Stewart Lee

Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, BBC Two

One of the great pleasures of being a critic is watching a career develop, and Stewart Lee's is one that I've had the pleasure of, so to speak, for many years. I'm not a Stewart Lee completist but I enjoyed his early days on television with comedy partner Richard Herring in Fist of Fun (just about to be released on DVD for the first time) and This Morning With Richard Not Judy, his solo stand-up shows, his work on the wonderfully subversive Jerry Springer: The Opera and much, much more in between.

A welcome return for Stewart Lee and his brilliant comedy vehicle - one of the most inspired rants you'll see on TV this week. As with the first series, he uses a single topic - tonight, charity - as a jumping-off point to take the modern world apart with forensic precision via the odd detour (crisps, his grandad and just how many actual jokes this series will get).

Put some more jokes in it. That's what they told Stewart Lee after the first series of his stand-up TV series.

And so he has, but ­­not like you'd expect. Lee - the ­self-styled thinking person's comedian - is above jokes.

He's better than that, or at least pretends to be. And so what he's done is very cleverly deconstruct stand-up - alerting the audience to when "jokes" are coming.

He's also interspersed this with clips of himself being given a pep talk by Armando Ianucci. "Give a joke to me and I struggle with it, as you know," he tells Armando.

It all hangs together like a well-cut suit - right down to a mad bit at the end.

Lee is less angry and, consequently, much funnier than he was in his first series and once you start laughing it's hard to stop.

In that series he seemed to have a chip on his shoulder about not being as successful as less clever ­entertainers.

Tonight, he's replaced that chip with a bag of crisps - the main topic of his comedy.

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.

Stewart Lee confirms 'Fist of Fun' DVD

Stewart Lee has confirmed plans for a Fist of Fun DVD.

"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.

Stewart Lee ('Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle')

It was with some glee (and no little surprise) that we at DS welcomed the news that Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle had been given a second series. He may have been proclaimed the 41st Best Stand-Up Ever in 2007, but we'd struggle to name many comics we'd rather see on stage than him. Before his show returns tonight, we spoke to Stewart about his new late-night TV slot, why Channel 4 are "moronic cynics" and the long-awaited DVD release of his and Richard Herring's '90s classic Fist of Fun.

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