already lurk deep in the collective subconscious. Re-organising the re-available past, Wolf People cast a cup of bones against the back wall, and play the runes in the patterns they fall in.

In the small hours of Tues 20th I received a badly punctuated e-mail advertising Foster’s through the medium of The Foster’s Comedy God poll, which invites the public to vote for the all-time Comedy God from 30 years of Perrier/Eddies/Edinburgh Comedy Awards nominations. Three pints drunk, on Foster’s ironically, I responded with admittedly ill-advised rudeness, but here’s the main reasons why the poll is deeply flawed.

1) No-one can possibly have seen all the nominated shows and there is no video evidence of most of them, as they pre-date the You Tube mass-media era, so the vote is immediately unfair and skewed towards the most well-documented and famous names, especially from the last few years.

2) Some of the winners and nominees, such as the hit 2000 show Arctic Boosh, are listed under the name of the performers (Mighty Boosh) others under the name of the show (Jackson’s Way, where the performer Wil Adamsdale is not listed). This is like having a MUSIC vote where NEVER MIND THE BOLLOCKS is listed alongside THE BEATLES. i.e it is stupid.

3) In these polls, whoever is freshest in the public mind tends to win. Perhaps Foster’s know this and have calculated that their brand will be associated with an already popular name. But this is the fringe. To be in keeping with the spirit of the fringe the sponsor’s money should be used in promoting new or unknown things not giving a high profile award to an already established name.

4) Of the nearly 300 performers involved not a single one has been asked if they mind their name being used to drive traffic towards what is essentially a big Foster’s advert. Artists should not be co-opted into commercial promotional activities without their express permission. (I do appreciate this could be seen as an extreme position, and that many people on the list will be happy to be promoted by Foster’s reciprocally, seeing the relationship as a symbiotic one, like that between maggots and a wound.)

5) Some listed names (Emma Thompson, Steve Coogan) had already distanced themselves from The Edinburgh Comedy Awards, during the period that they were owned by Nestle, in support of the World Health Organisation’s criticisms of the company’s developing world ethics record, and yet here they are, mysteriously airbrushed back in to the history of the award, like Trotskys in reverse.

6) The entrance criteria and the number of nominees are just two things that have changed significantly since 1980, so there is no way of comparing fairly nominees from different eras as the criteria by which they were suggested for consideration, and the pool from which they were drawn, have all changed significantly.

7) This silly poll discredits the fringe generally, and comedy specifically.

8) The poll is so poorly thought out and unfair that it is either the work of idiots in a hurry, or else it was done badly on purpose in order to ensure that a famous name wins to buoy up the Foster’s brand’s association with the Edinburgh Comedy Awards and ensure coverage.

9) There are loads more things wrong with it that I can’t be bothered to even think of.
Why not make up some of your own? It’s a load of shit basically.

It is essential for the Spirit Of The Fringe that Foster’s are shown that the world’s best arts event, (which has been shaped by many hands over many decades, mainly for no money, or even at performers’ own financial loss,) has its roots in a post-war spirit of hope and reconciliation, and is not something that can be exploited in this way, especially without individual consultation.

In my e-mail I chose at random Frank Chickens, the Japanese female performance art duo, as an example of possibly worthy winners who would not get a look in under this illogical and unfair voting system, and the Twitter world has adopted them as a cause. This was never my intention, and I was drunk when I sent the e-mail in a fit of annoyance anyway, but they are now leading the field, and it appears we should embrace them.

If Frank Chickens become Comedy Gods then Foster’s will have been helped to actually sponsor some actual art, and fans of Foster’s all over the whole world will be made aware of that wonderful, indefinable, mischievous, playful thing we call The Spirit Of The Fringe!

Since Frank Chickens shot to the top of the poll earlier this week, Foster’s keep redesigning their site to make it as difficult to vote as possible, especially for older people who have trouble understanding computers, presumably to disenfranchise deliberately fans of Frank Chickens, who are likely to be in their 40s and 50s.

You can still vote here - but you have to enter a code in a box, though if you are pressed for time there are usually quicker ways to vote explained on Twitter if you search for ‘Frank Chickens’.

Heineken UK Brands director Mark Given has explained that “comedy plays a singular and important role in the lives of Foster’s customers” and says that he looks forward “to facilitating and fostering their engagement with comedy in all its guises through the support for comedy’s most prestigious awards.” (*see footnote).

Reading this, I think Mark wants genuinely to help the comedy loving Foster’s drinkers to engage with comedy “in all its guises”, so this vote is the public’s chance to help Mark to broaden these epicures’ humour horizons and introduce them to a taste of the real variety of comedy on the fringe, rather than just allowing mass public ignorance to foist upon these poor and trusting drinkers an already familiar and well-known name. Hopefully, the joy of discovering the true spirit of the fringe may engender in the Foster’s drinkers some of the same joy and euphoria which they have previously derived from alcohol.

Vote Frank Chickens, for fairness and change, and please circulate this blurb as widely as you can across internet social networks.

FRANK CHICKENS – FAIRNESS & CHANGE

Footnote * - The exciting thing for comedy fans about Mark’s assertion that “comedy plays a singular and important role in the lives of Foster’s customers” is that, assuming ASA regulations apply to this promotional tool too, there must be some data to back up the extent to which this love of comedy is true, ideally in relation to consumers of other beers. It would be fascinating to know which beer drinkers like comedy the most, and which kind of comedy they prefer. Presumably this data exists, unless the assertion that “comedy plays a singular and important role in the lives of Foster’s customers” is just PR guff without a grounding in any serious study of the relationship between beer brand preference and taste in comedy.

Emerging alone beneath the vast dome of the Roundhouse in jeans and a plain green shirt, Steve Earle looks like someone who has arrived to fix a washing machine, rather than the man who reclaimed roots rock in the ‘80s and cleared the path for the Alternative Country generation. Earle’s angry 2004 album The Revolution Starts Now was a superb example of The Hardcore Troubadour and friends in full country-grunge mode, but here the absence of any accompanists is desperately evident in songs like The Devil’s Right Hand, as increasingly brutal downstrokes of the guitar struggle to fill a void. In contrast, the gentler, fingerpicked numbers, including Earle’s signature song My Old Friend The Blues, give the Roundhouse the feel of an intimate folk club.

Then a large, pear-shaped man in black arrives, portending doom, to provide programmed beats for selections from last year’s Washington Square Serenade album. Earle decamped to New York to walk the streets that shaped the ‘60s protest singers and tonight we’re treated to a cut-and-paste Big Apple of downtown A trains, alphabet city, and seventh avenue, over a budget backdrop that sounds like a 1992 trip-hop version of the Steve Earle sound. In the increasingly restless standing area before the stage, even elderly Uncut magazine subscribers recognise this hybrid as an ill-advised experiment. We should admire an established artist like Earle for challenging his audience, thirty years into his career, but only an unaugmented Sparkle And Shine really sparkles and shines, and even Earle’s wife, and opening act, Alison Moorer, looked kind of shifty during her vocal contributions to the latin-flavoured, genre-crossing landgrab City Of Immigrants.

Earle was alone again for a closing run of crowd-pleasers, but the room had already thinned around the edges when Earle took up the mandolin for a beautiful version of The Galway Girl, reminding us of what he’s capable of.T

The centre of the New Jersey trio Yo La Tengo's 1993 album, Painful, features a blurred polaroid of a plate of French fries. Neil Young's French fries. Yo La Tengo's guitarist Ira Kaplan, a moon-faced thirtysomething once described as "the Jewish Jimi Hendrix", had lunched with the grandfather of grunge in a New York restaurant and asked the waitress to wrap his leftover sandwich. Young's uneaten fries were accidentally wrapped with it, and were soon back in the apartment Kaplan shares with his wife Georgia Hubley, Yo La Tengo's drummer, co-vocalist and the daughter of John Hubley, the creator of the cartoon character Mr Magoo. At first they attempted to preserve the historic fries, dating as they did from the week of Young's acclaimed MTV unplugged performance. "Initially, we refrigerated them but, hey, cooked potatoes have a half-life," Kaplan explains. "We thought about varnishing, but eventually we decided on photodocumentation." Lucky. The inherent weirdness of the daughter of the creator of Mr Magoo varnishing Neil Young's French fries for future generations doesn't bear contemplation.

Yo La Tengo have just released an excellent ninth album and are touring the UK this month. Their name is Spanish for "I got it" and was the cry of Elio Chacon, a baseball shortstop. But, ironically not everyone seems to "get" Yo La Tengo at all. The name's Mexican dance-band connotations see them frequently misfiled alongside the Gipsy Kings in record shops and even their press officer admits, "They don't sound like the Small Faces, and nobody knows what to do with them." The New York director Hal Hartley's use of them in film soundtracks, and the fact that they self-mockingly played the Velvet Underground in the film I Shot Andy Warhol, are the closest things the press has ever got to an "angle".

It's not surprising. Yo La Tengo's first two albums slotted neatly into a mid-1980s guitar-pop scene centred around Hoboken's Watermusic studio, alongside a host of other jangly New Jersey bands, but then the duo made a sudden and shocking shift of gear. "With the President
album in 1989, I remember thinking, Wow!" Kaplan recalls. "We haven't been playing much since we last recorded, but somehow we've got much better." President buried the sweetest melodies beneath seemingly endless storms of throbbing feedback, while its follow-up, 1990's Fake Book, a collection of delightful covers of classic acoustic folk-pop songs, couldn't have been more different.

So is there an element of wilful perversity at work in Yo La Tengo? "Maybe a little," admits Kaplan, remembering the band's prestigious support slot two years back in a double-headlining show by indie-rock's premier-division title holders, Stereolab and Sebadoh, at the Shepherd's Bush Empire in London. Yo La Tengo's considered response to facing a theatre full of potential new converts was to ditch all their catchy tunes in favour of a single experimental 45-minute instrumental piece. "Well, we felt that it would be good to do something people remembered, like it or not. We'd prefer it if people liked it, but we'd rather be remembered unfondly than just dimly." The band's last five albums have seen them take on a permanent third member, the bassist James McNew, and reconcile the two sides of their personality. I Can Feel the Heart Beating As One, their new album (Matador records), is no exception. Kaplan will always follow his avant-garde rock inclinations, but is still seduced by the kind of simple pop melodies chart acts would die for. With too great a reverence for classic songwriting skills to fit in with drone-rock noodlers such as Labradford or Bardo Pond, the kind of bands Kaplan describes wryly as "dependably unpredictable", Yo La
Tengo are also, ironically, too experimental to sneak into the public consciousness through the door marked "Classic Guitar Pop". But even at their most elliptical, they still have the fluid dynamic of a road-tested band .

The title of Spec Bebop, the instrumental centrepiece of the new album, sounds like it's describing a musical sub-genre of jazz for the visually impaired - perhaps there's even a Mr Magoo connection - but, predictably, it takes its name from a prewar baseball player. Spec Bebop has the same metronomic, repetitious experimental trademarks as similar pieces by the Anglo-French drone-rockers Stereolab, but somehow it sounds felt , there's a groove to it, while its European counterpart seems merely thought . "Maybe," Kaplan concedes politely. "I wonder if we're not as afraid of being caught jamming as a British band would be. Jamming has very bad connotations for very good reasons, but our goal sometimes is to improvise
something well enough to try and overcome them, I guess there's something really old fashioned about us."

Without meaning to, Kaplan has summed up Yo La Tengo, perfectly, futuristic electric rock music played in the old-fashioned way. I got it! Jazz from the jet age.

Joey Burns has been biding his time. To see his group, Calexico, delivering their enthralling fusion of twangy guitars and widescreen soundtrack atmospherics live, often accompanied by a Mariachi band in traditional costume, one wouldn’t assume that such an explosive performance was the result of patience. But for over a decade, the rhythm section of Burns on bass and the drummer John Convertino have appeared on most of the finest recordings to emerge from the American South West. The sell-out show by their own project, Calexico, at the Barbican last November saw them reaching an audience largely ignorant of their history, and entirely their own. “I consciously wanted to hold back,” says Burns of the years before he stepped up to the microphone. “I’d always sung and written songs back in California before I came to Tucson, but I concentrated on being a bass player for other people. But about 1989/90 I made a conscious decision to focus on learning and listening.”

Burns and Convertino learned from the best, serving with Tucson’s improvisationally skewed country rock band Giant Sand since the late 80’s, with the instrumental combo Friends of Dean Martinez in the mid 90’s, and being the rhythm section of choice for a host of left field talents. But Burns holds a special place for the steel guitarist Rainer Ptaçek, a Tucson mainstay who died in 1997. “Rainer was the person I learned most from,” he explains. “His music was always exciting and transporting and you always learned something new from him. He inspired a lot of the music of the Friends of Dean Martinez, by pushing the envelope, mixing blues with jazz and always improvising.”

After a subdued debut, Burns and Convertino’s second Calexico album, 1998’s The Black Light, hitched Alternative Country moves to a Mariachi horn section and evoked scenes of Spaghetti western soundtrack grandeur. As émigrés to the Southwest, Burns and Convertino, who have supplied music for the local academic Laurence Clarke Powell’s spoken word cd’s of the region’s history, were free to seize upon the desert’s most affecting sounds and images with fresh eyes. “It was easy to identify with the place, and with the music you associate with it - Link Wray, Lee Hazelwood, Ennio Moricone,” says Burns, “But as we were not from Arizona, and as we’d arrived in our late 20’s and early 30’s we were free to dig deeper into local traditions than people who’d been there all their lives.” With the Friends of Dean Martinez, those same source materials seemed focussed through a lens of irony, but Burns and Convertino’s approximation of a Southwestern sound seemed utterly sincere. And on a practical level, Arizona time was cheap. “Tucson is a small town, small enough for there to be no pressure to hang out and take an hour out to experiment in the studio. It’s not like New York or LA where the clock is ticking and each second costs.”

Calexico’s new album, Feast of Wire, sees them at something of a crossroads. The trademark mix of scholarly experimentation offset by hot-blooded infusions of Mariachi sounds has been sacrificed for a more introspective vision. Attack El Robot! Attack! Fades out in a jazzy Gil Evans style horn arrangement; Dub Latina fuses Latin American shapes with studio tinkering; and Black Heart uses the kind of massed descending strings usually deployed by Holy Minimalist composers. Burns reminisces fondly of a show in Barcelona last December, where his fourteen piece band turned a concert performance into a party. “At the end we carried on playing acoustic at the back of the hall and people partied all night. We were able to respond to the mood on the most basic level of being humans playing acoustic instruments to people that wanted to hear them.” But how the virtual fiestas that have defined the Calexico live experience will survive their growing musical development remains to be seen. Burns and Convertino are musicians in flux, probing more unusual areas, but proud of their legacy. “The ‘Desert Rock’ label is like a doorway, and people can identify with that and then go beyond it into all the other kinds of music we’re now experimenting with.”, Burns concedes. “I think we’re all dj’s with our own vision of a radio station in our head and what the mix of sounds can be.”

Calexico play Wheelans, Dublin 8th, 9th Feb, and the London Shepherd’s Bush Empire on the 11th.
Feast of Wire is out tomorrow on City Slang. www.casadecalexico.com

---

Calexico Incognito.
Ten Calexico Supporting Roles

OP8 – Slush – 1997. Calexico, Giant Sand’s Howe Gelb and the violinist Lisa Germano. The duo find their own voice.
Rainer – The Farm – 1997. Three tracks with the late steel guitar guru.
Giant Sand – Backyard Barbecue – 1996. John and Joey back Howe Gelb in extended jazzy jams.
Lawrence Clark Powell – Southwest, An Essay On The Land – 1997.
Neko Case – Blacklisted – 2002. The hidden engine of last year’s alternative country classic.
Friends of Dean Martinez – The Shadow Of Your Smile – 1995. Twangy lounge band’s debut.
Richard Buckner – Devotion and Doubt – 1997. Adding light and shade to songwriterly introspection.
Bill Janowitz – Lonesome Billy – 1996. Turning the former Buffalo Tom indie-rocker into a country troubadour.
Barabara Manning – 1212 – 1997. Suitably erratic accompaniment for the psychedelic auteur.
ABBC – Tête a Tête – 2001. Collaboration with France’s Amor Belhom duo.

We meet at the bus stop. The No.73 has dropped Stewart Lee off from Stoke Newington, the steadily-gentrifying corner of North London whose social characteristics are increasingly providing material for his comedy. A green woollen hat pushing his famous quiff down into a tousled forelock, Stewart Lee the human being looks a lot like 'Stewart Lee', the onstage construct, after having made concessions to the cold March rain.

You probably don't need to be told Lee's story. How the pretty-boy star of Nineties television was on the brink of the really big time with Jerry Springer: The Opera, only to become the target of protests from Christian pressure groups, and the subject of an attempted prosecution for Blasphemy. How he was left skint, demoralised and somewhat beaten up by life, looking – to quote Lee's famous description – like a Morrissey (or Terry Christian, or Edwyn Collins, or Ray Liotta, or Todd Carty, and so on) "who's let himself go". How he nevertheless emerged creatively rejuvenated, and managed to revitalise his stand-up career by developing a persona who was fiercely disappointed by all aspects of modern culture, while simultaneously deconstructing his own methods and showing the workings. How, for the last ten-twelve years, Stewart Lee has been THE cleverest, and also one of the funniest, working stand-ups on the planet. How his routines about Top Gear, the Bullingdon Club, Braveheart, pear cider and racist taxi drivers have entered the immortal canon of endlessly-quotable and thought-provoking comedy.

The first evidence of Lee's astonishing renaissance that most people encountered was his BBC2 series Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, which launched back in 2009. The fourth series of Comedy Vehicle starts tonight, and without much in the way of a publicity blitz from the BBC machine, Stewart has suddenly realised that he probably ought to do some interviews for it, and naturally thought of tQ.

As well as tackling Big Subjects (Islamophobia, Nationalism and so on), series four pushes both Stewart Lee and 'Stewart Lee' to new extremes in terms of the possibilities of a half hour stand-up programme, and in terms of the fragile sanity of the protagonist. It also, almost despite itself, delivers daft laughs, the line involving 2 Unlimited and nano-pathologists being just one to treasure. (If some of the specifics of this article don't make much sense right now, bookmark this page and come back to it again in a few weeks after you've watched the shows.)

