Stewart Lee

Second series of Fist Of Fun to be released on DVD

The second series of Stewart Lee and Richard Herring's Fist Of Fun is to be released on DVD - after the first turned a profit.

Frittering away much of the goodwill garnered by his fine turn in Fresh Meat, Jack Whitehall's country-trotting new show embodies the issues faced by TV commissioners in showcasing stand-ups. Stewart Lee aside, it's hard to think of a comedy vehicle that really works (although plenty deliver ratings). Hit The Road Jack is a noisy, chaotic blend of feeble sketches, passable stand-up, superficial chat and hackneyed Candid Camera-style stunts with a musical turn thrown in. The only thing missing is an identity. This opener sees Whitehall riffing on Welsh traits, bantering with Ruth Jones and cameoing in Welsh soap Pobol y Cwm. The laughs are few - over-indulgent studio audience excepted. He can come back, but only once more on the off-chance it's improved.

There's a great cautionary tale for people wishing to sell their home in this witheringly funny attack on the cult of interior design from Johnny Vegas, Stewart Lee and Rob Thirtle. Never, ever show prospective buyers the post-castration scene from arthouse film Farinelli il Castrato. It will put them off.

Vegas stars as Jeffrey Parkin, an overbearing design obsessive, showing buyers around his home, a turn-of-last-century semi with original features and sympathetic updates. While the play's comic starting point is built upon as Jeffrey bumptiously details his "improvements" and design for living - including a bespoke pan rack based on sketches of the Humber Bridge - the tone shifts to reveal the emotional cracks hidden beneath his tasteful exterior. The message is, it's not home interiors that matter, it's human interiors.

This Afternoon Play had Johnny Vegas stamped all over it, the way he goes full throttle, his voice coming in stops and starts as if being squeezed from a near empty toothpaste tube, and then there is the dip as he comes to the darkness and futility that is often his pay-off line.

Interiors was a satirical and unexpectedly touching drama about property-owning during a financial slump and how homes can reflect broken lives.

Vegas, along with Stewart Lee and Rob Thirtle, is credited with having written the original play on which this production, directed by Dirk Maggs, was based, implying alterations to the original. As Vegas clearly enjoys and understands radio drama acting, with a track record stretching from The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists to Shedtown (whose first series is now being repeated), these tweaks to the script will have been more sensitive than those carried out by his character, Jeffrey Parkin, to the home he wants to sell.

Parkin does the en-masse viewing himself, full of empty bombast, playing to the gallery, which, if he had one, would be half-finished like everything else in the house. He issues a spluttering critique of TV property shows, a wheezy indictment of his erstwhile wife's taste in flat-packed furniture. Then, the vanity of the home-owner, once mired in the certainties of his own taste, crumples. Standing in his botched house of smashed dreams, he admits that he has wasted his energy on things that don't matter.

While this was mostly a one man tour-de-force, a cast of six actors played the viewers, a whispering, embarrassed Greek chorus, who were given few lines but whose presence is palpable.

First raft of shows for 2012 Edinburgh Fringe programme

Stewart Lee, Jimmy Carr, Rhod Gilbert and more to appear at Fringe 2012.

Fist of Fun DVD review

Stewart Lee and Richard Herring's debut TV appearance given a DVD outing.

Your next box set: Fist of Fun

Surreal one-liners and juvenile humour abound in this look at the early, anarchic days of Stewart Lee and Richard Herring.

Stewart Lee: being imitated isn't always flattering

Comic hits out at the '19-year-olds' borrowing his stand-up techniques - and calls them 'selfish' for following in his footsteps.

Stewart Lee: annoying kids are copying my trademarks

While being influential might be flattering for some, Stewart Lee has instead dumped some of his trademarks for Carpet Remnant World. "I think it's pretty obvious why I haven't done them - because there are 19-year-olds doing them." He adds: "It's a bit annoying. I sort of think, that's what I do, I'd quite like to be able to eek this out until I die, and yet you're making what I do a cliche and you haven't even got any dependants, you horrible, selfish child."

Stewart Lee talks about Cameron's views on British film

"David Cameron's advice to the British film industry is at odds with the nature of creativity."