With his BBC2 series Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle winning a surprise recommission, the comedian talks to Paul Whitelaw about TV’s stand-up boom and the art of compromising

Despite airing in 2009 to strong critical acclaim, a Bafta nomination and a loyal audience for post-watershed comedy on BBC2, it wasn’t always certain whether the first series of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle would receive an encore.

“I assumed it wasn’t happening,” admits Lee, who has clocked up more than 20 years on the comedy circuit and an on-off relationship with radio and TV. “I don’t think it’s wise to apply any reason or expectation to a commissioning process in broadcasting.

“You have to view it rather like a weather system: if rain falls on you, it doesn’t mean the weather hates you; and if the sun shines on you, it doesn’t mean the weather likes you. It’s just weather.”

The series averaged just under 1 million viewers in a 10pm slot and, some months later, controller Janice Hadlow invited Lee for what he assumed would be a diplomatic let-down.
“But she told us about this vision of carving out a slot for a certain kind of comedy post-Newsnight, whereby you could do clever or weird stuff but you didn’t have to be in competition with things that people actually found entertaining.” He smiles at his own back-handed interpretation of the brief. “And that suited me down to the ground.”

Original vision

Series one mixed lengthy routines in a comedy club setting with illustrative sketches of his routines, performed by TV comedy veterans including Kevin Eldon and Paul Putner. But Lee is optimistic that the tone of series two is more in tune with his original vision.
“There aren’t any sketches because of budget cuts, but I would’ve dropped them anyway; I’ve decided to focus on my strengths. Instead of trying to sugar the pill and make it more accessible, I’ve just got to get on with it now. You either like it or you don’t.”
Whereas series one was a fairly straight forward attempt to capture the intimacy of a comedy club enivronment, series two revels in the more unpredictable aspects of that platform. “Because we’ve got a bit more breathing space later at night, we’ve been able to include things where routines were received badly, or people walked out, or stuff appears to fail.”

Lee has avoided TV ubiquity as a way of freeing himself creatively, and it’s hardly surprising that he’s sceptical about TV’s current stand-up boom. “Part of why stand-up works on TV at the moment is that there are a lot of people who are very good at doing very accessible material,” he says.
“But television tends not to favour the brave. On the one hand, the man on the street has an understanding of what the conventions of stand-up are, which should presumably mean that, if you’re like me, you can mess around with them and people will realise what you’re doing.

“The problem with it is that it’s also establishing a fairly homogenised idea of what stand-up should be. I worry that the public now think you’re supposed to be a cheery person coming on and talking about buses.” Lee also points out that, rather than introduce audiences to a wide range of new circuit comedians, the likes of BBC One’s Live At The Apollo and Channel 4’s Stand Up For the Week tend to feature the same artists.
Diplomatically mentioning no names, he says: “There is a hegemony of certain management personalities who also control production companies, funnelling their own talent through those outlets.

“Not all stand-up benefi ts from being presented as if it were the Rolling Stones. To some extent, you have to look like you’re an unwanted outsider, especially if you slag people off and moan about stuff, otherwise it’s very easy to appear like a bully.

“Part of why people objected to Frankie Boyle saying particular things is because he’s now the sort of person we see in an expensive suit on Live At The Apollo. But if he was able to control the perception of himself as someone who’s a sort of angry weirdo, people would see it as coming from this sort of character place.” But Lee is nevertheless realistic about the privileged position that TV bestows upon performers and has no problem with exercising a little selfcensorship to fit the medium.

Alternative outlets

“There are a lot of people complaining about what they can’t do on television, but a lot of those people have got other outlets.
“Frankie Boyle complains about what you can and cannot say on TV. But you can talk to millions of people, so use the telly fee to write some other material for your live shows. In my last tour, I had a 45-minute routine about Top Gear that I doubt I’d be able to do on TV. But I wouldn’t have tried to. I’d just do something else if there was a compliance issue.

“All sorts of people want to smash up the BBC; you don’t want to hand them the means to do it by quibbling over small things. If people like what I do and they’d like to see more contentious things covered, then I do perform live for about 200 nights a year.”

While Lee accepts that it’s increasingly difficult to present yourself as a marginal figure after attaining a level of genuine popularity, he cautiously predicts the long-term benefits of standing apart from his TV peers.
“While I’m happy to benefit from the overspill of the stand-up boom, I also think the main thing for me is to keep my head down, so hopefully I’ll still be standing here.”

Stewart Lee On…

Chris Morris’ approach to script editing

“It’s strange: normally the script editing process is about putting ticks and crosses next to lines, but we just talked for a week and he helped arrive at a better tone.
There’s a great bit in one episode where I was trying to think of things that observational comedians might say; he suggested something about how in fish tanks at the dentist, why are there always tiny statues of Napoleon? That feels like it might be true, but you’re not sure. Chris has a gift for things like that.”

Improvising with Armando Iannucci

“Being on TV naturally confers a status on you. So the great thing about the Armando interviews is that we explicitly stage-managed improvisations so that I would always be on the defensive while he represented a voice of criticism or authority. Even though I still maintain this semi-high-status stage persona, there’s this secondary thread that undermines me.
That achieves something that I always do live: throw the gig at some point, so that I lower my status, so hopefully when I make criticisms of things, they appear to come from a slightly different place.”

Tailoring his material due to critical response

“During the last series, I looked online to see what people didn’t like about me, so I thought I’d do more of that. One of the criticisms was that there were no jokes, so the whole fi rst episode is about how there are no jokes, and you might as well stop expecting any because there aren’t going to be any. It’s not going to get any better.”

Fact File

STEWART LEE
TV and radio career
1991 Writer, On The Hour, BBC Radio 4
1993-1995 Writer/performer, Fist Of Fun, BBC2 (with Richard Herring)
1998-1999 Writer/performer, This Morning With Richard Not Judy,BBC2 (with Richard Herring)
2005 Broadcast of stage musical Jerry Springer: The Opera, BBC2 (co-written with Richard Thomas)
2006 Presenter, Stewart Lee Says What’s So Bad About Blasphemy?, Channel 5
2009-present Writer/performer, Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, BBC2