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Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle Series 1Comedy Vehicle Episode 1 ★★★★

By Andrew Billen in The Times Posted on Tuesday, March 17th, 2009

On his Comedy Vehicle Stewart Lee drove a cross between a tractor and the field it was ploughing into the debate that should start now about the purpose of BBC Two. After the silliest opening titles Lee could dream up, in which his tractor-field was followed by a troupe of circus performers, Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle provided the most intelligent half hour of stand-up you will see on television this year – outside, one trusts, the next five episodes of this series.

“The sat-nav is off,” promised Lee at the start of his set, and for once the promise of unpredictability was not broken. The heroes of last week’s Comic Relief effort, Chris Moyles and Davina McCall, were ruthlessly exposed to Lee’s mockery, alongside others made untouchable by their popularity: Dan Brown, J. K. Rowling and the Grange Hill star-turned- rapper Asher D (“Yes, I am disrespecting you.”) What had this lot done to deserve Lee’s ire? They had all written insultingly stupid books, whose vaulting ambition in Moyles’s and Jeremy Clarkson’s case, at least, was to find a place in the toilet. Thomas Young, Lee reminded us, was the last person reputed to have read all the books that had been published in his lifetime. The person who did the same today, averred Lee, would be more stupid than the man who read nothing.

Lee, who has not had his own TV series since the juvenilia that was Fist of Fun, demonstrated that in the intervening years he has become the master of deadpan stand-up. A routine in which he repeatedly tried to explain who rappers were was almost surreally brilliant. But that is not the reason Lee’s show was important: it suggested that intelligence might be valued again on BBC Two, after some decades in which intellectual snobbery was considered almost as vile as racism. When she was at BBC Four, Janice Hadlow, BBC Two’s new controller, gave a lecture, The Importance of Being Serious. Last week, at the Broadcast Factual Commissioning Forum, she said she wanted to commission programmes that “contribute to the national conversation” rather than mere “crowd pleasers”. She then rather spoilt things by saying that, of course, the “overnights” were important. In her job, they shouldn’t be. The question this morning is not what ratings Lee got for his intellectual snobbery, but if Hadlow cares either way.

Written by Andrew Billen in The Times on 17th March 2009. Filed Under: Reviews, Series 1, Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle
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