On Monday, the grey haired comedian Stewart Lee returns to our screens, after a 10-year absence, as the titular human face of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle. His reappearance on television is something of a surprise. There are many more talented has-beens still out there, and in Sunshine On Putty, the journalist Ben Thompson’s history of British comedy in the 90s, the visibly decrepit Lee warrants only footnote status. Lee shrugs, stares around the down-at-heel north London cafe he has affectedly chosen for our meeting, and begins to lick his first Calippo of the day. “I’m surprised and grateful to be mentioned in any book about comedy at all, to be honest,” he says, his carefully fabricated modesty clearly displaying a genuine bitterness and a misplaced sense of entitlement.

Nonetheless, comedy fans with long memories may recall the resilient stand-up as the co-host of the cancelled mid-90s comedy shows Fist Of Fun and This Morning With Richard Not Judy, along with Richard Herring. This short-lived double act was predicated mainly on an exaggerated weight differential the duo no longer enjoy, preventing any possible reunion and forcing Lee to strike out alone. Meanwhile, lovers of manufactured outrage may have encountered Lee as the co-librettist and director of Richard Thomas’s Jerry Springer The Opera, though, to quote a letter from his former management, he is “no longer involved in the ongoing commercial exploitation of the property”.

Like many comedy critics in their late twenties, I was unhealthily obsessed with Stewart Lee as a teenager, but in my attempts to annihilate the memory of my younger self, I will end up pursuing a needlessly confrontational line of questioning. I suggest to Lee that he is both more, and less, than a once thin man jointly responsible for the most complained-about thing in British broadcasting history. He is, in short, a limpet-like figure, a kind of laughing gastropod, attached undetected to the barnacled hull of a whole host of more successful comedians’ careers.

“What, like a sea anemone, you mean?” he says, sucking the wet, orange head of the Calippo into his red mouth. No, not a sea anemone, I insist, something with a shell. A whelk or a periwinkle.

“What with the acidity levels of the oceans, all shellfish will be anemones soon,” he quips. I laugh politely, but it becomes apparent why Lee has fared so badly

on TV panel shows like 8 Out Of 10 Cats and BBC4’s grammar-based quiz Never Mind The Consonants. The blind alley of jokes about the deterioration of a gastropod’s shell is typical of the kind of comedy cul-de-sacs this deluded, sad figure routinely pursues in his inexplicably attended live shows, infuriating and boring weary audiences up and down the land. I suggest that it is only the fact that Lee has attached himself to many now successful names over the years that has led to the BBC mistakenly recommissioning him.

Lee laughs, “Like a barnacle, I suppose,” but I can see that inside he is furious, and he grips the Calippo so hard that it rears up in its cardboard sleeve. I understand you once wrote for Steve Coogan? “Yes,” he admits, “in the early-90s Richard and I were the original writers of the Alan Partridge bits on Radio 4’s On The Hour. Steve was already very wealthy from his advert voiceovers and he once took me for a ride in his sports car. He tried to touch my leg with his hand but I didn’t like it, so he pretended he’d just been trying to change gear.”

And when the character transferred to television, you were no longer part of the team? “No,” says Lee, smiling, “but it was a good thing really, as it made me concentrate on my own stuff.” And how did your “own stuff” do? Lee doesn’t reply but I notice that he is squeezing the Calippo so hard that the juice is running over the lip of the packaging.

Tell me about The Mighty Boosh? You directed their breakthrough 1999 live show. “You could call it that. Noel and Julian would dance around dressed as cats and lobsters and wasps, and I just tried to get them to face the front and speak clearly. It worked, I suppose. But they said I was ‘stamping all over them in jackboots’ and replaced me with a French acrobat.”

I look up from my notebook. Lee has forced all the remaining Calippo into his mouth. He gestures for the waitress to bring him another. And you gave Johnny Vegas his first London gig in a club you used to run?

“Yes, back then Johnny, or Miguel Penhaligon as he is really named, was just a fat man shouting obscenities, but before the show I was just finishing making a jug on my potter’s wheel and…” He trails off. There is no more to be said. Vegas’s Perrier-nominated 1997 debut featured the roly-poly funnyman sat at a potter’s wheel. If only you had thought of bringing your hobby on stage with you, I offer, but it is too late.

“Al Murray had never even been in a pub until I took him in one at university,” Lee shouts, apropos of nothing, “He was a Quaker.”

Panicking, I look at a Wikipedia page I printed off: “Barnacles live in shallow tidal water and reach for their food with modified legs.”

“Look, I’m not a barnacle,” Lee snaps back. “I’m not a whelk. I’m not a periwinkle or a limpet. I am a human being. Twice Chortle award-winner. And I’ve got my own TV show on BBC2.” And with that, he throws the Calippo in my face and storms out of the cafe. Like a barnacle would.

• Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, Mon, 10pm, BBC2