We find a quiet corner in a loud city, and we begin.

Brace yourself, because I'm about to compare you to David Bowie and Prince. It's occurred to me that you're similar to them, in a strange way. They would both would take things that might be a bit challenging or difficult for the average listener, like Can and Neu! in Bowie's case or Stravinsky and Miles Davis in Prince's case, and turn it into great pop. In the same way, with the comedians you namecheck and draw upon, like Daniel Kitson, Ted Chippington and Lenny Bruce, you act as a sort of filter, using it to create something that's actually watchable.

Stewart Lee: That would be quite a good criticism, to be honest. In that... [sighs] You feel bad about it to an extent. Not just in comedy, but... Lots of the people I've learned from would never be able to make a living from it, like I have. But you've managed to take different things from them and tune it in. It would be fair enough if someone wanted to be annoyed about that. I mean, I'm like that with Bowie, to be honest. I knew about things like Iggy Pop and The Velvet Underground, weirdly, before I knew about David Bowie. I didn't know what David Bowie was, when I was a kid. I thought he was like Visage. The first thing I knew was 'Ashes To Ashes', and I didn't know he had this whole history. I didn't pay attention. I thought he was one of that crowd. Which is fine, but I didn't know he was something else. I knew the things that Bowie had learned from. Although, an amazing thing happened the other day. After he died, I was in a record shop and there was this thing on, and I thought, 'God, this is really good.' It was like a weird avant-garde record with atonal saxophone on it, but it was quite well-produced, like a pop record, and it was really long. So I asked, 'Who's this?' and it was David Bowie. It was from Blackstar. So, without knowing what it was, I thought it was really great. Which is interesting. Cos he's one of these people who has so much baggage surrounding him that it's quite difficult to get cleanly to the man, isn't it?

I meant it as a compliment. Because I have to confess I've tried with Daniel Kitson and it's not working for me, I never really got Ted Chippington, and while I appreciate the importance of Lenny Bruce and I can dig the mythology, actually sitting down and listening to a double LP of his stuff can be hard work.

SL: I can see that. You know what, it's from a long time ago now, and you need your little dictionary of Yiddish slang. But with Lenny Bruce, lots of the things that I get praise for are things he's already done. I arrived at them independently of him, but was then very disappointed to find that they'd already been done, in 1958. For example, he's got this brilliant routine called 'The Palladium', which is about 40 minutes long. And a third of it is about how he's got this gig in London, and what material he's gonna do. Then he does the gig, and it goes really badly. And then he tells you about how he did it again, and changed the material to try and make it work. You basically hear the same stuff, three times, but the same lines get really different laughs, depending on how he's framed them, contextually. And also, another thing which I may have been aware of, but forgotten about, is 'To Is A Preposition; Come Is A Verb'. And I heard that again recently and went... 'Ohhhh.' I thought I'd found something, but it's there: trying to replace the words with rhythms, and still [have people] know where the jokes are.

The central conceit of your show, for a long time, has been that anything up to half the audience don't understand what you do, and are either indifferent or actively resistant to it. In one episode of the new series of Comedy Vehicle you talk about there being a "two-speed room", and in another you pick on an individual audience member for being "a dead weight in the room". But the more popular you become, surely the more difficult it becomes to sustain that fiction.

SL: But this is why it keeps on going. I always think it'll go wrong, but actually, 'he' (meaning 'Stewart Lee', his exaggerated petulant onstage persona), for about ten years from 2004 onwards, was annoyed for about a decade about people not understanding him. And now, he feels like there must be some problem if they are liking him. There's an element that it must be because he's done something really cheap. Or that they've just come because people told them it's trendy. So you can kind of keep that rolling. It is hard, though, to continue being in opposition, but luckily, the character begins to develop itself. So, when things are going well, he's concerned that there must be some problem because it's going well. Which actually is sort of me, as well...

Did you always foresee this? Did you plan ahead with the layers of meta upon meta?

SL: No I didn't. But actually it reflects me. You read an interview with some really famous comic and the interviewer goes, 'Oh, you've done really well' and they reply, 'Yeah, well I did Edinburgh five times, you know. I've worked really hard.' And I always think it's just a collision of flukes. It could just as easily have gone wrong, and it could go wrong at any minute. And as you say, there are all these people much better than me that I've assimilated, but who somehow didn't find a way of selling it.

[I don't think they're better. But I let Stewart continue.]

And so, there's this awful self-doubt. To be in a room like that Brighton room [the Dome, capacity 1,700]. I did that four times on the last tour, so that's thousands of people. And you feel this sort of confused anger about it, that something must have gone wrong to allow it to be that popular. So, that would make 'him' feel sick that something had gone wrong. Also, none of the things 'he' likes are popular, so there must be something wrong with it.

It's like teenagers, isn't it? A typical thing that teenagers say to grown-ups is, "Oh, you don't understand me!", but secretly their worst fear is that we do understand what they're thinking, all too accurately.

SL: Well, it is hanging onto that adolescent part of me. It really informs the stand-up. He's an adolescent me, inasmuch as he wears his tastes on his sleeve to some extent. He does it as a badge of superiority. He's also an absolutist in terms of what's right and wrong, which I understand, but which is also an adolescent point of view. So yeah, he's like an adolescent, going, 'You think you understand what I'm doing, but you'll never understand!' But the good thing about that is, life sort of takes care of the character, in a way. Because with a lot of stand-ups, you think, 'Why have they come out here, talking about this thing?' Whereas he's told you that he's got a mortgage and kids, and he's got to come out and do it. And then things go wrong, and he gets annoyed by the audience. Or suffers some terrible doubt about the whole of existence. The worst thing that could happen to him is that he becomes more popular, and that would only make him more upset, which makes it even funnier.

And is that also true for you, the 'real' Stewart Lee?

SL: Well, yeah! Not being anonymous is really difficult. Apart from being paid, and not having to worry on a day-to-day basis about money, there's very few upsides to it. You have to spend an increasingly long time away from home, it compromises all your relationships with people you know, life's weird for your kids, and if you're just having an idle chat with someone at the bus stop, you have to think, 'Do they know who I am? Is this going to go on Twitter?' So you live in a state of unease and paranoia. And I'm not the sort of person who would go to showbiz events and become Jonathan Ross' friend. So I'm actually in a double bind. But this thing with ATP [the ATP 2.0 festival at Pontin's Prestatyn, curated by Stewart, subject of cancellation rumours as we speak] is one of the few things, since I became an E-list celebrity, that's actually a nice thing to happen. A bit of the pay-off. So, there's a cliché of people saying, 'Oh, I don't like being famous', but I don't even really like not being famous, either. Being mildly famous, I find it makes everything really really difficult, but it's too late. The sort of personality I do, I don't know if I would have embarked on this, had I known in the 1980s what the 21st century would be like. Which is basically a surveillance state, where you're supposed to be on social media and everyone can talk about you. It's my worst nightmare.



People must tell you all the time that you'd be great on Twitter.

SL: Yeah, well this last 24 hours, I'm really glad I'm not on Twitter. Because I'd have to be answering things that I didn't really know anything about, and I'd rather just wait for the dust to settle and then say something. But yeah, it's a terrifying thing, really. Difficult for the children, you know, they're only little kids and another kid will say, 'Oh, my mum saw your dad doing something'. And he didn't even know I was a comedian, till he had the piss taken out of him at school for it. And of course the kids can then go home and look for it all on Google. And there's some terrible things about me, if you Google me. The third thing that always comes up is a Daily Telegraph page basically saying I'm a kind of sociopath, who should not be allowed to interact with people!

Aside from the imaginary construct of an indifferent audience, how about real-life hecklers? I can't imagine you ever welcome them, but if you've been doing the same show 20 times in a row, do they break the monotony? I was there at your Brighton show where you broke off for a long time to deal with a particularly troublesome one...

SL: I remember that, cos someone filmed it, didn't they? Shame, that. Cos I'm gonna police phones a lot more in future, cos you want to be able to improvise for real, and not worry that it's going to be out there forever. Anyway, with this show, that I've been touring for 18 months using half-hour blocks of stuff for the telly, a heckler like that doesn't matter too much, cos every half hour it's reset to zero. But with something like [previous Stewart Lee stand-up shows] Carpet Remnant World, or 41st Best, or If You Prefer A Milder Comedian, if there was an incident like that, it would often ruin the whole show. Because there's a through-line, and there's an emotional development. And if I have to go high-status, to deal with a heckler, I then often can't get back into the low-status bit of the story. So what I've tried to develop is a way of dealing with hecklers that is low-status. And to treat it as a genuine enquiry, which is what I did with him. And it also came out of, I think, being deaf for ages and not knowing it. [In one episode of Comedy Vehicle series 4, Lee reveals he's wearing hearing aids.] I don't need them now, but during a show I'd often have to say, 'Can you repeat that?' and it would make the whole process of heckling grindingly awful for everyone. But with that guy, he'd come along to this, it wasn't what he thought it was going to be, and he was annoyed. And I actually do sympathise with him, really. Cos since I've had kids... I mean, we went out on Saturday night, got a babysitter, and went a long way to see a thing that didn't really work. And I don't mind, because it's the right of an artist to fail, but it's an expensive mistake, when you have to get a babysitter. And that man may have made an expensive mistake. I wasn't really trying to be sarcastic to him. I was saying, look, you have my sympathy, but this act isn't going to change. And when you invite the audience into that process, it becomes funnier. Because of course you can't do anything about it. You can't become what that person wants, in an instant. Even if everyone hated it, you can't change. Because it is what it is.

Do you ever 'play chicken' with a crowd? By which I mean you dare yourself to deliberately lose the room, then see how far you can push it, how badly you can lose the room, before you bring it back around?

SL: Yeah. Yeah I do. And sometimes it doesn't work. One of the reasons I gave up, for a bit, in the early part of this century, was that I was sort of getting quite good at that. Creating that drama, and doing something with it. And I got a couple of reviews, particularly one in The Independent in about 2000, which said something like 'At one point he loses the room for half an hour, and it's awfully tense, and it's only funny cos it's so bad. And then he somehow miraculously clawed it back.' And of course, what I was thinking was, 'If I say this to that man now, I can bring him back in 20 minutes...' I was working a quarter of an hour ahead in my brain, thinking about controlling the mood. And instead of getting credit for that, I got criticism for having failed. Because they didn't get what was going on. And I thought, 'Well, I don't know what to do now. Because the thing I meant to do, and where I wanted to go, was being reviewed as a mistake.'

In the first series of Comedy Vehicle, I was impressed by how masterly you seemed, how in control of the room, how cocky, almost. You could turn your shoulder to the audience and walk away, safe in the knowledge that you had them in the palm of your hand. But that has disintegrated now, and your character seems barely in control at all. Was that a planned progression?

SL: No, it's just developed. I'd got to the end of that thing. If I was to watch that first series again, I don't think I'd like the stuff in there. Cos he's a sort of high-status figure, dissing people. And there's not enough in it that suggests the criticism's also of him, or suggests that he's got some sort of problem. It may be that it's gone too far the other way now. We'll see what people make of it. There were a lot of compromises in the first series, even down to their insistence that I wore a suit, which wasn't really me. And I fought, fought, fought to have it like Wheeltappers & Shunters Social Club, and suddenly over my head it was decided that the punters couldn't drink in there, which really sterilised it. There was some directive from above which said that drinking would make the viewers at home feel that they weren't having a good time. Which made for this really awkward, terrible atmosphere. And also, the sketches. It would have been really hard to sell to the BBC this idea of half an hour of straight-through stand-up, with sort of filmic support. You had to give them something they understood a bit more, which was the sketches that were in it. But even the good ones broke the flow a bit. The third series, we really cracked it, because the film was this bit at the end which really supports the idea of the episode, and mainly has no dialogue. And Tim Kirkby, the director, did a really good job.

Halfway through the final episode, 'Stewart Lee' has an elongated emotional breakdown. And the laughter which it elicits is nervous laughter. Which is surely the most British type of laughter of all.

SL: It's probably even more English than British. Not cutting you out of this for being Welsh, but yeah, it's probably more English. 'Oh, what's going on, I'm embarrassed!' That bit caused problems on tour, occasionally. The bigger the room, the better it was. In the bigger rooms, there'd be more people who didn't get it, and were heckling and shouting things out. 'What are you doing? Why can't you do your job?' And then you could work with that, and that was great. But in little rooms, of 100 people, a bloke went 'You can't do your job, mate, that's your problem', and it ended up in a confrontation which was this close. And that was difficult. And I noticed in Dublin, when I did a bit about all the people who had died, that I knew, this woman gets her phone out and starts filming me. So I thought, what can I do? So I went, 'Are you filming me? Filming me talking about people I know, who have died? Why would you do that?' I needed to know the truth of it. Then she goes out of the theatre. And when I got home, I thought I'd Google it on Twitter. And it turns out she's a journalist for the Sunday Times for Ireland, saying, 'I've just seen Stewart Lee having a mental breakdown onstage, and I've got film!' And other people are going, 'You know that's the act?' And she goes, 'Well, it looked really convincing to me.' And I thought, 'Aw, I wish Twitter hadn't [been invented]. Cos then, that could have become a news story, and it would have been really interesting to see how that developed. But the problem with social media is, you almost want to say to them, 'Look, what happens here is a secret, don't go telling everybody.'



The little film that rounds off the new series is extraordinary. You're swimming through a vat of urine, surrounded by synchronised swimmers. It echoes so many things: a Busby Berkeley routine, Andres Serrano's Pisschrist, Ewan MacGregor climbing into the toilet in Trainspotting, Nirvana's Nevermind...

SL: Yeah. Yeah. I hadn't thought of Trainspotting or Nirvana, but yeah. What it came out of was, my little boy was having a bad time at school. But you can't really write about your kids, you know? Because it's their life, and other parents would go, 'Is that meant to be about me?' and stuff. Again, that's another problem: most of my life, now, is the kids. And lots of funny things, and sad things, happen involving them, but you can't really write about them cos it's someone else's life. I know there's a whole blogging culture out there where people write about everything, but I wouldn't do that. But then I sort of remembered that I was bullied at school a bit, which I'd kind of forgotten about. Probably a deliberately-repressed memory. And I remembered that I'd been kicked into a urinal and urinated upon. I knew who did it, and what their name was, and that I was told not to tell my mum... And then I remembered that thing people always say, that comedians are comedians because of some terrible thing that had happened to them. And I'd never thought about that, but actually, being kicked into a urinal when you're five is a pretty traumatic thing. So I tried to build that back in, as the reason why.

So, one of the things people would assume 'Oh, he made that bit up' is actually real.

SL: Generally, a lot of the things people think are made up are real, a lot of the things people think are real are made up, a lot of the things people think are spontaneous are cleverly faked, and a lot of the things people think are fake are spontaneous. I've seen people say, online, 'Oh he always does that bit with the heckler. It must be a plant.' I mean, the simple economics of that is insane. There'll be a person on Equity minimum rate, for a week. No, for a year! And you'd have to take them round with you. If you think about it for a second, you couldn't really do it. The problem with now doing so many gigs of the same thing, my improvisation has become decision trees, so I'm almost too good at it.

The symbolism of the piss is incredible. You have this beatific smile, as if you're surrendering to this pissy deluge, gladly drowning in it.

SL: I haven't seen it finished, because I haven't seen it coloured. Cos they had to do that in post-production. Does it look yellow?"

Yes, it looks yellow.

SL: It's a shame, actually. Because I thought I want to do synchronised swimming in a urinal, with a synchronised swimming team. And we got the Olympic synchronised swimming team. It was an amazing day. We were in the tank for 12-14 hours. And there was this underwater camera guy, who came with the place, the tank place, which was out in Essex. And I actually got in training for it. For a year, I went on a diet, thinking I need to be able to swim underwater. So I did all this stuff, swimming through these women, underwater. And then the underwater camera didn't work. And you can just see in the background, of one of these shots, there's a circle of swimmers with me going through it, and that's all that survived. But what that did, in the edit, was threw the focus onto the surface, and they used a lot of shots from above, with us all circling a giant cigarette butt, and it looked really good.

And it's soundtracked by some incongruously sacred-sounding music.

SL: That is Miserere by Allegri. It was a secret piece of music which could only be heard in the Vatican, but then Mozart, as a child genius composer, got in there and heard it, and went away and transcribed it. Initially we were going to go with Busby Berkeley music, but then we thought 'This looks like kitsch, or irony. Will it sustain a degree of sincerity, instead?'

It's what the composer would have wanted.

SL: I hope people think it's funny. It's such an over-the-top, self-aggrandising, over-dramatising response to this childhood incident.

It strikes me that you're the opposite of an indie snob's favourite band: instead of it being cool to say "I prefer the early stuff", it's "I prefer the later stuff". Do you ever meet people who hate your Nineties work, and only like what you're doing now?

SL: Yeah, yeah I do. Also, people who had never heard of it, which is interesting. Well, with that stuff, right, I mean... I was always doing stand-up on the circuit, and I think in my head, that was my thing, and the double-act stuff was this other thing. Which weirdly became much much better-known. I must have done five gigs a week, club gigs, through the Nineties. And we probably did about 30 a year, for four years, as the double-act. There was one tour where the improvisations got really good, towards the end. And of course it was never documented, because things weren't, in those days, were they? I really liked the first series of Fist Of Fun, and it's what we wanted to do at the time. It had a sort of bricolage, plastered-together sort of feel, which was what my sensibility was at the time. It's not unlike Mr Show, that thing in America at the time with Bob Odenkirk who ended up in Breaking Bad, and David Cross. But then the second series was conditional upon it being more Light Entertainment. With a shiny floor. They even did something to a band's music without permission. There was a band called Globo, who used to be Basti, who did the music. And without their permission, the producer got it and put all tones under it and cleaned it up. And I remember saying, 'You have to tell them!', and the producer said, 'Well, we own it.' And I said, 'You can't really do that to someone's music.' So, things like that happened, and the second series was made in a real rush. The second series, for me, was like a drift into Light Entertainment packaging. And I sort of sleepwalked into the rest of it. There's lots of bits, in things that we did, that I like. But it wasn't my plan, in the Eighties, to be in Light Entertainment-y sketch shows.

