Stewart Lee is bound to go down in comedy history as one of the best stand-ups of all time. By turns satirical, political, teasing and surreal, his sets are a heady mix. His latest tour Snowflake/Tornado, put on Covid hold for two years, resumes and is in Salford 25-29 January, Wakefield 9 March and Buxton 10 March (stewartlee.co.uk).

What got you through lockdown and being unable to perform?

I did the home-schooling for the first nine months. I did things like listened to every Bob Dylan album in order, watched every episode of Columbo. Mainly I became anxious and depressed and realised the need for constant audience approval obviously points to some deficiency in my character. I will need to earn money again at some point.

In the Snowflake section of the show you examine how the last two years has affected the culture wars. Can you give a hint of your thoughts on that?
Well, before lockdown I had a 20 minute bit on what the new “woke” Bond film would be like, but that has gone, and the bit about Tony Parsons calling me a misogynist in GQ – actually quite a good way of looking at the “culture war” – has grown to about half an hour, which actually gives that part of the show a through line and backbone it was lacking, and focuses the debate about “wokeness” through the lens of Parsons’ bad faith criticism. The Snowflake half is a refutation of the idea that algorithmically outrageous comics like Gervais or Chapelle are being “cancelled” when in fact they continue to be rewarded with Grammies, lots of exposure and $60 million pay checks. If that’s cancellation where do I sign?

I’m getting pretty tired of the word “woke” being thrown around as if it’s an insult. What are your thoughts on that?
Me too. It’s absolutely pathetic, but it is stoked deliberately by Boris Johnson’s culture war advisor, Dougie Smith, and his colleagues and connections in the alt-right media. Calling things “woke” and dismissing them is a way of shutting down legitimate concerns about inequality. This is not conspiracy or contention. If anyone I know starts moaning on about wokeness I just delete them from my address book. We either have to ignore “woke” as a word or deliberately overuse it until it is meaningless. Lots of young kids don’t care about all that rubbish though. If you told them they were woke they’d like it.

How did you get an hour out of Netflix’s listing mistake in the Tornado section of the show?
Brendon Burns sent me a screen grab of how Netflix had listed Comedy Vehicle but used the show description of the shark horror film Sharknado. It proved very hard to change and Netflix were very unresponsive. In the end it became a good story to hang a show on.

Any ideas on where we go from here in the UK? First the Brexit farce, now Boris Johnson’s increasing ineptitude.
I don’t know, and it’s hard to do comedy about people who have no shame, because they can’t be shamed. It’s hard to do factually accurate comedy about people who use falsehoods as a political weapon – 88 per cent of online electoral communications by the Tories in the last election were lies. That said I have hung the whole of the end of the Snowflake half on a load of quotes from Johnson so I hope he doesn’t get dumped by the Tories as a liability before August when the tour ends.

Any future plans yet beyond the tour? Or anything that you would like to do, however outlandish?
There’s a DVD of King Rocker, the anti-rockumentary about [post-punk band] The Nightingales I made with [director] Michael Cumming out in 2022, and Snowflake/Tornado tours until August. I have no plans for the rest of my life other than to work as a live touring comic until I die, hopefully on stage. This used to seem totally do-able, but in a post-Covid world, who knows?