Ben Clover finds Stewart Lee’s Vegetable Stew a little more silly and a little less ranty than usual, but no less precise.

Stewart Lee isn’t going to let something like gravity interfere with his act. Near the start of Vegetable Stew he says it isn’t a show with an arc like previous 60-minuters, but it’s still done with such precision that midway, after taking a gulp of water, he puts the bottle back on the stool, then carefully lies it flat, just in case it falls over.

It’s as if he’d decided very quickly he had no bottle-of-water-falls-over material and that it would be an event that would have to be acknowledged. After all, there’s no point having finely-crafted material questioning the audience’s own relationship to other material immediately preceding it, if they just want something funny about a bottle of water falling over. Best to just lie it flat, just in case, he probably thought.

Maybe his recent book on stand-up was so analytical that it makes you now pay more attention to tiny details than you should. But he seems more annoyed than amused later when, after much affected tuning of a guitar, the low E-string isn’t actually in tune when he needs it for a song.

The song is about the young Bullingdon Club boys now running the country as they rampaged around Oxford as students. It’s the centre-piece to one of the three subjects Lee introduces tonight, that will presumably form half of the second series of his Comedy Vehicle on the BBC next year.

Alongside politics, there are 30 minutes each on charity and Adrian Chiles. It’s not clear if his story about the BBC’s lawyers banning him from making a whole show about the former One Show presenter, because it constituted a “sustained, personal attack” is true, or whether it is untrue but nonetheless conveys the truth about corporation oversensitivity.

It’s all very clever but at the same time there’s fun to be had with words like “slayings” in sillier bits about Lee’s grandad, “a comic character”. Overall this seems like a slightly more hinged set than those from the first Comedy Vehicle series. Less ranty, a little bit less “inexplicably bitter“, but only a little bit.

He says he is trying to slim his audience down into people who share the same tastes and references as him, but also carps about having to play in a cellar while Tim Minchin tickets at the Millennium Dome go for £100+. But if he did narrow his crowd down to people just like him, wouldn’t they be quite a tough crowd; pedantic, prickly, inexplicably bitter?

So however chagrined he may appear, he should’ve been pleased with the press night crowd he does get, they laugh loud and often on their own, as the silliness take holds of them individually. There’s the same winning combination of repetition, sustained personal attacks and simultaneous director’s commentary as always, and always topped with a brilliant line.

But there is less of the walking into the crowd, sitting next to someone and doing the show from there. He might have decided that kind of thing is best left to Ahir Shah now.

At the start of the second half his pint of Guinness seems to sit fairly stably on the stool.