I have to admit I am one of those people. I was never really on board with your Nineties work, apart from a few bits here and there (notably the trendy teacher character in Fist Of Fun), and generally found it a bit studenty and overly pleased-with-itself. But I'm an absolutely obsessive fan of everything post-Jerry Springer.

SL: Yeah, and I understand that. And I don't mind. It feels like a long time ago, now. And also, it's of-its-time in a way that I hope the stand-up isn't. And there were huge cultural shifts going on, weren't there? Where by about '93-'94. with that New Lad thing, there was the idea that taking a reactionary position was in some way radical. Because there was a perceived PC orthodoxy. And where has that got us? Yeah, thanks for that. I'm sure the architects of New Laddism, which is David Baddiel and Frank Skinner, didn't really imagine that it would end up basically being a mode of government. Haha!

In the TV series Chris Morris is credited as script editor, and also cross-examines you intermittently during the show. Previously it was Armando Iannucci. But how much editing actually happens?

SL: Arm didn't do much, cos he was in America doing Veep. He sort of signed off at the end. Chris comes to see it, every few months. What he's most useful at is helping me with what parts would transition well into film material. Also, there's a bit in the fourth episode where the punchline is, 'The public-private partnership', and he said 'That joke doesn't really make sense. It's not good enough.' And I thought two things, there. One, I'll leave it in but make it worse. And two, I know that he's noticed it. So when it comes to the improvised interview thing, he'll probably criticise it. Which will be good. The film stuff, I used to really labour over writing it, but now I sort of delegate a bit. For example, the 'Orienteering With Napalm Death' thing. My original idea was to have it a bit like Michael Bentine's Potty Time, with a wide shot of a model landscape with these tiny figures of Napalm Death moving over it quickly. Then I said to Tim Kirkby, the director, 'If you had to make a rock video of Napalm Death, and they're orienteering, what would you do?' And he went 'Like this', and he brought up this Norwegian death metal video of these guys in a landscape, and we did it like that. So I basically take out all the scripts, for the film bits, and I say to the team, 'If you were doing this for real, what would you do?' and try to reverse into it from that. The main thing about having Chris as a script editor is that there's not much script editing you can do, because it is what it is. It stands or falls live. But the fact that he's seen it and knows it means that on the last day of filming, when I sit down for four hours with him and I don't know what he's going to say, he knows the stuff inside-out and he knows how to undermine me.

In the interview clips, he plays a sort of disappointed headmaster, and you're like a sheepish schoolboy.

SL: Yeah. And that works really well. Because, like you said, the character was more arrogant in the first series, and now that I'm seen on some level as a success, I need to be smashed down again."

You and Richard Herring worked with Iannucci and Morris as writers for On The Hour, but were edged out when it transferred to television as The Day Today. Presumably any ill feeling from that era must be water under the bridge...

SL: We've never really talked about it. It wasn't much to do with Chris. What happened was, there were four writers who weren't performers. And they were me, Rich Herring, David Quantick, and Steven Wells, who was like the Swearing Consultant. What a sad loss, a very nice man as well. Anyway, a lot of the characters, if we didn't invent them, we named them or whatever. So when it came to doing it for TV, our agent said that we ought to get part-ownership of things. We were offered a very generous amount of minutes-per-week writing, but we held on for a share of them, which seemed like the just thing to do at the time. We were told that wasn't happening for anyone, but it did happen, with Patrick Marber, who ended up getting a percentage of Alan Partridge, even though he'd not been involved in the initial writing of it. I always worried that this had never been resolved, and there was bad vibes about it, although there never seemed to be when I met people involved. Then about five years ago, this book came out about On The Hour (Disgusting Bliss: The Brass Eye Of Chris Morris, by Lucian Randall), and I read in there that apparently I was on a flight to Scotland with Armando Iannucci, where there was bad turbulence, and it was discussed. I said, 'We might die in this flight, so let's get all this sorted out.' And the brilliant thing is, I have no memory of that whatsoever. So I read this book and thought, 'Oh, I'm glad that's all sorted out.' I was probably drunk – I was young, I was on a plane – so I can't remember it at all. So it's a nice thing to find out, to read about yourself. That I was a quite reasonable person, even though I have no memory of it. It's fun for us to say we invented Alan Partridge, but we didn't. We invented a sports writer, and Steve Coogan did this voice, and that was it. It wasn't much to do with us. But other people have made more out of less, haha!

You often mention that people repeatedly nag you to tell jokes, and just be a gag-merchant, even though you're trying to achieve something different. Which brings to mind another musical comparison: Scott Walker. For all that we respect what he's doing on avant-garde records like Tilt or The Drift, there's always a part of us which would love it if he just went onstage and belted out 'Make It Easy On Yourself' and 'The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore'.

SL: Well, you know, basically I've forgotten how to write those sort of jokes. And when I do one by accident, I'll put that in and make a big deal of it. Because the rhythm's so odd. The problem with doing them at all is that it then gives people who make trailers something to work with. Then they make a weirdly unrepresentative trailer. Partly the reason I do it is because there aren't jokes, and I want to show people: I could do it, I could do it, but then I'd have to develop a different kind of character. If people think you can do something, they trust you more to not do it. With a lot of the free jazz guys, and I know this is something people take the piss out of me for but I do find it helpful, when John Coltrane's doing all his free stuff, the beginning and the end is my favourite, cos people know he can play. So when he does the free stuff, he's not gone mad – he's chosen to do it. He must have some sort of plan. But what a lot of the free people do now, they just do the middle, haha. So people go, 'Oh, they can't play.'

It's like that Simon Munnery thing you've quoted...

SL: Yeah, he says, 'Many are prepared to suffer for their art. Few are prepared to learn how to draw.' So what you wanna do, there, is show people that you could tell jokes: 'Trust me, I could do it, but you have to trust that I'm doing something else.' And that's what's got me into trouble, before. When I really tried to start again, in 2004, and really think about what I was trying to do in stand-up – and I had to do something, because I was in a lot of trouble financially and I knew I had to make something work – that's partly why I started to take the piss out of famous comedians. [Lee fans will be familiar with his mocking references to the likes of Michael McIntyre, Lee Mack, and "those Russell comedians they have now"] You'd get reviewers going, 'It's not shocking like Frankie Boyle', but I wasn't trying to do that. You can't say, 'It's failed because it's not that.' So I overstated my case, really, in order to clear the decks, so they couldn't compare me to anyone else. But the problem with that is, had I known how well it might do, I probably wouldn't have said that, about those people. Because the things I said hang around, and it doesn't make sense now you're doing four nights at Brighton Dome. Another weird thing, related to that, is that all phases of your life exist simultaneously. As if you're responsible for them all, now. Actually, even this series, it's got in under the wire but if you were starting it from scratch now, you'd have to think about Europe and all these other things. So the stuff's already... not what you'd say now.

That's interesting because, even though your feelings on shows like Mock The Week are well known, I wondered if you ever hanker for a format in which you could deal with bang-up-to-the-minute material, ripped from that day's headlines, rather than the broadly topical subject matters you deal with in Comedy Vehicle?

SL: Well, no. Because I associate that with the world of work. Because as well as doing temp jobs and doing circuit gigs in little pubs, for the first four or five years I was in London I was writing for Week Ending on Radio 4 and things like that, where you had to come up with topical jokes. And a lot of the radio things that me and Rich did, and when we wrote for things like Armando Iannucci's show, you'd basically get all the papers, and then you'd do mathematical equations about how things fit together. So it just feels like maths homework, to me. I did so much of it when I was young that it feels like an office job. If there's a fifth series, what I'd try and do for that, if I did news stuff, is that I'd take all the names out of it. And make it about big global trends in economics and so on. So you don't lock it down. For example, in the news today, scientists say we're in a new thing, not the Holocene age but the Anthropocene age. Which means we now define our age as one where climate is controlled by man, which it previously hadn't been. Well, that's not going away, is it? There's no danger of that feeling out-of-date. That's an example of something it would be good to do: broadly topical.

What's your view on the biggest topical story of the moment, the European Referendum?

SL: I want us to stay in. Principally, above all, for environmental issues. For example, this [gestures at London traffic in the street behind us] is two or three times over EU limits, out here. And what Boris Johnson – who wants to leave – does, to avoid the fines, is that when the particles get too heavy, he sends people with anti-freeze to spray the air around the readers, so the particles stick to the ground. That is documented. Because he doesn't want to pay the fine, he'd rather do that. He's let two of the machines go offline in central London and not fix them. But the reason we've got clean rivers, the return of various species, the last line in our battle for the defence of the environment against capitalism is the weird EU laws that say, 'You must have ten birds in this wood', and stuff like that. And everyone takes the piss out of them, but everything's dying at a hell of a rate. So above all, I'm pro-EU for environmental reasons. I want Europe to defend us, and our environment, against our own government. And other things, like disabled access is all because of the EU. And if you've ever been on the wrong side of a moral panic – and I'm talking about the Jerry Springer: The Opera thing, not the ATP thing – then things like the European Court of Human Rights would be very important to you. It's all very well people being against it when they've never been threatened with being tried for blasphemy or whatever, but at some point you might be the one who would benefit from cross-territorial human rights legislation. All the stuff about money and trade agreements, fine, talk about that till you're blue in the face. But that's my reason. And also, intelligence-sharing about ISIS, and the fact that Putin obviously has military ambitions. So I think all those things are reasons to stay in. And also because it will annoy Boris Johnson.

Do you think there's an argument that Boris Johnson's the most dangerous politician in Britain, and could be our Donald Trump, because people think he's 'a bit funny' and ignore his underlying agenda?

SL: Yeah. But Johnson has no views or values whatsoever, about anything. It's all about positioning himself. Actually, though, you watch Gogglebox, and all the people on their sofas see through him instantly. A random [selection] of British people, from UKIP voters to old Asian guys, they all go, 'Yeah, but whatever he says about Europe, it's all about him.' All the normal people on Gogglebox all said that. Which is very gratifying. But they also all said, the people on Gogglebox who I think of like my friends, 'We've not got enough information to decide.' Which I do think is a problem.

In the live show, last year, there was a routine involving an England flag covered in cat diarrhoea, and the cat responsible was called Paul Nuttall From UKIP. In the TV show, the cat's called Jeremy Corbyn. Why the switch?

SL: What happened there was, I had this whole half-hour on nationalism, and I had this idea of hanging it on a cat called Paul Nuttall From UKIP. Then within two weeks of the election, that whole routine fell off a cliff, because no-one was the least bit interested in him, or could remember who he really was. And I thought that was a shame, cos it was a good half hour, that. I did it one last time, at the start of September in a pub in Kingston, to prove to myself that it wasn't working. Nothing. But then, that week, Corbyn got in trouble for not going to the rugby match, and not singing the national anthem. So, ideas of national identity are still such a big deal, but they're not attached to UKIP now. They're attached to attacking Corbyn. So I thought, how can I bring him into the same story?

What's your personal view on Corbyn?

SL: I think he's an object lesson, in the way that the press have decided that whatever he does, they'll tear it apart. Just when I was starting to root for Cameron, when he was standing up for Europe, the next day he was really really pathetically rude to Corbyn in Parliament. Corbyn's like this weird Christ figure whose very presence reveals everyone else to be horrible cunts. But, you know, he is a Eurosceptic and I'm pro-Europe, and I'm not convinced about his defence position, all sorts of things. But it's nice that our children will grow up with an experience of what the Left meant."

The new series contains possibly the most avant-garde thing you've done so far. There's a routine about the columnist Rod Liddle always looking like he's got food on him, and it ends with you just making a chomping sound into the microphone for five minutes, like Paul McCartney chewing celery on 'Vega-Tables' by The Beach Boys. And you've somehow got that onto national BBC television.

SL: That's partly what I hope people will find funny about it. Not the thing itself, but the fact that it is on television. You know what's sad about that is, I filmed the shows in December, and all the dates had sold out so I added some more in January and February, but most of the routines peaked around the time I filmed it for telly. One, sadly, went off the boil round about September and I couldn't get it back, so I had to let it go. But one got better. And the one that got better was that one. I worked out how to time it, to make it funnier, even though there's no words in it.

Never mind putting jokes in the trailer. Imagine putting THAT in the trailer.

SL: That's what I want, you know? In the first series I managed to get them to make trailers that were all silent. But they won't do it again, so I'm trying not to give them any. They haven't noticed, though.

Another thing that makes it even funnier is that Rod Liddle isn't even a towering cultural figure, really. It's not like he's Katie Hopkins. A lot of people won't really know who he is.

SL: There's something funny about it being Rod Liddle, where people will think 'I'm not actually sure who he is, and why has he got food on him?' But if you do know who he is, he does look like he might have some food on him. It doesn't really matter either way. And the other thing with that is, when you make a joke about politicians, what happens is that all those bloggers and those people in The Daily Telegraph and The Times, they all go online. And the worst one is Tim Montgomery, who has no sense of humour whatsoever. So when I said that the government destroying the BBC was as bad as ISIS destroying all these temples, in a column, he did a thing saying 'The Guardian's gone mad. No-one would think this.' And yeah! No-one would think that, it's for comical effect. So he's the one with the biggest power and the least grasp of nuance. But if you do a joke, you go der-ner-ner-ner-ner-ner-ner, ner-ner-ner-ner-ner, bang-bang, about the news, then they go mer-mer-mer-mer, picking it apart in a sneery way. Because they don't have a sense of fun, or of the absurd, any of those people, it means that what they absolutely can't cope with is something about food being on one of them, that goes on for ages. Because they sort of think, 'Ah yes, what's this all about?' Like the headmaster coming in, going, 'What's this supposed to be?' and you're going, 'Nothing, sir!' And the headmaster goes 'It means something, doesn't it, Lee?', and you're going, 'No, it just means some food's gone on Rod Liddle.' And the headmaster says, 'Yes, I know, it's about anal sex, isn't it?' and it's not.

For all the boundary-breaking stuff you do, it can't be denied that a lot of what you do involves gross-out humour, giving people permission to laugh very easy laughs. The dog's cock in your face, vomiting into the gaping anus of Christ, and so on. In lieu of zingers and one-liners, there is that stuff, for lo-com-denom laughter.

SL: Well, yeah, but normally it's connected to some sort of idea. I dunno, we'll see what happens next. Every series feels like I've got to the end of a particular idea.

But there is also a small but significant extent to which you're a catchphrase comic. For example, there's a bit where you're talking about someone collecting mini pots of jam, and you say "He likes all the different types of jam... plain...", which regular viewers will remember is a throwback to the old routine about crisps.

SL: You know what, it's interesting you mention that, because originally I was saying, 'He likes all the different types of jam... Raspberry...' or whatever, then at the end of a gig, a punter came up to me and said, 'You should say plain, the same as you said plain crisps.' And I said 'It's a good idea, that. If I do that, get in touch with me and I'll give you a writing credit.' But I don't know who he was, so hopefully he'll notice it. Because the idea of 'plain jam' really made me laugh. Cos what would it be? Just gelatine of some sort. But my dad did really like jam. He used to be a rep for a cardboard company, and he spent a lot of time in hotels, and he would being all the little pots of jam back. He never bought jam, but always had a lot of small pots of jam. I'm the same. I've got enough shampoo for ever, now.

It's as if you're giving people reward points for loyalty, if they get the little in-joke.

SL: Yeah. The producer wanted to cut that bit, cos he thought it was only funny if you knew the other one. But I thought 'plain jam' was funny anyway.

Of course, you also play with the idea that the audience don't follow what you're doing at all, and are unreceptive to it. That becomes part of the plot, almost.

SL: I noticed the first few pieces about the telly show, a lot of them have picked up on how in the first episode I say something about how the room's cold and unfriendly. And they've written 'He does well, despite what he admits is a cold, unfriendly room.' But I have to say that, because I need to get into the Graham Norton routine [monologue in which he initially claims to be pleased for Graham Norton when he won a BAFTA for Best Comedy Show, but slowly reveals his simmering resentment and frustration], as if I didn't want to do it. I have to offer up this story, saying, 'I can see you're uneasy. To put you at your ease, I'll tell you why I genuinely like Graham Norton...' And I have to give them this whole ten-minute Graham Norton BAFTA story as if it were not the set, but it's this extra thing. Because if it looks like he intended to say it, it would look really gratuitous. But if you accidentally end up in a position where you're pretending to be James Corden spitting on the prostrate body of Graham Norton, but it wasn't your plan, that's sort-of acceptable. And you have to give them permission to laugh again. It's become a critical term, that phrase, 'permission to laugh', and I'm not exactly sure where it came from. But I have to pretend that the room is a struggle, to allow me to do that. And you'd think, if you watched it, that would be obvious to a critic, because it sets up the next bit.

That Graham Norton bit reminded me of Columbo, in the sense that from the moment you say you're really pleased for Graham Norton, we all know where it's going to end up. But the fun is in seeing how you get there.

SL: You know what, right. I don't watch much telly, but in the last two years I've watched every single episode of Columbo. My wife loves it, and she said 'You've got to watch this.' And I think it's the funniest thing. I think he's absolutely brilliant, Peter Falk. What a hilarious actor and what brilliant writing. So yeah, exactly that. In the first five minutes, you know who the murder is, and you know that he knows. So, I'd never thought about it but yeah, I suppose it does what stand-up does. You know what the end of the joke is, so how's he gonna get there? I like the fact that Columbo, almost in a postmodern way, destroys the idea of what a whodunnit's supposed to be. Because it shows you who did it! Also, normally the woman or whoever's done it will say something in the first three minutes and he'll raise his eyebrow, so you know he knows it's her. Also, you know there's a lot of improvisation in it?

No, I had no idea.

SL: Yeah, that's one of the great things about having it on DVD. And I looked it up online and he'd just say things to people. Like, 'That's a nice coat you've got there, where'd you get it?' And they'd got, 'Oh, um, I got it in the shop, Lt. Columbo.' So Peter Falk does what Lt. Columbo would do. He just throws in random questions all the time, and you can see them behaving really weirdly.

