Migrants and my own modest proposal - November 2020 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - November 1st, 2020

In August, a television producer asked me to contribute to a forthcoming documentary about the 18th-century satirist Jonathan Swift. Swift is best known for writing the children’s story Gulliver’s Travels, which is about a man who keeps going all different sizes and riding around on mice. Swift failed to use the then fashionable travelogue format…

Since we’re talking fantasy Brexit deals… - October 2020 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - October 25th, 2020

In 1981, tarnished by a legacy of nuclear embarrassments, the leaky Cumbrian atomic power plant Windscale was rebranded as Sellafield and the problems of public perception simply melted away, like hot uranium seeping into a water table. Likewise, we are no longer about to embrace a similarly contaminated no-deal Brexit. We are instead welcoming a…

What’s the story with Britpop and Covid denial? - September 2020 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - September 20th, 2020

On Monday, the Oasis pop star Noel Gallagher announced his suspicion of masks: “If I get the virus it’s on me, it’s not on anyone else… it’s a piss-take,” declared the People’s Virologist. “There’s no need for it… They’re pointless.” The previous week, in a punctuation-resistant statement Auto-Tuned into near coherence, former Stone Roses singer…

Never mind Extinction Rebellion, let’s consider Boris Johnson’s charge sheet - September 2020 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - September 13th, 2020

My old university friend, the American geographer William Dyer, accepted my Skype call at a research station on the pebble shores of the Antarctic Sound. Once, it would have been too remote to receive messages and yet here I was, laughing at the Sub Pop Records baseball cap that fixed him temporally and culturally. Will…

I’ll tell you what’s got us choking on our granola… - August 2020 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - August 30th, 2020

The nation will fall. The monarchy will collapse. The ravens are leaving the Tower of London. They flee not in anticipation of another Landrover-crash Prince Andrew interview, but because they are bored by virus London’s lack of bustle. I understand. Without live music, live comedy, and live yoghurt, London is the congested, polluted, overpriced hell-hole…

Come summer 2021, who’s going to save our sorry asses? - August 2020 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - August 9th, 2020

Two dozen young people, their hair unkempt, their face masks filthy, stood on the rolling route of the Ridgeway at Overton, holding aloft on wooden shafts an enormous pair of billowing ladies’ bloomers. White against the blue sky like nylon clouds, written upon their wind-filled cheeks were the words “sorry ass”. “Sorry ass!”, chanted the…