Stewart Lee

Comedy, controversy and more comedy

Meet Stewart Lee, the notoriously uncompromising comedian.

Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle Returns!

'There'll be a 2nd series of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle. Huzzah! Huzzah!' tweeted producer Armando Iannucci earlier today.

Stewart Lee signs book deal

Faber Publishing has bought a new title from comedian Stewart Lee.

In its one-off revival last night as Rock & Chips, Only Fools and Horses, the BBC's over-loved hit from the Eighties and Nineties, performed a genre-bend. A broad, sentimental, Cockney sitcom became a comedy-drama of charm and subtlety that did its writer John Sullivan nothing but credit. It is possible, I concede, that as an irregular viewer I missed nuances in the original, but for most part Only Fools stays in the mind - does it not? - for the chandelier smash, Rodney and Del Boy's foggy transformation into Batman and Robin, and David Jason's perfect fall through a non-existent bar, a moment pilloried with splendid unfairness by the comedian Stewart Lee for being repeatedly voted television's funniest moment.

There was almost no physical comedy in Rock & Chips, a prequel set in 1960 (it felt earlier). Del Boy was a teenager, Rodney not yet born and their mother, Joan, not merely still alive but, in Kellie Bright's winsome portrayal, still sexy. (I'll never think of Kate Aldridge, whom she plays in The Archers, in the same way again.) The 90 minutes' broadest point was Phil Daniels's moustache, donned to complete his misjudged turn as Grandad. Joan's boss's lascivious attentions to her bosom would also count as seaside postcard humour were they not undercut by the seediness of his masturbating after each of their encounters.

Instead of big laughs we were delivered a genetic explanation for why Rodney was as he was in Only Fools: melancholy, disappointed, brighter intellectually than his half-brother Del but without his neon-glare personality. His father, an unknown quantity in the series, turned out to be a ruthless jailbird with an artistic streak called Freddie Robdal (pun), who seduced his mother right under the careless supervision of Del's idle father, Reg. Nicholas Lyndhurst who, of course, played Rodney, here played his father, Freddie, and produced a detailed performance that suggested the con's psychotic tendencies could be tamed by the right woman. It was from Freddie that Rodney must have got his brains, for Joan was so thick she did not get a single joke that Freddie pushed her way. From Joan, he clearly inherited his stoical sadness.

As the really boyish Del Boy, James Buckley conveyed during his relatively brief screen time his Oedipal feelings for his mother and an early surefootedness in business, if not in society. Joan, looking down at her new baby, predicts, not unreasonably, that Del will be rich one day. From another high rise Freddie looks down on them. She nods her head. He raises his glass in pride. His paternity has finally been acknowledged. The question posed by Rodney in the last Only Fools and Horses, did his father love his mother, has been answered. Full of astute period details, such as the family planning clinic where a room of Mrs Smiths await their pregnancy tests, and with enough good lines to get by on (a snail looks like "a bogey in a crash helmet"), Rock & Chips was better than the sequel that preceded it.

First shown in March, this was one of the comic comebacks of the year. Though best known for co-writing Jerry Springer: the Opera, which made him the focus of a national hate campaign, Stewart Lee is a gifted stand-up with a laconic style. In the first instalment, his subject is books in general and so-called "celebrity hardbacks" in particular, which allows Lee, who looks a bit like a very young, very tired Morrissey, to give Jeremy Clarkson and Chris Moyles both barrels. The sketches don't work very well, but the rest is a treat.

Stewart Lee: 'hate all popular culture'

Britain's finest stand-up comedian explains why it is his job to have a pop at the powerful - and that includes glibly offensive entertainers.

See how Gordon Brown's mouth falls down after he speaks? See how Dawn French is fat? See how Scottish people are smack heads? What about some celebrities? Don't they get DRUNK? See children? Aren't they sexy? See cricket? Isn't it boring? See stand-ups? When they guest on Mock The Week, don't they get to choose a round that allows them to recite a big chunk of their stand-up routine?

Mock The Week grows ever more popular, being the sole mainstream comedy satire show not peopled by authority figures and old favourites whose laughs grow more grating by the week. It is The Frankie Boyle Show, of course. While the others flail around him fighting, often pointedly, for applause, he can deliver the audience into a paroxysm of frenzied self-congratulation merely by suggesting that John Prescott is fat/Gordon Brown has one eye/David Cameron is posh.

Of course, the comedians (Boyle in particular) are capable of wit. But that's not the main outcome of the show. It's not about laughs. It's a show about concision, speed and nastiness. Get a clear run on the mic before anyone else and suggest that MTW stands for Mediocre Television Spamfilter and you'd get a laugh just for having replaced an initial with a rude word.

The most telling point is the guest comedians. Whether total rubbish (Gina Yashere) average (Jon Richardson) or brilliant (Stewart Lee, who described his own appearance thus: 'I must have looked like a competition winner, who'd won a prize to sit silent on an unfunny topical quiz show') they never make any impact. They're always less important than Andy Parsons. Think about how that must feel.

The guest in this episode is the bona fide genius Stewart Lee, a man the TV world inevitably can't get enough of now his own super stand-up show has come to an end. But he nearly meets his match with the inventive folk in this series finale, who offer up swimming commuters, psychologically enhanced chickens and a choir controlled by a piano. The show has been a hugely imaginative celebration of the bonkers brainwave, and we'll be sadder than a toddler who's dropped his Mr Whippy if it doesn't get another series... the tumbleweeds blowing across what must be the best props room in TV would simply be too much to bear.

Daringly or negligently, BBC Two may have upset Eastering Christians last night by transmitting Stewart Lee's anti-religion stand-up set last night. Benedict XVIII got it in the neck and so did John Paul II, or, at least, his marketing man did for selling lollipops bearing his features in Vatican Square. The Muslims were hardly more than a passing reference, however, and Lee got distracted by David Cameron, Laurel and Hardy and a postmodernist reading of his own act. The sketches were awful. His routine about the evangelist who turned up at his door with the poser "If Jesus is the answer what is the question?" (reply: "Is it, 'For which role was Robert Powell nominated for a Bafta?'") was brilliant. As it was 20 years ago, when Lee first performed it.

Editor Note: This review was published in The Times despite the fact the religion episode had actually been moved to the following week and thus had not been broadcast yet