One tends to think that post-modern mucking about, like breaking the fourth wall or improvising or messing around with the form, is something that came through into mainstream television in the late Eighties/early Nineties, with shows like Moonlighting and Dream On. But Columbo was already at it a whole decade earlier.

SL: Yeah, but it's in Laurel & Hardy, isn't it? And it's in Chaucer. In a way, this is true of everything: if you knew more about it, you'd have given up. Cos you'd realise it had all been done."

The device of the Unreliable Narrator, which you employ via the onstage 'Stewart Lee', is also something that works well in pop. An obvious example being 'I'm Not In Love' by 10cc.

SL: Or 'Do You Know The Way To San Jose' by Dionne Warwick, where she's making out she's really happy to leave LA, but she isn't. Clearly something's gone really wrong, but she's saying she's really glad to be going, 'LA is a great big freeway...', like she didn't even wanna be there. I love that stuff.

I've seen you quote the comedic poet John Hegley regarding a workable business model for performers such as yourself, whereby you only need a small but loyal fanbase to sustain a living.

SL: When I was trying to start again, he said to me, and it was a really low number, something like 5,000 people. He said if there's 5,000 people and they all come and see you once a year and spend £10, you can live off that. Like a lot of things, once I'd given up any personal ambition is when it started to work. Like the bloke in The Shawshank Redemption who, when he doesn't want parole, they give it to him. And in 2004, when I'd been on telly in the Nineties, and I'd co-written and directed this Olivier Award-winning musical thing that didn't work out, I thought it's too late to do something else, so I thought about what I could do to cut things down and pare it back, and aim for that 5,000 model. Also, I'd just discovered Myspace. Which sounds hilarious now, but if you could get 5,000 Myspace fans, and get them to follow you, that seemed sort of do-able. And also, I realised that a lot of the bands I like, they've always got a CD to sell, and they probably see more on that than the one that's been released by Virgin Records or whatever. And I'd come back every year with a mainly different set, maybe one of the hits. And it seemed like, if you saw the business model as being like The Fall, rather than some big massive band, then weirdly you could keep going.

A more flippant approach, which I've also seen you quote, is that the ideal situation is to whittle away your audience down to the size where you can just stop the show and go to the pub.

SL: Oh, that was probably Kitson. Really, Daniel Kitson's what people think I am. He really doesn't do press at all, and he doesn't go on anything, or engage with anything at any level. And yet he will sell out six dates at the National Theatre."

You joke, in the TV show, that you hope it doesn't get recommissioned. And while I don't imagine for a moment that you actively wish to fail, is there a natural ceiling for what you do? Above which the whole thing would waver, falter and crumble?

SL: Well, I can deal with writing a live show that's one of the story shows, with the music and the sets and all that. I can deal with that. But if they recommission another series, I won't do that other thing. So I'd be doing something that's not quite what I ought to be doing, creatively, and I'll do it because the days when the BBC will pay you to make something are probably on the way out, anyway. And I've got the kids now, I've got a pension plan, I've got a house, I've got collateral. That's another thing that's changed the character: he's not living in a flat above a shop any more. So one of the reasons I'll carry on is for the kids, because I worry about what would happen to them. Between us, my wife, Bridget Christie, who's also doing well, we've had a good two or three years. But anything could happen. Suppose that ATP thing did fall apart, and people go 'Oh, you did that.' They won't, and I haven't killed anyone, but you know, you worry all the time that anything could scupper it.

Financial advantage is increasingly a factor in the arts. The independently-wealthy are taking over, after a Post-War window of relative meritocracy. People like Julie Walters and Laurence Fox have spoken out, on different sides of the debate. A recent survey by The Sutton Trust found that 75% of classical musicians were privately educated, as were 42% of BAFTA winners, and even 19% of BRIT winners (meaning they're over-represented by 171%). What do you make of that?

SL: I'm an interesting part of this problem. First of all, you have to be a little bit careful about it. Bob Mortimer's been sounding off about how he's looking forward to the film Grimsby, 'Some Oxbridge private schoolboys' take on the working classes' or something. But the co-writer of that, with Sasha Baron-Cohen, is Pete Baynham. Who's from Cardiff, and who left school at 15 to join the Merchant Navy. So, on average, they're less posh than Bob Mortimer. I can see things from all different angles, which I think shows itself in my act, in a weird way. I've got a chip on my shoulder, about not being privileged. But I'm also privileged, in that I got a part-scholarship and a charity bump into a private school. And I went to Oxford, at a time when you could get a full student grant. And it felt not-impossibly-exceptional that different types of people would be there. So on the one hand, I'm within spitting distance of the kind of education that people like Cameron had. In fact, I wrote a long routine where I pretended I was friends with him. Which is sort of interesting, because it's almost conceivably true. But then the actual circumstances of my childhood are nothing like that whatsoever. Also, this is a big thing, but being adopted, you feel like you have a slight disconnection from society. You understand that if the dice had rolled differently, you could be anywhere. So I'm able to move through it and see it from different sorts of places, and that's the privileged position to be in. But I did a talk at Oxford Brookes University recently and someone said, 'How can we stop Oxbridge dominance of the arts?' and I said 'Well, don't invite me to speak to you!', haha! So, class is not a defining thing for me, but it's gonna get worse. Those surveys go, '75% of people doing this job went to public school.' Well, of course they did. It's not just about going to public school. It means their parents had 15 grand a year spare. Which means that when they're asked to do an unpaid internship in London, they can afford it. So it doesn't actually tell you that the school does that, but it shows there's a correlation to wealth. And I think it's absolutely, utterly dishonest of someone like James Blunt where he did that stupid thing where the Culture Secretary said there was a social imbalance in the arts, and James Blunt called him 'a classist gimp'. It's obvious when you look at it: the support networks that got a generation of people through it, like squats, and student grants, have all gone. We've got this whole thing where London celebrates punk rock this year, as if it's some part of our heritage. But it fundamentally would never have existed, in this city now. Because it's the music of cheap accommodation. It's utter hypocrisy.

Have you noticed a similar change happening in comedy?

SL: I have. If you went to the alternative night with all the weird acts, which 25 years ago was downstairs at the Market Tavern on Islington Green on Essex Road, you'd see Simon Munnery who is the son of a plumber. Or Johnny Vegas, who is not a member of the upper classes. The same thing now, which is the Alternative Comedy Memorial Society at the New Red Lion, is a very good night, but there's a higher proportion of people whose parents bought them a flat. Inevitably, because you can't do that sort of stuff that doesn't pay, unless you've got some sort of fallback position.

Is there an argument that an unintended consequence of the Alternative Comedy movement in the Eighties, which blew away the traditional working-class comedians in velvet jackets, was that it paved the way for all this?

SL: A lot of people have said that. It may even have been Alexei Sayle who said it, that you can disenfranchise the working class from comedy just by saying they don't conform to a middle class liberal set of ideas. That said, in the Nineties and the Noughties, there were all kinds of people on the comedy circuit. You'd go round the country on the gig network and there'd be an ex-soldier and all sorts of people. But you wouldn't get that now. Partly because for 20 years there was a Jongleurs and a Comedy Store-type club in every town, and they're all closing down now. It's like when a mine closes, and you see all these guys and wonder how they're going to make their mortgage. That's one of the saddest things of all.

The fourth series of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle begins tonight at 10pm on BBC2

Darren Hayman, a former John Peel favorite adept at addictive indie-jangles and precise writerly nuggets, has released thirty-one tracks, written and recorded at the rate of one a day throughout last January.


The double CD is stripped of the tang of arrogance by Hayman's obvious talent, and relative low-profile. Sleeve notes paint the punishing project as an attempt “to reject the creative spark" and focus on “hard work, resourcefulness and intelligence", but January Songs' vast smorgasboard of tasteful and literate art pop merely emphasises Hayman's direct line to the muses.

The massed chorale “We're Tired Of Getting Dicked Around" is a “We Shall Not Be Moved" for the Occupy generation.

Though I'm personally invited to drop a star by Lee tonight, I'll resist the temptation. This rating comes with a caveat, however. The ursine comic's often sublime shtick (here ranging over politics, race and age) still requires those allergic to alienating repetition, knowing deconstruction and long-game subversion to deal with that, albeit to a lesser extent than before.

Shakespeare, assured my English teacher, always supplied a direct hit even in his most involved passages. So it is with fellow West Midlander Lee, who can despatch his targets with caustic brevity: "You have to have imagination on the left... to look at Ed Miliband and imagine that he represents anything other than the destruction of the post-war socialist dream."

For UKIP deputy leader, Paul Nuttall, there is more trademark, and therefore more elaborate, rebuff. Lee takes Nuttall's view that Bulgaria should retain its high achievers to a nihilistic conclusion, reaching it via a backwards chronological rundown of immigration that includes the evolution of fish to land animals.

The mix of pathos and playfulness is heightened in a closing sequence where Lee puffs himself up only to puncture his ego and portrays himself as a burnt out performer, berated by his family who apply their own 'dropped star' rating to him.

‘No one is equipped to review me.’

(Stewart Lee.)

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that a comedian in possession of a good humour, must be in want of a TV deal.

For the comics that routinely leave the stage to rapturous applause, TV executives wait in the wings, plotting how best to repackage the sweat and salt into shine and polish. Often the gig they’re given is a world away from stand up. Just look at Romesh Ranganathan’s output: travelogue, sports panel show, and now judge on Dave’s Judge Romesh. TV wants stand ups, but they don’t want them doing stand up. The viewing figures for Michael McIntyre’s Big Show are far higher than Live at the Apollo­, proving that comics as entertainers, as opposed to comics as comics, ensures ratings.

The comedian that bucks this trend is Stewart Lee. The comedy vehicle he was given wasn’t an squabbling travel show, where a parent with questionable views is pitted alongside their exasperated offspring for LOLS; nor a late night chat show, where the host talks to a depreciating grade of celebrity until the plug is pulled. No, the comedy vehicle stand up comedian Stewart Lee was given was a stand up one. Not since Dave Allen in the 70’s and 80’s had television commissioned a series where a comic could be a comic. In Allen’s seminal series he combined sketches and routines, typically on one topic, over the course of half an hour. Lee more or less adopted this structure for the first series of the knowingly named Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle. Over the series the format changed slightly, dispensing with the sketches that punctuated the stand up, placing instead interrogation scenes where Lee was challenged on his material. (These Grand Inquisitors were played by Armando Iannucci in Series 2 and Chris Morris in Series 3 and 4.) The programme was a commercial success and relatively cheap to make, therefore it's no surprise the BBC didn’t recommission it for a fifth series.

Although in many ways they have.

Stewart Lee’s Content Provider is the fifth series in all but name. Initially, the tour show was made with a live audience – not TV one- in mind. However, with it being green-lit by the BBC, Lee brings back the tropes he invented first time round: the Grand Inquisitor returns, this time in the form of Watchmen creator Alan Moore, and the fourth wall doesn’t so much get broken, but bulldozed. Like a possessed Exorcist spirit, Lee's head is in constant rotation, working the audience in front of him and those at home.

The show begins with the comic in a darkened room, waiting on his adversary. Footsteps are heard. A chair is taken. Alan Moore sits himself opposite; his face bad cop-bad cop. Lee, typically smug and conceited, is on the back foot, disarmed by the frown facing him. The Headteacher’s reproach begins. Who are you and what do you think you’re doing? Like a callow youth, Lee bends to his master, conceding that he shouldn’t be back on our screens, that his work isn’t fit for public consumption. These Kafkaesque inquisitions are so important to Lee’s show as they remind us of his underdog status. Sure, he’s playing to a packed audience; yes, he’s got a TV commission, but in the grand scheme of things he’s an unknown. Show a member of the public a picture of him and they’re as likely to say ‘Leonard Di Caprio’s let himself go’ as they are to say, ‘That’s critically acclaimed comedian Stewart Lee.’ For the arrogant character of Stewart Lee to work, we have to believe his author doesn’t hold power. He’s Lear on the heath, railing against his position in society. A king in a kingdom that doesn't acknowledge he's king.

We cut away from Lee’s cross-examining to see him appear on stage with the painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich, a nineteenth century piece of art serving as a metaphor for man’s place in a confused world. Lee tells us that he wanted to use it to explore an individual’s role in a digitised time; however Brexit happened, then he felt like people would want him to comment on that. But how do you create a tour show, whose receipts will feed your family, about a situation that’s in constant flux? Lee explains his lack of Brexit material with, ‘I don’t see the point of committing to a course of action which has no logical or financial justification.’ There’s not many comics that get a punchline out of such syntactical elegance. It’s also why Lee is not for everyone. You have to concentrate when listening to his comedy. David Simon, writer of The Wire, said he didn’t want his programme to be consumed but watched. ‘Fuck the casual viewer’ was his mission statement, and in many ways Lee’s too. Better to be loved by a few than kind-of-liked by many.

Although Lee claims he hasn’t got any Brexit jokes, he spends his opening twenty satirising the political players who've orchestrated the funeral march. Here, he uses popular comedy techniques of ‘rule of three’ and ‘pull back and reveal’ to create a punchy, raucous beginning. This bit allows Lee to tell his audience that he can do jokes, but just chooses not to. Towards the end of this segment, he deliberately derails his train of thought, and criticises the crowd for not buying into a joke. Now, this is just a contrivance. The set has been going well and the material well received. The reason he lambasts the audience is for tension. Comedy necessitates tension. Without tension there can’t be release. Release is the stuff of laughter. Lee has to feign struggle, otherwise his low status persona won’t get away with the things it says. In promoting himself as critically acclaimed, he has to prove how publicly he’s not; this ensures his boasts appear hollow, of little worth.

In disturbing the rhythm of his comedy, Lee positions himself as an alternative comedian. He’s not working to the same beats as other comics, rather he’s playing with form and tension in a style more akin to Jazz than plodding rock n’ roll. Although this sounds pretentious, it’s a breath of fresh air to comedy fans. It’s not always the case of predicting the punch-line when it comes to comedians, but you can at least guess where the joke is going to be. Having someone move beyond conventional joke structure to do something more theatrical with character and status is infinitely more interesting and nourishing.

The stage set up for Content Provider has Lee as island man, marooned against a sea of comedy DVD’s. Wittingly, he’s physicalising how he stands apart from the stand up crowd. These props allow him to move onto the central thrust of the show: how the physical has become redundant in our digital world. The DVD’s that used to be bought for fifteen pounds at Christmas are now being sold for a penny. It makes more financial sense for a comedian to buy their own DVD second-hand and sell them as brand new, then it does to flog their originals and have the tax man and production companies cream off the profits. The idea of a comic buying their own DVD’s is absurd and again reminds the audience that Lee isn’t Carr or McIntyre. In fact, the joke that follows about Jimmy Carr buying his own DVD is one of the best of the evening, challenging Britain’s favourite entertainers and their rampant capitalism.

His families incredulity towards his success ends the first half – another nail in the coffin of Lee’s ego; then we’re back in the interrogation room with Moore asking: ‘What do you do during the interval? Cry? Comfort eat?’ It’s all a cumulative distraction piece: the audience not getting the joke; his family not valuing his comedy; Moore criticising the material. All of this falsifying failure is from the Tommy Cooper playbook: appear like you’re getting it wrong when in fact you’re getting it very right.

The second half of the show again reminds the audience about the painting. (Lee knows this memory will be important for later). He tells us that he wanted to explore an individual’s role in a digitised world, but then Donald Trump happened, and people wanted him to write about that. You can probably already see how the second half begins in the same way as the first: the punchlines are the same, but the subject has changed. Structurally, Lee is in a class of his own. This parallelism isn’t a technique that will ever concern Joe Pasquale, but it isn’t solely there for art's sake. The replication gives the piece a feeling of unity and serves as a metaphor for a world that doesn’t heed the mistakes of the past, but continues to repeat them.

Lee holds the under-40’s responsible for the state we’re in. Yes, the old voted for Brexit and the Conservatives, but the young were compliant in allowing it to happen. The exaggerated mimicry of a young person is sublime here and shows we’re not just witnessing a verbal masterclass, but a physical one too. Some great gags about Game of Thrones are thrown in, which set up some momentum for the protracted ending. This is a shaggy dog story of how his grandparents couldn’t just click online for deviant sex; instead they had to travel far and wide to gather the materials needed to make it happen. Fans of the comic might recall the Give it to me straight routine when listening to this. Even though you know the tale is tall, you invest in it anyway. It’s the level of detail that Lee puts into the description that mean you are assimilated – not alienated – by the artifice at work.

As for the very end, Lee brings that painting back. And the way he subverts its meaning is so profound and clever that you’ll want to get off your seat and applaud.

Content Provider is the ironic title of a majestical piece of work. It uses a work of art to show how art is overlooked today. Its message seems to be that instead of admiring an artist’s work, we spoil it by using it to promote ourselves. Maybe in writing this blog I’m guilty of that: Am I trying to earn cool points by celebrating something cultish? Am I trying to receive some reflected glory by praising it? I hope not. What I’m trying do is urge you the gallery to put down your phones, take a good long look at Content Provider, and admire the work of an artist. For in a career spanning thirty years, this might just be Lee's masterpiece.

"I’d forgotten this was a radical town,” says Stewart Lee during one of this evening’s many semi-improvised asides.

Touching on everything from losing out on a Bafta to Graham Norton, to hating yoghurt-drinking under-40s and orienteering with Napalm Death, Lee’s self-styled passive-aggressive approach may be very familiar, but it certainly hasn’t worn thin.

His esoteric trails of thought, introspective dissections of comedy and faux jibes at the crowd may still occasionally rile some critical opinion; in particular, Lee references a recent zero-star Telegraph review. But the laughs certainly come thick and fast tonight, typically often at our expense in the audience.

When one poor chap in the front row dares to scurry out at the inopportune moment of a routine’s conclusion, the resulting rant segues into an impromptu extended first half. In fact, Lee performs for almost three hours this evening in a set that proves he’s lost none of his idiosyncratic charm with age or his notable successes of recent years.

So although Lee laments that “it’s taken three decades to half-fill a room in Bournemouth” while scoping out how long it’ll take him to pay off his mortgage, from where we’re sitting his Comedy Vehicle seems to be pootling along nicely.

Even if he does suggest its appeal is limited to vegetarian Guardian readers.

