In need of an affordable home? Turn left at Pluto - January 2016 The Observer - January 24th, 2016

A new Neptune-sized planet has been discovered, lurking beyond Pluto, after a prolonged study of unexplained orbital patterns. This method of detection has a precedent. As long ago as 1846, the French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier wrote to the physicist François Arago, saying “Sir! Surely you can see there must be a ninth planet, if…

Why I mourn for Eddie Redmayne’s old phone - January 2016 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - January 17th, 2016

I’m sure everyone will always remember where they were last Monday when they heard that Eddie Redmayne’s analogue handset had died. I was in a traffic jam in the Seven Sisters Road, with my two daughters, nine and five, as the quizzical tones of the Today programme’s Nicholas Robinson broke the news. At his wife’s…

I wouldn’t have an OBE unless they gave me one - January 2016 The Observer - January 10th, 2016

For the public good: Sir Lynton Crosby in Downing Street. Photograph: Steve Back/Rex The New Year knighting of David Cameron’s election strategist Lynton Crosby was the most obscene misuse of Conservative power since George Osborne, unable to locate his satchel, used a friend’s chained gimp as a human pencil sharpener. If the opposition were not…

Out of the mouths of babes, real religious truth - January 2016 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - January 3rd, 2016

Nicky Morgan believes that children should be taught that the UK is ‘in the main’ a Christian country. Photograph: John Stillwell/PA On 28 December I performed my annual progress around a Midlands motorway triangle, through sluggish bank holiday traffic, to venerate relatives’ graves. My eight-year-old daughter accompanied me, leavening my loneliness, and I made the…

The best gig I ever saw: Stewart Lee on the Fall, Cornwall, 1984 - November 2015 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - November 15th, 2015

It was the summer of 1984. I was 16. I wanted, finally, to see the Fall. I’d been fixated on the group since a 1981 Peel session suddenly flipped somehow from irritating me beyond reason to enthralling me beyond imagination. Provocative repetition. Monotonous drones. Withering sarcasm. I’m lucky I was struck by something so utterly…

Sun slams Corbyn’s nod and gets a rise out of me - November 2015 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - November 15th, 2015

Last week’s newspaper attacks on Jeremy Corbyn have moved from the dishonest into the deranged. On page seven of Monday’s Telegraph, Sir Gerald Howarth MP, who once worried that the same sex marriage bill would be seen by “the aggressive homosexual community… as but a stepping stone to something even further”, analysed Corbyn’s Remembrance service…