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A Room With A StewTasty, Stew ★★★★

By Will Stone in Morning Star Posted on Wednesday, October 7th, 2015

STEWART LEE’S cat is called Jeremy Corbyn. Or so he would have us believe.

Long before Corbyn’s stratospheric rise from rebellious backbench MP to Labour leader, Lee remembers seeing one of the North Islington MP’s campaign fliers in the 90s and thinking it would make a good name for a cat, his story goes. But that revelation is in fact the vehicle for a wonderful metaphor about the new Labour leader not singing the national anthem.

In the absence of cat litter, Lee recounts how he uses a load of cheap England flags he says he bought during the 2012 London Olympics for Corbyn the cat to shit on.

Afeared by this anti-patriotic act, Lee spends the next five to 10 minutes attempting to sing the national anthem while mimicking the cat’s farting sounds.

The image of a red-faced, saluting Lee blowing raspberries defiantly at the audience is a comic-gold conclusion to one of the master raconteur’s trademark lengthy anecdotes.

But there’s so much more, with much new material from the sardonic Lee as he prepares to record a fourth series of his brilliant Comedy Vehicle for BBC2.

He test-drives four ingenious sequences in his trademark digressive vein and there’s even time for some classic asides on the brain-dead observational “comedy” practised by his contemporaries.

A highlight of the show is a gag about his three-year-old daughter asking him what “that thing” is — a condom thrown over the wall by a local prostitute which hangs off their back-garden tree.

Mindful to protect her innocence, Lee tells her: “It’s a pixie’s hat,” to which she replies: “Then why is it filled with sperm?”

There’s his usual self-deprecation and mocking of the audience’s slowness to respond immediately with the barrel of laughs that his intelligent and painstakingly crafted “jokes” so often deserve.

“That’s why you’re down there like rats in the dark and I’m up here like a sun god,” he tells us, tongue in cheek.

He mocks us further, as he does for most of the set. Referring to us as “vegetable-eating Guardian readers,” he adds: “The haloumi sleeps easy on the grills of Soho’s vegetarian restaurants tonight.”

But he laments the speed and scale of volatile political material that he simply didn’t have time to turn around such as “that Cameron would have had sex with a severed pig’s head, the world of satire couldn’t have predicted that.” And he laments too the fact that Isis the dog — “the best actor” on Downton Abbey — had to be killed off because of a 21st-century terrorist organisation.

“Now the series is just thinly veiled paternalistic Tory propaganda,” Lee tells us.

Don’t miss.

Written by Will Stone in Morning Star on 7th October 2015. Filed Under: A Room With A Stew, Reviews, Series 4, Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle
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