The title of Stewart Lee's latest show - Carpet Remnant World - is anything but easy to comprehend. He loosely ties it very carefully as a punch line towards the finale. In this manner, he demonstrates his style of comedy, taking a form which is subtle in its reference to a future joke you've not yet heard, which vastly dissimilar to the modern styles of what he likes to call the "Russell Howards of this world" with shows like "Joke Gags 8" or similar, more in-your-face advertising.

This is mainly because he knows he doesn't need to try. He barely advertised his 2011 Edinburgh Fringe show which still sold out. He prefers the smaller rooms to the big money rakers such as the Hippodrome (with a £1 restoration fee). Lee publicly mocks his audience on stage, yet he still has a large and growing loyal fan base.

Yes, he does mock the audience, and he preferes some sections of the crowd to others, often those who are quick-witted and can see the joke before he's said it. This preference is just an act though, repeated in all his shows, but it works and even unites the audience in their laughter. He cuts those who are slow (or just can't laugh for fear of suffocating) with the killer line "You don't belong here."
In this way, he is the Ratko Mladic of comedy. Yet his vehement rhetoric is what drives the high-speed laughter locomotive, picking up passengers at Satire City via Topical Town - but only rarely slowing down for stragglers.

He compares being religious with having a mental illness, but his mockery of religion isn't specific. Lee tells the audience that his lack of understanding of the Muslim faith is what prevents him from drawing as much humour as he does with Christianity, yet he shows his contempt for comics who slate Islam or its followers.
This isn't hypocrisy; he doesn't like the racist stylings of Roy "Chubby" Brown or Jim Davidson, but shows that you can mock sensitive topics such as religion without inciting personal mockery. He ends that topic by working the audience against their own prejudices that are inherent to society and then mocks the larger lack of intellect abundant in the broadcasted media.

Within the 2 hour show, he covered topical issues as well as his own pet hates, but in own unique brand of humour, soaked in sarcasm and steeped in satire. To those who say his list of comic achievements fall when he tackles the surreal, I say to them half of his show was a lead up to a man made up of stationary with a typewriter for a head and little green strings for DNA. Noel Fielding, eat your heart out.

Lee disdains being labelled as a "post modern critique of performance comedy", when in actuality he is far from being "post" anything. His grip on topical issues is as contemporary now as it was 20 years ago, and as for being a critique - it's his cynical misanthropy that so attracts me and so many others to this comedian, a.k.a a fat Morrissey a.k.a 41st Best Stand Up Ever.

I’m sure most stand-up regulars know that situation where you have to force laughter out, even with a comedian you really like. Their set might be good, but you might be doing it to keep the energy up, or just out of courtesy. However, whenever I watch Lee, live or not, the laughter is honest and never forced.

The reason lies in the fact that most of Lee’s comedy doesn’t come from the set-up and punchline formula, even though it is there; it comes from everything around the joke. Lee’s characteristic deconstructive style emphasises the absurdist nature of all stand-up comedy, it makes you realise the bizarre situation of one person standing in front of hundreds of strangers, trying to make them laugh.

Everything you could expect from a Stewart Lee set is there; meticulously planned moments of audience contempt, frantic repetition, and unrelenting self-deprecation. It’s stand-up pedigree, go see him.

Stewart Lee is, ironically, one of the biggest comedians working in the UK today. Despite years of stand-up based around the fact he felt he wasn’t as popular as he should be, his wry persona, deadbeat delivery and general disdain for the audience has seen him offer a refreshing kind of stand up; one that progresses the medium, rather than striving for imitation. 

Lee brings his new show Content Provider to De Montfort Hall this February as part of the comedy festival, headlining for two nights at one of the city’s largest venues. It seems that the audience he berates for not understanding his comedy may be finally getting the joke. “I am very lucky that an open-minded, clever, tolerant, inquisitive and loyal audience have stayed with me, and self-seeded themselves, for decades now,” Lee explains. “But, on the other hand, I always come back with new shows that develop on what they have come to expect, and I never short change them.”

Content Provider is also a book by the same name, a collection of the best of Lee’s newspaper columns over the past five years. In much the same way as his stand-up, Lee pushed the barriers of what a column is supposed to be. “Having accepted the jobs, I tried to discharge them to the best of my abilities, whilst at the same time trying to bend the rules and push the fringes of the ‘funny column’ genre where possible.”

For those who have read his Observer pieces, his articles have covered wildly varying topics, from advising Corbyn to take advice from Putin, to a piece purporting to be about the Olympic legacy, only to be mainly about a decomposing cat. The absurdity of his comedy has become increasingly popular, as is much of what was previously deemed ‘alternative comedy’, meaning it has begun to move into the mainstream. Yet much of his work has been met with intense hatred, with big Lee-bashers including the Daily Mail and The Telegraph, something he revels in by posting their reviews on his website and even using them to advertise his books.

Lee’s strength lies here; his seeming disregard for anything that might offend him. When the audience doesn’t laugh, he explains why they should. When there is a bad review, he uses it as marketing material. “I may pretend to hate doing stand-up,” he says, “But I really do my best.” His persona’s cynicism and superiority is the result of meticulous craft, and those who don’t respond to his work are often missing the point entirely.

Content Provider is in very much the same vein as most of Lee’s work to date, examining what we know about being a column writer and dismantling it. “A decade or so ago I got a bewildering text asking me if, in the light of attending the Kilkenny Comedy Festival, I had any ‘content’ which I would be willing to ‘provide’ to local ‘content providers’. This was my first encounter with the phrase, and I came to understand that they were asking me if I had any text or film or audio, which I could give to mobile phones or websites,” Lee explains. “We like to imagine we are artists, us writers, but it is funny to see what you do described as if it is just filler to put onto gizmos, which I suppose, increasingly, it is.”

Described as an attempt to “understand modern Britain”, Content Provider in its live form will inevitably have to incorporate Brexit. Little more than a month after the vote that divided the country, the Edinburgh Festival began and comedians had to adapt to the new, untrodden landscape of a post-Brexit Britain.

“People that I had routines about had been instantly forgotten,” Lee explains. “As it is, it’s evolved into something that sort of addresses that issue – what kind of content do I provide to an unstable divided society?”

The society comedians were reflecting before had changed drastically, and so in turn did their shows. Lee was clearly in the Remain camp, something reflected in his columns leading up to the vote, but how does he – rather than his persona – feel about the reality of Brexit now it’s happening?

“Anecdotally, racism is on the rise. Austerity is, it’s official, going to be prolonged and worsened. There will be no cross-continental plan, that includes us, for the Syrian refugee crisis or climate change and environmental pollution. It may be that people will get what they wanted out of Brexit in the end, and feel like the sacrifices have been worth it. But for now there are a tense few years ahead. That said, my comedy is like a horrible vulture feeding off the carcass of human misery, so I’m laughing.”

Fortunately, so is everyone else. Lee sold out both his stand-up show and book festival talk this year in Edinburgh, and has become an increasingly iconic figure in comedy. And so naturally, his return to Leicester’s Comedy Festival is hotly anticipated. “My first ever paid out-of-London gig was Leicester Poly with Jerry Sadowitz in 1990. I remember the hotel room had little soaps and shampoos that you could take away with you. I had never seen anything like it.” Who said Leicester wasn’t a luxury destination, eh? We also have the pleasure of being credited as the place in which he met his wife, fellow comedian Bridget Christie, in 2005. Yet, there’s one thing missing this year.

“Leicester has changed in 26 years. I miss the German progressive rock shop, Ultima Thule, by the station, which is online now, and was run by two identical twin brothers who really knew their stuff.”

Europe’s longest comedy festival this year will see Lee share the stage with other big names including Jimmy Carr, Susan Calman, Dane Baptiste and his former comedy partner Richard Herring. Sadly, it doesn’t look like a Lee and Herring reunion is on the cards.

“We would need to rehearse properly for ages, and there is no time or financial incentive to do that, and also the basic relationship of the double act doesn’t make sense for two men of nearly 50, predicated as it is on an essentially adolescent relationship. That said, I think it might be funny to do it in our 80s.”

Well, at least we can keep it in our diaries for the 2040s. And, if he is right, Stewart Lee will no doubt prove to be as popular then as he is now. “I’m lucky that my stage persona makes more sense, rather than less, as I get older.” If this is a hint at a move towards grumpy old man territory, then it is a humble remark. Lee is in a league of his own, brilliantly breaking down audience expectations of comedy and outwitting us at every turn. But of course, what we think isn’t the point anyway. “People can come if they want but it is what it is and it’s not my fault if they don’t like it.”

Stewart Lee: Content Provider will be on 8^th & 9^th February at De Montfort Hall.

Jamie Hall and Ben Farrell review the latest TV shows.

Jamie Hall is group head of production at Lime Pictures.

The format for Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle is Lee performing stand-up material in front of an audience interspersed with sketches. It has a great set that looks like a cross between the Press Club and a Soho jazz bar.

The prime targets for the satire were Dan Brown, Chris Moyles and Jeremy Clarkson, a rich vein to mine then, but sadly it just didn't make me laugh. And in this industry at the moment, we really need a laugh more than ever. As we all know, taste in comedy is a very personal thing, but sadly Stewart is not for me, this time.

I loved the Alexander McCall The Number One Ladies' Detective Agency series of books and with the TV show having the combined talent of the greatly missed Anthony Minghella, Richard Curtis, the Weinstein Company and director Charles Sturridge, this should have been television gold. It was slow; the characters were at times clichéd; and it projected a view of Africa that I didn't recognise. However, it was great entertainment and was perfect Sunday night viewing, I look forward to more soon.

As a fan of Skins I was really looking forward to the third series and how the transition to a new cast would be managed.

The new actors had big shoes to fill. Sadly, I was disappointed with the beginning of the series. The wit and humour had been lost and I felt it was trying to shock rather than entertain, I fell out of love with it. However, after viewing this episode I am pleased to say the love affair is back on. A cracking story of teen bisexuality, twin rivalry and GBH produced a vibrant, witty and emotionally charged episode that gripped me and will have me coming back for more.

Kathryn and Megan Prescott and Lily Loveless delivered performances of great maturity and emotional intensity, surely stars of the future. But Skins always leaves me thinking, why the hell were my teenage years so boring?

Ben Farrell is head of comedy at Objective.
Comedy on television is a threatened genre. So it's in the best interests of comedy producers that every new show, regardless of production company or channel, is brilliant.
On paper, Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle should have been excellent. Lee, the hero of latter-day stand-up, performed new material alongside illustrative sketches, featuring comedy god Kevin Eldon, with script advice from Armando Iannucci and Chris Morris.

Unfortunately, apart from the title sequence, the Vehicle was not good. The stand-up sections didn't work as well as they should, mainly because of choppy editing and some strange shot decisions, concentrating on a lamp or Lee's hand, or the top of his head – never the best way to translate stand-up on to screen.

As a low-energy performer Lee wasn't best served by being placed in a dark working men's club. It brought the whole show down.

And the script, from stand-up to sketch, needed subbing down. It felt baggy, like a show that had been filmed before the running order had been decided.

To be fair, it would have had a fraction of the resources of international co-pro The Number
One Ladies' Detective Agency, which is a well-crafted and faithful adaptation of the popular series
of books. As a drama, it wasn't my cup of tea – I didn't enjoy the books and so wasn't likely to enjoy the TV show. This was very gentle family fare in the tradition of Doc Martin, or Miss Marple, the only difference being that this featured an entirely black cast in an African setting.

I'm jealous of Skins. It's not just that the storylines make me feel that I went to all the wrong parties when I was a teenager, but it's also the sharp scripts from the likes of the Dawson Brothers and Robin Ince. And whereas most of us just pay lip service to the term "360 commissioning" (second only to "edgy" in the broadcasting dictionary), Skins has created a unified cross platform show that works.

So which do you find funnier? V.D. (contraction thereof) or 'comedian' (not) Stewart Lee?

His TV shows are pathetic - even the invited audience are bored out of their minds. He is not unlike Brand and the slobbering, fawning Ross (OBE) - smug, overpaid, arrogant, apparently stupid and not remotely amusing or entertaining.

I'd prefer a trip to the clap clinic.

Rachel McCarron and Sean Breadin have already recorded the Pentacle Of Pips album as Venereum Arvum, its abstract drones and dark tones appealing to the sort of neo-folk fans who sell organic vegetables to fund their occult memorabilia collections.

Songs From The Barley Temple is a brighter, more welcoming, proposition. Modal, improvisational techniques, Bredin's exotic stringed instruments, and McCarron's pure and unaffected vocal revivify an erudite selection of traditional British songs.


Silver Dagger shines anew. A spritely reading of The House Carpenter dissolves into an abstract pagan fug.

The ideal October album.

The role of a stand-up comedian can take many forms. On the one hand, they provide simple light relief and act as a release from life's pressure cooker of trials and tribulations. On the other, they can be important social commentators who shine a light on the absurdities and inequalities of our daily existence.

The very best stand-ups can combine both roles seamlessly. Stewart Lee does just that. For years, Lee was considered the ultimate "comedians' comedian" but had been off our TV screens for the best part of a decade. Before his recent return to the BBC with his Comedy Vehicle show, his last brush with mainstream success - actually, make that notoriety - was his role as co-writer of Jerry Springer: The Opera.

And we're never too far away from a little controversy when daring comedy is concerned. We've seen Russell Brand being hung out to dry over the "Sachsgate" palaver and, just recently, Jimmy Carr was forced to apologise for a badly-timed Remembrance Day gag about the Special Olympics.

Pertinently, all of these elements feed into Lee's latest show, If You Prefer A Milder Comedian, Please Ask For One. Spinning off a comment from the current enfant terrible of stand-up, Frankie Boyle, that all comedians should pack it in when they reach 40, Lee - who is now aged 41 - weaves in all manner of serious subtext behind some hilariously silly surrealism to blow that argument out of the water.

First, a riff on taking a pirate friend to a children's play park to break the ice before he really lets his anger off the leash to plough into the Top Gear team.

Although Lee argues that at his age he finds life merely provokes a feeling of disappointment rather than anger, he goes on to prove just the opposite. Jeremy Clarkson's supposed carefree political correctness is exposed as calculated cultural button-pressing designed to create the maximum amount of column inches in publicity. And Richmond Hammond fares even worse as a simpering coward who "hangs around with the playground bully".

Lee expands the point by telling us that he had once attended the same school in Birmingham as Hammond and saved the diminutive presenter from school bullies, thus creating his present on-screen persona. It's a totally credible story until Lee tells us he has concocted it all just to make a point. And when the stand-up says that he'd wished Hammond had died in a recent car crash on the show you can sense the audience en masse seem to shift uneasily in their seats as they're not sure whether to laugh or not. When Lee tells them "it's just a joke" and refers them back to Clarkson's oft-used get-out clause you can see his point.

But there's no tiresome finger-wagging here. Lee's a self-proclaimed "middle class liberal", but his argument holds water.

Lee's technical skill is awesome. His use of "callbacks" - a trick of the stand-up trade where key phrases or lines are returned to at key sections of the set is second to none. He takes his time, makes fine use of pregnant pauses, and can shift the emphasis in a routine through all manner of emotions in an instant.

By the end, this man who is supposedly too middle-aged to conjure up more than a dejected shrug about life has thrown his microphone to the ground and stomped off into the Royal Circle to deliver a frantic routine about, would you believe it, the tagline to a Magners pear cider advert. If this is what Lee calls mild, you can only imagine what he would have been like when he was young enough to get really worked up.

Stewart Lee has written another show, additional hours of content for his consumers. He arrives on stage bearded, barrel chested, announcing ‘Julian Assange has let himself go.’ The joke is self-referential, alluding to an earlier routine in If You Prefer A Milder Comedian. Lee has such a loyal following he can now callback to jokes he made years ago. Intertextuality is not something that concerns Roy Chubby Brown, but it’s something Lee gets a kick out of.

Lee’s last show Content Provider toured for two years, culminating in a BBC2 release. Centred around Caspar David Freidrich’s painting Wanderer Above A Sea, it was a masterpiece of language, structure and form. From the parallel set up of its first and second act to the subversion of Freidrich’s painting at the end, the work demonstrated a craft and stagecraft rarely seen in comedy. It’s little surprise that Alan Bennett describes him as ‘the J.L. Austin of what is now a sloppy profession.’ (J.L. Austin was a British philosopher of language. I learnt that last night.)

So how do you improve on what is peerless? Lee is a regular contributor to The Guardian; his articles a vitriolic lament on Brexit and its architects. All of which have been collected into a book, March of the Lemmings. With the title of this show Snowflake/Tornado there's a strong suggestion the political maelstrom will be addressed here.

The first half of the show though is less about Britain’s decision to leave the European Union and more about mainstream programmers decision to leave Lee well alone. Netflix, the biggest buyer of stand-up comedy, has his show Comedy Vehicle available to stream. Comedy Vehicle was critically acclaimed; BAFTA, Chortle and the British Comedy Awards garlanded it. Inspired by Dave Allen, each episode took a different subject, distilling it into smart laughs. However, Netflix, the biggest producer of stand-up comedy, listed the show as ‘Reports of sharks falling from the skies are on the rise again. And nobody on the Eastern Seaboard is safe.' This type of thing wouldn’t happen to Jimmy Carr or Ricky Gervais. Soon Lee is dissecting the semantics of Netflix descriptions, pouring scorn on how Carr is described as ‘serving’ up comedy – like jailhouse slop – and Gervais ‘slings’ trademark snark – like he’s throwing testicles at trans people. Insulting comedians is Lee’s stock-in-trade and a big reason why we love him. His targets are white privileged males, the counter-culture bad boys who ‘say the unsayable’ for millions of pounds, or mainstream stars who don’t say anything at all.

Soon we’re onto Dave Chapelle, Rolling Stone’s 9^th best comedian of all time. Of course, Lee references how his Times position surpasses Chapelle’s. The pair are from two very different schools of comedy, yet their paths are similar. Both enjoyed critical success for their sketch shows: Lee in Fist of Fun and Chapelle in Chapelle’s Show. Both too had long hiatuses from stand-up. Yet the quality of their returns aren’t comparable. Ever since Lee reclaimed the microphone, his output has been prodigious. In the comedy arms race he is packing more than his rivals. Repetition, parallelism, shaggy dog stories, pull back and reveal, anti-comedy, deconstruction, clowning, analogy - he has it all. Chapelle, on the other hand, seems to be living off past glories, barely getting out of second gear. For all that, his tickets sell for hundreds of pounds; Lee’s £27 - with a complimentary £20 DVD.

