Comedy legend Stewart Lee’s first television programme in over ten years debuted last week to a not unrespectable one million viewers on BBC2. Fans of his were not disappointed – the show was simply a 25-minute stand-up routine intercut with a few brief sketches – and non-converts were questioning why they had not heard of this genius before.
It was, in short, everything Stewart Lee promised it would be to his fans that feared their hero was selling out.
A diatribe against “celebrity hardbacks”, his targets were relatively easy for him (his stand-up generally chooses far trickier targets such as religious zealots and football fans), but no less worthwhile. If you’ve ever despaired when seeing Chris Moyles at the top of the bestseller list or wanted to scream at those idiots on the tube reading Dan Brown novels then this show was for you.
Anyone between the ages of thirty and forty will already be familiar with Stewart Lee’s television oeuvre. Twenty years ago at the tender age of 22, he and likeminded genius Richard Herring devised, wrote and starred in Fist Of Fun and This Morning With Richard Not Judy. Both shows were masterpieces but they were treated appallingly by the schedulers and the commissioners at the BBC who cancelled the latter without even telling its two stars. You can catch much of their work on YouTube (the BBC have never released the shows on DVD) but to get an idea of what it was like: imagine Horne and Corden but intelligent, funny, not homophobic and with some notion of comic timing.
Thankfully Herring is now doing better than ever, selling out large venues all over the country with The Headmaster’s Son, his best full-length stand-up show to date, and Lee is back on our screens. Happy days.
Tonight, Lee takes aim at television itself, wondering who is to blame, and it’s even better than the first show. Lee has long been one of the five best stand-ups in the country. Now he is possibly the funniest man on British television. Again.
Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle is on BBC2 on Tuesdays at 10pm.
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