Stewart Lee

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.

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"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.

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