So the idea of these two men crossing paths is funny. And it’s this tale that forms the bulk of the first half. Despite the cheeky pronouncement that his critical placing is higher, Lee positions himself as the underdog. For someone packing out theatres across the country, he is a master of a deception. A magician. A specialiser in sleight of mouth. We grow so accustomed to hearing him talk about his failures and slights that we forget how schadenfreude is occuring in a sold-out room. Our sold-out underdog tells us about how he was so keen to see Chapelle’s intimate gig he spent £150 on tickets for him and his wife. Our sold-out underdog tells us how with his show finishing before Chapelle’s he looked forward to meeting him. Of course, with the megastar arriving late, entourage in tow, Mariah Carey rider on ice, the G2 conference doesn’t materialise - at least how it should. The pay-off is a contrivance, but a funny one.

By the end of the hour we’re back to Alan Bennett, with a surreal impersonation that you wouldn’t even see Rob Brydon or Steve Coogan attempt. Yes, Lee doesn’t live up to his billing of ‘sharks falling from the sky,’ but he achieves a tornado of comedy, in which nobody – whether it be on the Eastern Seaboard- or the auditorium- are safe.

The second half seeks to address former Leftie, Tony Parsons, assertion that Lee is a ‘BBC approved comedian who can be guaranteed to dress to the left.’ In other words, a woke snowflake or as Parsons defines, ‘professionally sensitive.’ Much of the material invokes the ‘Political Correctness’ routine from 41^st Best Stand-Up Ever! In fact, I heard a punter complain after the show that the second half was all old routines. It isn’t. Correct: the scaffolding is the same, but the content is different. His Gran’s punch-line of ‘It’s political correctness gone mad, Stew’ echoes his earlier output, however the set-up of nuclear disaster is different. If anything it’s the sign of the times that old routines can be updated in today’s world. The battles we thought we'd won, we're having to fight all over again. History repeats itself. Therefore, it stands to reason that the master of repetition repeats himself too. By Lee’s own admission this second hour requires more work. The pacing is a little off and the coda tagged on. With weeks more of previews, this second section will soon match the first.

To get two shows and a DVD for under thirty quid, in the centre of London, is great value for money. And although Parsons means ‘BBC approved comedian’ as an insult, it’s in fact a true compliment. Lord Reith, whom established independent broadcasting in the UK, declared the purpose of the BBC was to ‘inform, educate and entertain.’ These triumvirate qualities are embodied in the comedian’s work. Snowflake/Tornado made me think. It taught me things. It made me laugh. With this being a work in progress, the painter is still painting. Have a look at his tour dates and see the unveiling of another masterpiece.

Camden’s historic counter-cultural hotbed The Roundhouse reopened in 2006, with a concrete stack of bars, holding areas and walkways appended to its tubby body, like those glaringly modern visitor centres attached to prehistoric remains at World Heritage Sites. Crossing the metal bridge from the brightly lit 21st century annexe into the darkness of the 19th century engine house proper we leave our humdrum modern lives behind, as we prepare to view another ancient monument of a distant age, the exiled king of the fabled land of ‘80s Indie Rock, Morrissey.

Morrissey is condemned to live in the shadow of The Smiths, the band that saved the lives of thousands of bedsit depressives, but 2004’s You Are The Quarry surpasses any Smiths album, and the one Smiths show I ever saw was an oddly underwhelming Midland stop on the Meat Is Murder tour, where sausages were thrown at Morrissey’s unhappy face by loutish wags forearmed with offall. But tonight, middle aged men and a healthy smattering of new fans chant Morrissey’s name, football crowd style, without a sausage in sight. And at 9pm exactly, a screen drops to reveal their idol and his five piece band, styled in tight blue denim suits like the capering prisoners of Elvis’ Jailhouse Rock. In the predictably slack world of rock and roll even Morrissey’s punctuality seems subversive.

Last month, after waxing nostalgically about the England he grew up in, Morrissey was again accused of racism by the NME, and subsequently claimed by The Telegraph’s pop critic as a right wing genius alongside Ezra Pound. But Morrissey, by artistic necessity the eternal outsider, at least has some new tormentors to kick against. “Apparenly” he says, “my name is trouble.” The group launch into the first of four Smiths numbers, How Soon Is Now, a bequiffed, slow-motion throb, that ends with Morrissey prostrate to the clattering of a ludicrous Spinal Tap dinner gong. Morrissey is one of the few performers left who radiate the old-fashioned aloof star quality that entitles him to indulge in such theatrics. The love in the room is infectious and almost overwhelming, yet Morrissey’s between song banter, as usual, becomes more apologetic and less confident as the evening progresses.

The back-catalogue is trawled, in anticipation of a forthcoming greatest hits album, but surprises include an incredibly obscure, and rather wonderful, Smiths 12” single b-side, Stretch Out And Wait, and a defiant National Front Disco, a stomping depiction of a family losing their son to the far right. Its uncomfortable refrain of ‘England for the English’ reminds us, provocatively, that writing about an unsavoury view is not the same as endorsing it. New songs - That's How People Grow Up, Something Is Squeezing My Skull, I'm Throwing My Arms Around Paris, and Mama Lay Softly On The Riverbed, with its martial snare drums, - draw on glam rock power chords and skiffle beats, familiar stylistic platforms for Morrissey’s bitterly defeated romanticism. Long term lieutenant Boz Borer and the band move into forestage phalanxes of flailing guitars that seem self-consciously choreographed to echo classic rock iconography, and the multi-instrumentalist Chris Pooley adds textures to the songs that sometimes seem perilously experimental.

Morrissey works the room, at one point shamelessly crouched in a spotlight with his back to us while Pooley extends the descending riff of an extended fade into a cinematic moment of melodrama that still manages to tug the heart strings, for all its forced theatricality. If Morrissey’s self-absorbed sadness is really an act, then it’s an act that works brilliantly. He closes, bare chested, with a knowing and valedictory Last Of The Famous International Playboys, like a battered prize-fighter holding aloft a hard-won trophy that he has no intention whatsoever of surrendering.

Knock knock? Who’s there? Benjamin Netanya. Benjamin Netanya who? That’s right, can I come in and see Theresa May please?

Before you clog up the below-the-line comments for this column with criticisms, I am aware this knock-knock joke doesn’t quite work, logically. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was left standing at the unanswered door of No 10 on Monday, yes, but his name is not Benjamin Netanya. It is Benjamin Netanyahu.

And of course, when asked “Who’s there?”, Benjamin Netanyahu would have given his entire name, not an inexplicably truncated version of it in order to set up an illogical punchline. He’s not going around the globe trying to amuse world leaders into taking action against Iran by entertainingly editing his own name to make a joke work. He’s not that clever.

While Theresa May’s Monday “Doorgate” scandal blew over quickly, if Jeremy Corbyn had left a world leader standing unwelcomed at his door, we would never have heard the end of it from the biased British news media.

An event doesn’t even have to have happened for us to be able to hear already the frivolous tone of dishonest levity Laura Kuenssberg would have deployed to cover it, like a gossipy schoolgirl, breathlessly telling you the bad news in a voice suggesting at once self-righteous horror and salacious excitement.

If smelly Tania Masters had wet her pants in RE, Laura Kuenssberg would ask the other girls if they had heard about it, but would do so in such a way as to suggest that while, of course, the incident was awful for poor Tania, it was also somehow thrilling for everyone else, and if they gave her 10p they could even see the pants, which she had screwed up in her pocket.

The accomplice-cartoonists of Brexit Britain would have fed the Corbyn’s door event into their satanic child-labour-driven comedy mills, the gears grinding, vast slabs of satire-stone crushing the incident down into cartoon pulp.

Look, there’s a scribble of Corbyn now, in the Express or the Mail, peeping out of the curtains of his Islington home, as a hooded dying skeletal figure labelled “The Future of the Parliamentary Labour Party”, its rotting feet tripping each other up in tangled anti-EU bunting, raps at his door, Corbyn hoping that if he pretends not to see the horrible vision, it will just go away.

It’s deadline day. Sitting here in this annually familiar Leicester hotel room, wearing just last night’s stand-up-sweated pants, I tried to imagine a parody of a newspaper cartoon of Corbyn, and instead accidentally conjured an image which sums up my current genuine feelings about the Labour party, in the wake of Wednesday’s Brexit vote.

I went back over the start of the column. I toyed with opening it with a more accurate version of the imagined knock-knock exchange, thus: “Knock knock? Who’s there? Benjamin Netanyahu. Benjamin Netanyahuhu? No, it’s Benjamin Netanyahu, can I come in and see Theresa May please?” But in the end, I didn’t.

On balance, I felt the slightly less realistic “Benjamin Netanya” version of the knock-knock joke, with which I opened the bit, was punchier, despite its structural flaws. And my editor here at the Observer says it is important to grab the reader’s attention, and not get bogged down in long-winded explanations of irrelevant details. She has also suggested that metaphors drawn from the writer’s life that have an unexpected correlation with current affairs are also an acceptable framing device.

Two summers ago, clearing decades of foliage from an abandoned garden, I learned a belated respect for rats. Our cat went for the baby ones as they emerged fighting from long undisturbed nests, but they stood up to him on their hind legs; a quarter of his size, they hissed and spat and screamed and punched at him like prizefighters, before he took them by their necks and tossed them onto the burning bonfire. But most Labour party MPs just lay down before the second Brexit vote and threw themselves, and their party, onto the pyre without a struggle. There are braver rats.

Some of the rats put up a fight, admittedly. Chuka Umunna tabled a motion challenging the Brexiters to stand by the promise of £350m a week for the NHS that their leaders had been happy to literally stand in front of in poster form last summer, and it was rejected. The press crushed Ed Miliband with his tombstone-etched pledges. But abandoned “£350m for the NHS” posters are being used to gift-wrap boxes of empty promises.

MPs also rejected attempts to ensure the status of long-term EU nationals here, whose uprooting would be at least as traumatic as the airport stranding of Muslims that millions worldwide turned on Trump for last week. When even the concept of shame has evaporated, where is there to go? You cannot shame a Brexiter, it appears. Politics was already post-truth. Now it is post-shame as well.

Without truth or shame there is nothing to keep the Brexiters in check, except Tim Farron. Unlike truth or shame, Farron at least has the advantage of being an actual living thing, rather than an abstract concept. This must count for something I suppose, but the huddled masses edged towards Tim by an utter disappointment with Labour’s Brexit performance are running on hope.

Other politicians, in contrast, become abstract ideas. Ken Clarke has taken the form of a hush-puppied jazz banshee, warning of doom in six-eight. And when I look at Nigel Farage, I see only a man who, before masturbating, would put on a pair of driving gloves. And a cap.

Even the exact location of Paul Nuttalls’s current home has become mysterious, as if he travels the country in a Tardis-like workman’s hut powered by hate, targeting its next destination with a steam-punk dashboard gauge that detects the smell of despair; a smell which seems to be overwhelming the whole country.

Meanwhile we learn that our economic saviour Donald Trump will be knocking at our national door in June. What’s the betting his visit will be planned for the Glastonbury weekend, same as the Brexit vote was, taking 250,000 potential protesters, torn between laughing ironically at Lionel Richie and making a difference, off the streets?

Knock knock. Who’s there? Donald Trump. You’d better come in then, no one else comes round to play any more.

Stewart Lee’s Content Provider is now touring, see stewartlee.co.uk for details

The explanation on the introductory page to this blog tells us (although I already knew) that the blog is largely about me watching football matches and maybe reviewing the occasional book. Good luck in finding the book reviews.

But it is summer now, the swifts and swallows are here, I have strawberries growing in my garden, I am regularly eating barbecued food and as I write this I am enjoying the sensation of having bare feet and exposed legs; life is sweet and there aren’t any football matches to go to. Happily, life goes on in wonderful football-free ways and a few weeks ago I went to the Mercury Theatre in Colchester with three friends to see the ‘comedian’ Stewart Lee. I put the word comedian in inverted commas because, as Stewart Lee takes time to explain, he is not like Michael McIntyre or Russell Howard; he is not a populist comedian, his humour is partly jokes about jokes (metahumour) and certainly in my experience some people don’t understand that, but he is critically acclaimed and is perhaps Britain’s ninth best comedian.

Stewart Lee de-constructs comedy, he is able to do this because he is a very clever bloke; he went to Oxford. Of course I went to Oxford too, but to the Manor Ground and Kassam Stadium, Stewart Lee had a place at the university. That last sentence was a sort of a joke; I said I’d been to Oxford like Stewart Lee, trying to make you think that I had been a student at the university; but I then qualified the statement by saying that I had actually only been to Oxford to visit the home ground of Oxford United Football Club. This is a football blog of course, hence the football reference.

But my explanation is in the style of Stewart Lee, although he would have first berated you as the audience for not having laughed enough, implying that you are not intelligent enough to understand the joke, hence the need to explain it. Anyway, that’s what Stewart Lee’s humour is like; it is self-referential, comedy about comedy and you might say it’s existential. Existential philosophy is about being and the ‘being of being’ what it means to be, to exist. If you’re not entirely following this now you should probably seek out a different sort of football blog, perhaps one by Gary Neville or Alan Brazil. Haha! That was another bit of Stewart Lee type humour there, did you spot it?

Former footballers who become pundits indulge unknowingly or unselfconsciously and without the necessary irony in a version of Stewart Lee’s style of humour. The likes of Robbie Savage will opine that no one can comment authentically and with real credibility on professional football unless they have played the game like he has, by which he doesn’t mean badly. Robbie Savage and those of his ilk say that you and I don’t understand the game. Of course he is completely wrong; in fact our views are the only ones that are valid because we haven’t been infantilised like he has by making a living and a career by merely playing a game. Playing Doctors and Nurses as a child is nothing like being a doctor or a nurse, but playing football really is just playing football, wherever and whenever.

Last season at Portman Road we could have witnessed some Stewart Lee humour too, as some supporters publicly, and others more privately, condemned manager Mick McCarthy for the poor standard of the football played by his team; “Your football is shit, your football is shit, Mick McCarthy, your football is shit” they sang, to the tune of Sloop John B, possibly the only tune Ipswich football supporters now know although for my money it is one of the more disappointing tracks on the Beach Boys Pet Sounds album. They didn’t seem to understand however that Mick is only out to get results and with the resources he has available, a bunch of not particularly talented players, playing “shit football” was probably going to bring in more points than trying to play attractive football. Mick McCarthy didn’t really say too much, but he was clearly a little exasperated by the ‘supporters’ at times and I like to think that when the team did win, and on one occasion late in the season they managed to win two consecutive games, he was tempted to deliver his post-match press conference as Stewart Lee and to sneer at the crowd for not having understood that his team had won. A regional newspaper review of one of Stewart Lee’s TV shows once stated “His whole tone is one of complete, smug condescension” and that I think is what Mick McCarthy should be aiming for in his post-match press conferences. Stewart Lee used the phrase to advertise his next tour and Mick’s CV would be all the better for his use of it too.

Football is just a game, a laugh, everyone needs to understand that.
Anyway, Stewart Lee at The Mercury Theatre, Colchester was great; I hadn’t laughed so much since ……I don’t know, I really should start to make notes on how much I laugh and when. Finally, if you liked this ‘review’ of Stewart Lee, such as it is, then you have possibly seen him already and if you didn’t you might not want to.

In November 1986, The Cowboy Junkies huddled around a single microphone in a Toronto church to record their breakthough second album, The Trinity Sessions. The four Timmins siblings played country music in a spacious, spooked style, like a Nashville Velvet Underground, but when their third album, The Caution Horses, arrived on a major label sounding more conventional, it seemed their experimental leanings might have been accidents of economy rather than artisitic choices.

Tonight, the Union Chapel’s stately 19th century architecture, and the group’s acoustic trio format augers well. They open with a gloriously somnambulent version of Neil Young’s Powderfinger, with Michael Timmins’ minimal guitar implying Young’s famous lead. Songs from the forthcoming At The End Of Paths Taken album take on softer hues here, with Jeff Bird supplying some especially elliptical harmonica solos. The singer Margo Timmins sometimes undermines her brother’s lyrics with stagey gestures and actorly intonations, but a cover of Townes Van Zandt’s Flying Shoes sees her and the group finally achieve the gloriously sedated country groove their name implies. With most gigs you spend an hour waiting for the band to hit a peak. With the Cowboy Junkies you’re hoping they’ll find the confidence to do less. An encore of The Trinity Sessions’ Misguided Angel is spolied by a middle-aged man in a blue shirt doing a ridiculous bent-double run from the toilet in front of the stage, reminding us, in the midst of a glimpse of heaven, that we are foolish mortals with no sense of timing.

If the Cowboy Junkies had actually gone away, they’d be ripe for a comeback. A clever promoter would ask them to perform The Trinity Sessions in its entireity and their stock would rise. As it is, they just need to remind everyone that they’re still here.

'Notebooks out, plagiarists!" ran the sleeve notes of the Fall's 1991 album Shiftwork. The veteran Manchester band's frontman, Mark E Smith, tends towards an inventive paranoia, but in the case of the American indie quintet Pavement, he couldn't have been more right. Their acclaimed 1991 debut, Slanted and Enchanted, was the sound of the Fall's back catalogue invigorated by a youthful American college band's lightness of touch and a stateside slacker's knowing sense of irony. Even so, Pavement's wholesale reappropriation of Smith's consonant-ridden jargon still seemed a little brazen. Wasn't Slanted and Enchanted's Our Singer just an exact rewrite of the Fall's Hip Priest? "Yeah it was," Stephen Malkmus, Pavement's wiry, bookish singer and guitarist admits, "but there were other songs too. Conduit for Sale was New Face in Hell. Jackals, False Grails; The Lonesome Era was The Classical. It didn't worry me at the time. I don't know what I was thinking," he muses idly, as if he'd never considered the subject before. "We don't sound like them any more."

