Armando Iannucci

This week saw the return of Stewart Lee's less-than-conventional stand-up show on BBC Two.

If you want to know who unconventional it is, let me put it this way - the show was meant to be about charity, but instead it consisted of Lee talking about crisps (he repeated the word "crisps" over 100 times during the show), and the programme had only four jokes which Lee deliberately deconstructed, giving advanced warning of when they were due to appear and explaining the jokes in detail.

This show is therefore not going to please everybody. Having said that I fail to understand why the BBC decided to broadcast the show at 23.20, where it would fail to get a larger audience. At least there is the iPlayer.

There were some changes to the format. Most of the sketches had gone. There was only one sketch at the end of the episode featuring Scottish comedian Arnold Brown. However, the original red button feature of the programme, in which Lee was "interviewed" by Armando Iannucci, now appears in the main show, breaking up the stand-up routines.

I am not sure whether this new format works. Maybe it is best to let it settle down for a little while, but I quite liked the original sketches, primarily because they featured comedians not usually seen on TV such as Simon Munnery and at one point Jerry Sadowitz as Jimmy Savile.

It is however a funny, interesting and above-all clever show. Lee makes you laugh and also think about the way comedy is presented. Just a shame it is on so late.

The former 41st Best Stand-Up Comedian ever (and current 12th) is back in Stoke Newington's Mildmay Club for the second outing of his Comedy Vehicle. If the first series was a test drive for Stewart Lee's suitability for television, this is him taking the wheel, ditching the rather unnecessary revving at the lights (we're talking about the sketches - this is a metaphor...) and taking us for a more assured drive through, er, Comedytown.

Even StewLee fanboys like tvBite will admit that the cut-aways in the first run didn't always hit the mark. Instead, in their place we have clips from an interview with Armando Iannucci, as found last year on the Red Button. So this second run is more stripped-down and, presumably, less expensive for the Beeb.

At the beginning, Lee explains that he intends to add more jokes to make himself more appealing to a wider public and to the BBC themselves ("They wanted me to put more jokes in as a condition of this being recommissioned."). The only joke is - there are no real jokes ("Not in this show"). They've actually allowed him to be more Stewart Lee-y; he's contrived to make himself less appealing to a wider public. So the pauses are longer, the repetitions more pronounced, the deconstruction more constant. He implores the audience to keep up and then scolds them for anticipating jokes or even laughing at them ("They're sycophants, basically. I despise them"). With the new 11.20pm time slot, it's as if the BBC are saying, "Go mad - no one'll mind."

Will you like it? Would you find a 29-minute routine about a man's grandfather eating crisps where the punchline is "the reconstruction process was time-consuming but not expensive" funny? If not, you may be best waiting for a ride in Russell Howard's Good News Party Limo, which is bigger and more comfortable, but ultimately leaves you feeling a bit cheap. This is still a metaphor.

"Alternative comedian" is a misused term, but it's one that can quite accurately be used to describe Stewart Lee. By his own admission, he doesn't really do jokes. As he starts up his Comedy for a second series, he's preoccupied by complaints about the absence of jokes in the first. So there's a deconstruction of his routine to ensure we get the comedy, and playful interludes where Armando Iannucci tries to teach him how to tell a gag. It's artful, intelligent comedy that doesn't rely on idle reminiscences for laughs, even though it mostly revolves around crisps. Lee toys brilliantly with the audience - both at home and at the Mildmay Club in north London - deploying awkward pauses so pregnant they should be drinking raspberry leaf tea.

Peter Capaldi talks Malcolm Tucker's future

When the third series of Armando Iannucci's political satire The Thick Of It ended in 2009, we feared it might be the end of the road for foul-mouthed government spin doctor Malcolm Tucker. Out of favour with a party which was subsequently chucked out of office, it was difficult to see how the rudest man in Scotland would fit back into series four.

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It's party conference season and hapless Secretary of State of Social Affairs and Citizenship Nicola Murray is in Eastbourne with her team of self-serving apparatchiks, as the repeats of series three of Armando Iannucci's satire continue on Gold. Yet again, watching is like being caught in a firestorm of expletives and deliriously offensive jokes. It's a relentlessly testosterone-charged world - Nicola Murray even remarks at one point, "It's like being trapped in a boys' toilet" - packed with macho posturing from egomaniacal men behaving like competitive baboons. And it's brilliant. Look out for the memorable scene where Malcolm Tucker gets physical with a misguidedly assertive Glenn.

No joke as BBC college of comedy is binned

A BBC training scheme that was set up to nurture emerging comedy writers and endorsed by leading creative talents such as Armando Iannucci and David Mitchell has been scrapped after it failed to secure funding for a fourth year.

Spin doctor Malcolm Tucker is back in a blizzard of vituperation as Gold repeats series three of Armando Iannucci's peerless political satire. Tucker is doling out his "verbal colonics" to a new Secretary of State (splendid Rebecca Front, in a role that won her a Bafta). The inventive expletives bounce off the walls in firework displays of pure filth and bad taste. The dexterousness of the insults remains a marvel, as does the sublime supporting cast - Chris Addison and James Smith - of useless apparatchiks.

Video: Iannucci on Alan Partridge in the digital age

As Alan Partridge returns for more of his web-only series, Catherine Gee talks to the men behind it, Armando Iannucci and Henry Normal.