This much is true. Since their scratchy lo-fi four-track singles of the late 1980s, Pavement have blossomed from inspired copyists to fully fledged artists who, on last year's Wowee Zowee, finally found their own voice. With their new album, Brighten the Corners, released on Domino records on February 10, Pavement have managed to retain their alluring, ramshackle charm and ally it to a set of distinctive songs - the wry humour of Stereo, the gorgeous folk rock of Shady Lane and the shuffling jazz inflections of Blue Hawaiian. Brighten the Corners is an album only Pavement could have made. But appropriately, Pavement themselves are about to find out what it feels like to be the subject of comparisons.

The eponymous fifth album from Britpop flag-bearers Blur allegedly indulges their suppressed love of American indie rock stylings, especially Pavement's. Malkmus doesn't hear that much of Pavement in it. "I think the overall tone could be equated to our last album, Wowee Zowee," he offers, "in that it covers loads of different genres, with mellow bits and aggressive bits going back and forth, but as far as individual notes go - no, it's not like us. I think it still has Blur's English Kinks/folky part to it. But what I like about Blur is Damon's singing. He has a voice that doesn't annoy me."

Pavement are probably one of the only American bands Blur could use as a new template, their stock of classic British rock being exhausted. Most American bands have a coast-to-coast road-tested lack of contrivance, but Pavement used to be too clever by half. While Oasis, blissfully untroubled by intellectual anxieties, are ideally equipped to speak to the child in all of us, Blur and Pavement are more likely to engage the head than the heart or the gut. Malkmus concurs, albeit defensively: "I think there's parts of our sound that you could react to emotionally. I try hard to have soul, but maybe there's some irony and necessary self-consciousness that you can't help having if you've got a brain. I want to listen to someone who is clever and smart, like Bob Dylan, not just some raw-emotion person with no brain."

Malkmus has admitted in the past that Pavement have a tendency to play "in inverted commas", but elaborates: "If anyone's guilty of inverted commas then it's British bands in general. The Britpoppers are much more referential to other music in that way than us." One would hope that in giving a song on the new album the appalling title I'm Just a Killer for Your Love, Blur were using a fairly bold set of inverted commas, but Malkmus won't be drawn into criticising his new-found fans. He's now a regular house guest of Albarn and his girlfriend, Justine Frischmann. Frischmann's band Elastica, successfully sued for plagiarism by both Wire and the Stranglers, were once described by Malkmus as "representing the 1990s disease of wholesale nihilism about creativity", but he now tries to put an apologetic gloss on the comment.

"Er...well...I mean it's just a different kind of thing. It's just more controlled, more anal, I guess. I think she has different goals to us." In a single bound Malkmus escapes. "Justine wants her album to be the perfect statement for now, and I'm envious of that in a lot of ways. And I think Damon decided this is what it is for this year and he carries it out to its end, and there's something honourable about that, too." Pavement, Malkmus suggests, don't operate to such a rigid agenda, and Brighten the Corners is the first album they've rehearsed before recording. "What we do in a lot of ways is, like, more of a dartboard," he says bewilderingly. "I don't really know about music being a pop cultural movement or representing middle-class youth culture or working-class consciousness in a song. I think of music as an art thing. I try to keep it sort of loose for that reason."

Malkmus is painting a picture of our champion Britpoppers actually aspiring to make disposable ephemera. But as Blur set about spinning a new web of idiomatic cross-references, so Pavement are consolidating the escape from the bonds of theirs. And in a show at the London Astoria 10 days ago, the Pavement/Fall comparisons ended, too. Where Mark E Smith stands aloof from the Fall, looking like a vicious soldier ant sternly surveying his labouring workers, Malkmus stands only a little to the side of Pavement, glowing with the benign pride of a parent at the school nativity play, as if he finds his band mates' attempts to push out new shapes from guitar, bass and drums inexplicably endearing.

2009 has been an exciting year for Stewart Lee. His TV show, 'Comedy Vehicle' aired on BBC2 to critical acclaim. This enabled Stewart to break out of the arts centre circuit and play large theatres for his new show for the year, If You Want A Milder Comedian Please Ask For One. Having seen the fantastic Swansea date of this tour (reviewed in this issue), I spoke to Stewart the next day to discuss the tour, TV show and The Daily Mail, amongst other things. Interview by Leigh

MM: You are currently in the middle of your new tour, having already done the Edinburgh Festival. How has the tour been going so far?
Stewart: It's been going really great. In Edinburgh I did a hundred- seater room for a month, because I knew I'd be doing big rooms, and they are difficult to hear. You can't quite gauge the responses, so playing the little room which I normally do, The Stand, was really great, because I knew the show worked properly before I had to upgrade it to spaces that aren't always great for comedy.
The most difficult one yet was actually the Swansea one, because it was a big room which was only half full, so the bodies don't quite absorb the laughs. It's hard to get an atmosphere in the room and you have to trust your own internal timing as you can't quite hear the room, because all the sound disappears into the roof of the auditorium.
So last night's show was a mixture of a real performance, but also I had to trust that it was going better than I could hear and sort of fake it a bit, which I think that all these comics who are properly famous and who are used to doing stadiums do, because you can't really get a proper flavour of what's actually happening in the bigger rooms sometimes, and Swansea was one of the biggest places that I've done so far. It was great, but it wasn't as spark-y as some of the others have been, because I couldn't quite hear the room.

MM: One of the arcs of the show is based around Frankie Boyle's comment that after 40 you shouldn't really be doing stand up. Do you think there's any truth in that comment at all?
Stewart: Ummmmm no. I think people in stand up get better with age, usually. A lot of musicians get worse. There's something about being in a rock band, it's kind of a naïve art form. It can be really great when you've got loads of energy and no technique. I think sometimes technique in rock music makes people kind of worse, actually.
With comedy you tend to get better. The pitfalls are that sometimes you can get sucked towards blandness as your life becomes blander. You're not out there having adventures anymore. The other thing is that people tend to become more conservative politically as they get older, which doesn't always make for great comedy. We are living in strangely reactionary times where you could almost not be conservative enough to satisfy many audiences.
It depends where you're coming from. When I was 21 and started doing stand up I remember a quote from Victoria Wood, who is kind of a godmother of alternative comedy, and she said that no-one under 30 should do stand up as you couldn't possibly know enough about anything. I don't agree with that, either. But I also think that it's part of Frankie's sense of humour.
I don't think he would really think that. Or else he was talking about himself and what he's doing in his life. Stand up can be anything you
want, particularly if you're Frankie Boyle, you know, he's really popular, so there's nothing to stop him doing anything he wants on stage. He could do a really thoughtful, nice show, or a story show, or he can do what he does now, loads of jokes. The main thing about him saying that was that I had an idea that this show should be about what I'm supposed to be writing about.
I thought, 'what am I supposed to write about as a 40 year old comedian and a father of one?' I had this idea about something that happened to me in a coffee shop and I started writing about it and thought, 'that's so bland, so middle-aged'. When I read that quote of Frankie's I thought that it was a great way to set up an argument in the show. There's someone who said you should give up doing stand up, so you have to prove why you should be doing stand up. What have you got to offer, you know? So I suppose that's what the show is about.
I'm talking about all the slippery ideas, things that make me feel that there's nothing left for me to relate to in culture as an older man who still has the political views he had as a teenager. I know Frankie; I wouldn't hesitate to tell him that I'd done that. It was just something he'd said in an interview and it seemed funny.

MM: There is a bit in your new show which talks about Richard Hammond [a TV presenter for any of our non-UK readers]. The Daily Mail took sections of this bit completely out of context for a story. What was your reaction to this 'journalism'?
Stewart: The guy came up to me in the street before the show in Edinburgh and said, “I write for the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday, I understand you are calling for Richard Hammond to be decapitated" and I said, “Have you seen the show?" and he said, “No", and I told him I wouldn't talk to him about it and he'd have to make something up.
He said, “Well what's it about then?" and I said, “It's a joke, like they have on Top Gear". There's absolutely no point in talking to it about people, that's what I've learnt. There's no point in discussing it because there's no way that the nuance of what you're doing can translate to the Mail on Sunday. The problem was that if I had tried to explain it then it would've spoiled the joke for people coming.
And also no-one that reads the Mail on Sunday or likes Top Gear is going to come and see me anyway. So it doesn't make any difference. What I learned from Jerry Springer The Opera, which I co-wrote and got in trouble for, they sent me around the country trying to justify it when people tried to ban it, and there was absolutely no point having a discussion with any of the people because they'd already made their minds up.
All that happened was that I was forced to explain what we meant by it, which I think spoilt it for people who were coming to see it, so I'd be happy to have a conversation about what I meant the show to be about with you, but there's no point doing it on the back-foot when you're being attacked by a tabloid newspaper.

Actually I thought the article in the Mail was really funny. The way it was written up was hilarious. They changed what I'd said, they had me saying, 'I hoped his head had exploded into a million pieces', which is pretty funny. They had this picture of me smiling, looking quite nice, then next to it a picture of Richard Hammond's car exploding and then a picture of Richard Hammond's face looking unhappy. It looked like something they do in Viz, you know.
Anyone with half a brain reading between the lines would realise what the joke was, it's about…well you know what it's about. It's about if you are on Top Gear
and you attack the weak and the defenceless and say, “It's only a joke", then what's to stop that being used against you? Nothing. You have no comeback on it because that's your defence when you pick on gypsies or whoever. The best you can come up with is 'it's just a joke'. It's just about that idea. No-one reading the Mail on Sunday would agree with that anyway, because they hate the poor (laughs).
It's not as if I've lost any audience by it. At the end of the day, when you're 41 and have a family it's nice to get good reviews, but really all you're hoping is that bad reviews don't make it more difficult for me to pay my mortgage.

MM: This year you've gained more exposure with your BBC show. On your '41st Best Stand Up Ever' DVD you talk about the disappointment of having the show offered and then taken away. Were you surprised when the offer was then put back on the table?
Stewart: I was, yeah. It was offered to me in May 2005, withdrawn in April 2006, then back on the cards in spring/summer of 2007. So I was surprised and confused, because the offer was for exactly the same project that was already turned down by the man who had turned it down. The thing about television is that there's no point trying to make any sense of it. It's like looking at the weather system. If you go out and it starts raining and you get wet, it doesn't mean that the weather was trying to harm you. It was just raining. Likewise if it's sunny and you're happy, it doesn't mean that weather likes you, it's just weather.
So you have to view television and commissioning procedures as kind of a random system that there's no logic to. You can't start to believe that it means anything because there're lots of people much better than me who have never been on television and there're lots of people much worse than me that are on television all the time, so it doesn't mean they are good or bad, it just means that their face fitted at the time, and what strange decisions were being made behind closed doors about what kind of audience they were trying to attract.
That said, I still think that the BBC is out best bet globally for any kind of quality news coverage or comedy or anything.
There's a tiny chink of risk there, where they can afford to make things without having to worry too much. I know it's a deeply flawed system, but I've benefited hugely from it and I don't think there's any way that a commercial broadcaster would have made any of the things that I've done.

MM: In the series you did an episode criticising some aspects of television. Was there anything you wanted to add to that show but couldn't as it was on the BBC?
Stewart: No, there was nothing I was stopped doing in the whole series, apart from one sentence about David Cameron that I was made to slightly re-twig so that it was factually accurate. It was just something he'd said about religious schools, I just had to change it so it was right. One other bit was this idea I had about religious dog training schools, and I wanted to have an Islamic one for training dogs, and there was a concern that was never really resolved that because there's a cultural, but not a specifically religious, taboo about dogs in Islamic culture, although not necessarily in the Islamic faith, that it would look like I was being deliberately provocative.
I was asked not to do that, and to be honest no-one was really able to resolve whether this Islamic dog taboo was the case or not, so we just had to let it go. It actually made the bit funnier.
Those were the only things I was stopped on. But there's other stuff that I wouldn't have done on TV anyway, because there's things that I do in the live shows that are very long and they are contextualised and they have balance.
You worry that on TV a sentence gets taken out of context and pinged around the world, and it's not worth the risk with YouTube and all this kind of thing.

MM: Some of your shows talk about religion and atheism.With books by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens hitting bestsellers lists in the last few years, do you think that atheism is being looked at more positively in mainstream society?
Stewart: Definitely. The worry about it then is that you have to remember to be polite. There probably isn't a God, but it's not worth getting too cross about.
You have to be able to carry on your discussions with your mental enemies with a greater degree of politeness than they've historically shown to us (laughs).
There's a worry now that in Europe, as the rationalist's cause starts to gain ground that you have to avoid triumphalism. Remember that there's still a lot of work to do and that's best achieved with a degree of cautious politeness, but you can understand people's frustration when their work gets banned and they get shouted down.

MM: The TV series recently came out on DVD and, as you mention in your new show, you've had trouble with people illegally downloading your DVDs, so will you continue releasing live DVDs?
Stewart: I will do, in fact the guy that put out the last one sold 57 last week, so he's just about to cover his costs, so he wants to do this show.

MM: Is that Go Faster Stripe?
Stewart: No, this is Colin Dench, who runs another company, but Go Faster Stripe are great as well, and I'll definitely do some more with them if they'll have me. Probably audio stuff or old archive, but the new show will be filmed with Colin Dench. He films it to broadcast quality which means you can flog it on to the Paramount channel or whatever.
Go Faster Stripe are really brilliant and what they've done is fantastic, because there a lots of really great comics who don't get on telly, and there's no documentation of them. Four or five of the DVDs that Go Faster Stripe have got are of the best people working today, people like Tony Law, Simon Munnery and John Hegley.
Will Hodgson is amazing and it's really great that they are out there doing it. It's one guy in Cardiff, Chris Evans, and I think that the British Film Institute should give him a grant because he's documenting the best people, and they don't get documented as a rule.

MM: He's also bringing comedy out on different formats. He released your Pea Green Boat poem/story on 10", and comedy hasn't been pressed on vinyl for 20 years or so.
Stewart: (laughs) Just as everyone else is heading into downloads I'm going back to vinyl. Good idea.

MM: In your new show you tell a story about your youth and being friends with members of Napalm Death…
Stewart:Well there's no-one that I knew in Napalm Death who are still in Napalm Death. The only person from the line-up on the first album was Nick Bullen, who sang on one side. Nick Bullen wasn't at my school, but the other three were. The other three were, they were Daryl Fedeski, Simon Oppenheimer and Miles Ratledge.
I didn't know them that well; they were in the year above me. I was in a play with Daryl Fedeski, I was a butler and he was a sailor, I was in a walking club where we used to go walking in Wales with the other members of Napalm Death. I did see them when they had that lineup and around that time they were only 14 or 15.
They got on these compilation albums that Crass used to put out called Bullshit Detector which were samplers of new anarcho-punk bands, but back then they sounded more like Crass or Poison Girls or something. They hadn't got that sound, even that's on the first album, where they sort of invented speed/metal/thrash/grind punk.
They played sort of early 80's anarchopunk.

MM: Speaking of music, in your new show you close the show with a song. Did you approach picking up a guitar live with some trepidation?
Stewart: I stopped doing stand up in 2001 for three years, partly because I was never nervous and did the same sort of things again and again and I was sort of jaded with it, and I think that communicated to audiences. So every new show I do I try and do something I think is going to be difficult.
In the last show it was trying to show a degree of sensitivity, I suppose, about having a kid and things like that. In the show before that it was about having one 40-minute routine which only had one joke at the end. This time around I thought I'd try and end on a song. It's sort of not something you'd expect from me, and also it'd make me nervous.
It means I'll be nervous all the way through the show until the end, because I've got this thing coming up. It was a deliberate thing to do, and when I can afford to get him along I have a fiddler to play along as well. He helped me learn it. It was a deliberate decision to make it hard for myself.

MM: I think a few people may have missed the Sex Pistols reference in the song last night.
Stewart: Yeah... I do like the song 'Galway Girl', and I was sad when it was in an advert, that's what gave me the idea for the words, with Iggy Pop and John Lydon being in adverts. Also things you like generally, Nick Drake songs being in phone adverts and so on. I thought one of the only things you've got when you get older is culture that you love, books, films, music, comedy that means stuff to you. It's really depressing when it's taken away or the meaning is changed.
Although I hope that the song's funny, I am also serious in saying that we need to value these things more and let them retain their original meaning and not abuse them.
You've only got one memory, you've only got one life and those special things are what keep people going, and certainly the Nick Drake albums that I loved, you just now think of that horrible fucking BT advert where his music is playing and they are talking about options for friends and family and stuff like that. It's insane, it's awful. I know that's an old-fashioned point of view, but that's what I think. Leave stuff alone (laughs).

MM: You also talk about the recent Magner's Cider adverts, and of course the comedian Mark Watson is the 'actor' in them…
Stewart: Yeah, I don't mention him in the show because I've got no personal animosity with him. I wish it hadn't been him and had been some anonymous actor. I know him a little bit.
I've seen some of his work and I like it, but it would be hard to watch him again without thinking of advertising.

MM: I like Mark Watson, but wondered why he'd decided to do an advert.
Stewart: I expect he did it because he's got a family. He always does very well in Edinburgh, but for the rest of the year you don't really hear much of him. I would worry if I were Mark Watson. The brand of Mark Watson, as a quirky young fellow who thinks deeply about things and wears a Socrates T-shirt is compromised by being in an advert, on a purely practical level.
I would imagine there are people who would stop going to see him because of it. But then he might pick up a lot of people who like cider (laughs).

MM: You're closing up the year with a month-long season at Leicester Square Theatre with If You Want a Milder Comedian Please Ask For One. Have you done a season that long before in London?
Stewart: I think it's six or seven weeks. I have done five weeks before at Soho Theatre, which is half the size. It may be that people won't come, but on the tour I've been getting 25-50% more people than usual, so maybe it will be all right. It's about a 350 seat theatre, and I could probably have done a shorter run at a bigger venue, but I chose this as it's sort of an optimum size for stand up, especially with what I do. It's not a big show.
So I decided to do a longer run at Leicester Square and see what happens. I hope people come. It's been good around the country so far.

MM: Do you have any new projects for next year?
Stewart: I'm not sure yet. The BBC are supposed to tell me at the end of January whether we'll do a second series. If they will do a second series then I'll get on with that and I'll do some stuff in Edinburgh and film it before the summer of 2011. If they don't do another series then I'll write a new show for August next year and then I'll tour it and hopefully be back everywhere I've been before in about a year's time. It'd be really nice to do a TV show again, because it's nice to earn that money, and it's nice to earn that money without being away from home when you've got a little kid.
On the other hand, just having it on at all has been amazing and it's transformed my life. The money meant we could get a mortgage and stay in London and get a flat with a room for our son. And the exposure, it's not like being Michael McIntyre, but it does mean I get six hundred people rather than three hundred, and that makes the economics for touring so much easier. I can get someone to drive and come with us and help us with technical things, I can pay an opening act properly and I can pay a fiddler for some of the gigs and it just makes life easier.

I was just getting old and tired to be honest, and I don't know if I could've carried on doing what I did without a little bit of a leg up. I was getting burnt out. I was in a sort of funny quandary where I'd get really good reviews in broadsheet newspapers, but I'm not the kind of comic who does corporate gigs, I can't do them, I'm not very good at them, or do the commercial gigs like Jongleurs or the Comedy Store, so unless I'm on the small theatre/arts centre circuit it's hard to know what to do exactly, and the telly show has probably really helped get people along.

It will be interesting to see what difference this makes long term, but when I used to tour there was always 10-15% of the audience, maybe more, where I just wasn't what they wanted to see. They'd come to see some stand up comedy and they end up seeing this boring bloke going on really quietly about things they aren't interested in. Because the TV show was an accurate reflection of that, those people aren't coming on this tour.

There was a bloke in Worthing that hated it, but on the whole, most of the people who come know what they're coming to. You can have more fun with them and there are more of them. In fact, a lot of people who think they don't like stand up come and see me because it's not like other stand up.
It's helped to whittle out trouble, the people who wouldn't get it in an audience, which is nice, but on the other hand all of us think that who we are now is the sum total of all our experience in the past and I wouldn't want to undo the twenty years I've had doing gigs to people who didn't really like me (laughs).

I think it helped me become what I am now. It is nice now, at 41, when you have a kid and want to earn some money to be playing to large groups of people that actually want to see you (laughs).

I was in a meeting recently when someone who makes more money than me told me not to be cynical, and to hold fast to original ideas and not make my ideas fit into holes that I may have perceived commissioners and controllers think they have in their schedules. It is infuriating to be told this - not least because they were right and one needs to hear this now and then. Even though holding to an artistic vision or a central idea doesn't put shoes on the feet of your children, it is ultimately all writers really have.

I shouldn't have needed to be have been reminded of this since I'd just finished reading Stewart Lee's fascinating and splendid book, How I Escaped My Certain Fate. Lee is rightly held in high regard by comedians, writers and industry folk. He shames many of us by refusing to compromise on his artistic endeavours and the way he would like to do stand-up comedy. The problem is that the way he would like to do it is not the way it is conventionally done - and furthermore, it is not to everyone's taste.

The book is an encouraging story of how a comedian can build up a following and become commercially viable through creativity, persistence and bloody-mindedness. But this comes at a cost personally and financially. The big bucks are to be made in The Hammersmith Apollos all over the country. It seems unlikely that Lee would play the Apollo five nights in a row - or even one night. (He may be able to fill the place, but I'm not sure he would be interested in playing a space which lacks intimacy - unless he was in some way able to turn it into a big joke that ultimately the audience would have been better off not coming and waiting for the DVD, since that would probably feel more personal that sitting six hundred yards away from a man with a microphone.)

Despite his frosty on-stage persona, and air of pretention and disappointment - which he admits is a blurring of an onstage persona and an offstage personality (although I've met him a couple of times and found him to be thoroughly polite and courteous), the book shows the humanity of the man - and a comedian who thinks deeply about his act. He is not motivated by money, although is rightly peeved when he is treated unjustly in the realm of finance. Lee does not really crave the adulation of an audience - highlighting dry patches in his shows which are intentionally joke-free. No-one can accusing of being a crowd-pleaser. He seems, at best, uninterested in the opinions of critics, and sometimes sympathises with their frustrations at his material or shows. He doesn't even seem that bothered by the opinions of other comedians, by whom he is very well-respected (in turn pays homage to others he considers greater or more pure than he). What comes across is that the only person he is seeking to satisfy creatively is himself. And it turns out that he is very hard to please.

We can all learn from this. Stewart Lee keeps pushing himself to find new ways of performing, new routines, turns of phrase and ways of managing audience expectation. I regularly write - and watch - comedy that feels rough, drafty and, at best, sufficient.

We are all in awe of Stewart Lee because he has very high standards. And we know that if we were to have such standards, and cling to our original comic visions, we might be less popular or make money. When this impacts on spouses and children, it can seem indulgent, but we have to find ways to keep going, keep writing and creating worlds that we want to inhabit, or else, why bother? We'd probably make more money doing something else.

Tonight, Stewart Lee tells us, he will be tackling three main topics. Charity. The Government. And Adrian Chiles.
Normally, he’d try to be more seamless than this. “Why hasn’t it got”, he asks himself on behalf of his fans, “a narrative arc like the other shows?” The answer is that he is working up material that can work as half-hour chunks for his second BBC Two series, next year. On this matter, at least, we can take him at his word. So even if we are guinea pigs here, this is another delicious dose of the self-aware and the self-involved. As ever, the footnotes to his performance — the moments when he turns on us for not getting a joke, for blanking “references at the very edge of human consciousness” — matter as much as the ostensible targets. Which soon sprout into flights of fancy involving, say, his crisp-loving grandad who lives in a nest, Godzilla, and the comedian Russell Howard, of Mock the Week.

For more than 20 years now, Lee has been selling his ideas with a dubious yet musical delivery that blurs the lines between the rational and the ridiculous. Here, his immaculate timing isn’t always enough to conceal a lack of inspiration in some of his material. Several of the flights of fancy take off too soon — the tale of Grandad and Godzilla, say, is Lee at his most whimsical. And the ingenious fag-packet mathematics that “proves” why Howard doesn’t do enough for the needy is an engaging misuse of logic that has descended into protracted sarcasm by its end, even if he’s mocking our own preconceptions more than Howard’s behaviour. And yet his spirit of subversion is so original that he wins out anyway.

He ends the first half with a great song about Russell Brand’s wedding, accompanying himself on acoustic guitar. And he hangs on to the guitar for a superior second half in which he pretends to tune up, mocking and celebrating the bag of tricks of a musical comedian. Then he nails the certainties of alternative comedy — “In the 1980s everybody hated the Tories. It’s amazing they got reelected” — before taking us into a story about his days at Oxford with David Cameron that is richly detailed and resonant, whatever your political hue.

Lee loyalists will find some ideas and formats from earlier shows getting dusted down for their turn on the telly. Some of his engaging unorthodoxies are in danger of becoming orthodoxies, too: the way he sticks an unneeded definite article in front of something, talking about, say, “the ITV”, “the News 24”, “the comedy”. But even at a notch below his brilliant best, he retains his mix of passion and pique, of the determinedly small-minded and the generously imaginative. Fascinating, funny stuff, in other words.

As you can imagine, it is a constant source of irritation to me that I am frequently ridiculed in academic circles for my supposed over-reliance on cultural comparisons drawn from the world of the Native American shaman clown.

And yet, in the light of the ascension of Jeremy Corbyn, I find myself taking familiar soundings once more from the sacred miracle caves of the south-western mesas. But our story starts in north London, last week.

“She corbyned you man,” laughed a teenager on the 73 on Tuesday. On the top deck of Boris’s faux Routemaster, despite being the third most critically acclaimed British standup of the century, I remain anonymous enough to eavesdrop. “To corbyn”. It’s a new verb, it would seem.

“You were corbyned man, well corbyned.” Listening in, I realised the phrase describes a situation where one of the youngster’s remarks had been deliberately misrepresented to some rival youths with the intention of compromising, perhaps fatally, his standing in their social milieu. It had only taken a weekend for the press treatment of the new Labour leader to make its way into the street argot of a younger generation.

“They corbyned Corbyn in the paper last night. They say he done that Diane Abbott once, back in the 70s when she was well fit,” offered a young lad to his chums by Camden tube on Thursday. “Yes, but what’s really appalling is that the Daily Mail columnist Sarah Vine,” continued a well-scrubbed middle-class schoolgirl, “has apparently been doing Netflix and chill with Michael Gove for decades!”

And with that, the young Corbynistas stood outside the station miming projectile-vomiting into a dog excrement receptacle, until they were forcibly moved on by a uniformed security guard in the pay of a vast property-owning multinational corporation.

Now, none of the above stories are true. But I feel what they tell us about Jeremy Corbyn is true. Post-digital, tech-savvy, and able to Google the sources of Corbyn’s supposed comments, the vibrant young people on our capital’s streets, their veins coursing not with genetically modified skunk juice, but with the thrill of The New Politics™, saw through mainstream media’s misrepresentation of Corbyn immediately.

Illustration by David Foldvari

Why should Corbyn talk to Sky reporters? They’ll only corbyn him. The voters of tomorrow share clips of Corbyn speeches on social media, without having to cut to Andrew Wilson raising his eyebrow quizzically and then making a sneery face, before he slithers away to rub himself on the rim of Adam Boulton’s executive urinal.

There are big questions to be asked about the ethics of many of Corbyn’s fellow travellers, but so far the questions being asked most loudly, and which are calculated by his enemies to do the most damage, are mainly about his top button, his anthem-singing ability, his ex-girlfriend from 1978, and some free sandwiches, which he may or may not have stolen from the hand of a dying Spitfire pilot.

And while Corbyn introduced members of Hamas and Hezbollah to parliament using the ill-judged phrase “our friends”, David Cameron is genuinely real-life friends with both Rebekah Brooks of News International and Rachel Whetstone of Uber, and had Jeremy Clarkson jump out of a cake naked at his 50th birthday party.

It is too soon to say whose “friends” history will judge most harshly. Ex-polytechnics have refectories named after one-time “terrorists”, and commemorative slabs laid by Tony or Cherie will one day go the way of Jimmy Savile’s gravestone.

Leaning over the shoulder of a Daily Express reader on the 341 on Monday, I saw a prune-faced content-provider describe Corbyn as an “absurd Marxist”. As a new philosophical doctrine, Absurd Marxism sounds viable to me, whatever it is. We already live in the oxymoronic era of Caring Capitalism, and that doesn’t really seem to make sense either. If I were Corbyn I would own the title of Absurd Marxist with honour.

Absurdity, with a small a, has attached itself to Corbyn in a way that amplifies the ridiculousness of the world around him. He was mocked for making a vegan shadow environment secretary. Yet under David Cameron we have had an equalities minister who was against equal marriage, an anti-environmentalist environment secretary, and a culture secretary who loves torture porn and wants to dismantle the BBC. The government is ridiculous. Corbyn is its satirical shadow.

In many Native American societies the comedian, far from being a lowly fool who other children’s parents think doesn’t really have a proper job and so could host more play-dates, is considered to have an important, almost priestly, function.

The Lakota clown, the Heyoka, lives his life backwards, washing in dirt, wearing his clothes inside out, shivering in sunlight, violating taboos, and asking questions others dare not ask of those in power. Some plains people even gave their contraries, as these shaman clowns were known, important roles in battle, where their unpredictable behaviour and refusal to follow orders gave them massive advantages over their bewildered enemies. I cannot believe Corbyn has not made a detailed anthropological study of these comic visionaries.

At Taos Pueblo, New Mexico, in 2006, I was lucky enough to attend a massive outdoor Koshare ritual. Clowns ranged through the village, making erotic overtures to elderly disabled women, showing disdain for the beautiful, throwing food in the faces of dining Anglo-American dignitaries, hurling Christian crosses from the roofs of buildings, and doing all this to force onlookers to consider what kind of a society they wanted to live in, and to assess the professed values of the society they already had.
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Mainstream media condemns Corbyn’s actions. On social media, free from editorial interference, those same actions receive almost blanket approval. The satirical counterweight of the Corbyn shaman-clown has forced society to enact its own Socratic dialogue. Should we bow to Queens? Should we sing songs that profess spiritual and political beliefs we do not have? Should we speak to Sky reporters?

People on the right shake with fury at Corbyn, corbyning him mercilessly, while people on the old left tremble with anxiety over what further damage he may do to their already ruined party. But think of Corbyn, not as a politician, but as a totemic figure, a contrary, a shamanic clown come to throw the system’s failings into sharp relief, and I promise you can all enjoy his career as much as I am. The wailing. The gnashing of teeth. It’s going to be hilarious! What fun we will have! Maybe some good will even come of it.

Stewart Lee’s A Room With a Stew is at Leicester Square theatre, London WC2 from tomorrow

The DVD of the fourth and final series of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle is out today (Buy here). Chortle will be running a raft of exclusive content to mark the release, including descriptions of each episode in his own words and a competition to win copies. We start with the DVD sleeve notes, written by Lee himself:

I began work on the six half hours of the fourth series of Comedy Vehicle in the Summer of 2014, with an August run in the cellar of Edinburgh’s iconic Stand comedy club.

Then I performed and reworked the material almost nightly, in different permutations, at various stages of evolution, in long London theatre runs, on tour nationally, and in the 2015 Edinburgh Fringe, for the following 18 months or so, until the series was recorded in December 2015.

Series 4 was the hardest series to write. Series 3 and 4 had been commissioned back-to-back. The BBC’s reluctance to re-commission the massively acclaimed, inexpensive, multiple-award winning show after Series 1, and then again after Series 2, made long-term personal and career planning difficult; but at least it meant I toured regular full-length story-shows in the interims while the channel made up its mind, developing new techniques and angles.

But Series 4 came hard off the back of Series 3 and, I’ll concede, represents the Comedy Vehicle, in its original format, being driven, perhaps deliberately, off a cliff. How much weight could I load on ‘the TV character of Stewart Lee’ before he finally broke?

Another problem was the sheer unpredictability of local and global news during the period I was assembling the material.  Personalities that were big news in 2014 were utterly forgotten by 2015; whole political schools of thought rose and fell; random terrorist acts cast appalling shadows over material that would otherwise have been innocuous.  And the acclaim loaded onto me meant that, like it or not, I was a kind of authority figure with a degree of status, who would have to work even harder to undermine himself, to engage in the struggle to retain dignity that rests at the core of all comedy.

On the road, I ran in some of the strangest material I had ever written in front of the largest audiences I had ever played to. It’s a numbers game. The point at which an audience of 2,500 tips over the edge into collective hysteria, at some absurd device, is much lower than the point at which a room of 120 does the same.  I don’t know if, this time, the large theatres I was playing prepared me for the little room I was to record in.

Ludicrous, borderline surrealist exercises that rocked vast halls were harder to swing at the tiny Mildmay Club, and my own popularity meant the audiences for the tapings were now visibly compromised by noticeably unconvinced spouses, dragged along against their will, and pockets of bewildered TV executives on free passes, there because they thought they should be.  The extended absurdism of episode 5, The Migrant Crisis, was rarely less than joyous live, but was an extremely tense experience in the recording process.

By the time the series was over, every single executive at the BBC involved in its development and commissioning a decade earlier had left or changed jobs, perhaps made anxious as the government speedily and deliberately asset-stripped the institution, or perhaps trying to get away from me.  There was no-one left at the top of the tree who profited personally from Comedy Vehicle’s acclaim, and as remakes of classic 1970s sitcoms lurched into life all around me, the writing was on the wall.

Even those who loved the show seemed caught up in events beyond their control. One executive’s final set of advisory edit notes were sent from the back of a taxi, after watching the show in fragments on an iPhone, days before resigning, the BBC comedy department’s morale and confidence seeping away under the lash of the Culture Secretary John Whittingdale.

For a proposed Series 5, I went into a meeting with a man I had never met before and suggested shooting the series over four nights in the sort of larger theatre I now get to perform in, the character’s comic tragedy now the fact that he is forced to accept a level of popularity he thinks must mean he is rubbish, as anything with that level of appeal is usually shit.

In early 2016, there were rumbles about making a version of the programme with the BBC’s own in-house studios, and selling it on to the Netflix-style content carriers that already host my live shows, and the BBC series that I have bought back from the channel and sold on.

But then, in the dying days Whittingdale’s Culture Secretary tenure, there seemed to be some sort of governmental rethink about whether the BBC was even allowed to enter the competitive content provision market.  And because I write all the material myself, the kind of long-term breathing space I require to generate it between series apparently became harder for the heads of comedy to justify.

Then that Brexit summer settled like a toxic cloud. Pretty swiftly the world moved on, and it’s already hard to believe that Comedy Vehicle ever existed at all, clearly informed, as it was, by a set of liberal values that now seem all but obsolete.

I’m proud of every one of the 24 episodes, the progress the team made between the first and last series (under producer Richard Webb and director Tim Kirkby) is visibly astounding, and the final episode of the fourth series is probably my favourite of the lot.

Peace! I’m outta here!! You shoulda killed me last year!!!

Stewart Lee, writer/clown, Edinburgh, 2016

To search for contemporary queens of comedy you need look no further than performers like Victoria Wood, French and Saunders and, of course, the 'slimline' Jo Brand. But they follow in the footsteps of some quite special comic ladies, a number of them still raising a laugh today.
The Comediennes (R2, from Thursday, January 19) is a series celebrating the lives of such performers, with archive material which includes interviews and memories of classic sketches.
The first programme focused on Irene Handl, and dealt with her memorable portrayals of cockney characters, as well her work with artists like Peter Sellers.
It was an interesting half hour, though I felt the formula was a little haphazard and unsatisfying. However, there was a vast improvement in the second instalment when the spotlight was turned on Hattie Jacques.
Male, funny and considerably more modern, Lee and Herring are currently causing hilarious havoc on Radio 1 (from Monday, January 9).
This is no ordinary hour of music and chat - in fact Stewart and Richard appear to select records either for their bizarre content or so that they can deliberately label them worthless.

My favourite bits were the outrageous tribute band competition, hapless Peter Baynham's lifestyle tips and the alternative parable.

It had me laughing out loud.