Stewart Lee

Stewart Lee is a very funny guy, so one can assume that he knows a thing or two about making people laugh. And that's the focus of his musings tonight. He talks about those who have influenced his career and considers where stand-up comedy is going in the future. Very far, if this display is anything to go by.

Stewart Lee's amusing stand-up show, with accompanying (and, unfortunately, less amusing) sketches, continues tonight with a concerted examination of political correctness. Well, concerted in as much as it gives Lee an excuse to wave a child's ballet shoe over the audience and make jokes about the Finsbury Park branch of Weight Watchers.

I kind of liked The InBetweeners. Okay, it was on E4, the watching of which, as Stewart Lee pointed out this week in Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, is normally like connecting a giant sewage pipe to your house. But it was surprisingly funny for a show aimed at "young adults" and was a refreshing antidote to Skins' über-coolness, principally thanks to its more realistic premise: four blokes who aren't quite nerds but who aren't popular, trying to be cool but failing.

That Stewart Lee, off Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle (BBC2), is an angry man. He's an angry man, that Stewart Lee, off Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle. On BBC2. And he says thing over and over again, getting angrier and angrier, shouting louder and louder. He says them over again, getting angrier and angrier. Stewart Lee, off Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle. On BBC2. He is clever and funny, but everything else and everyone else (especially people who are more successful than him) is stupid and silly. And that makes him very angry. Stewart Lee, off Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle. On BBC2.

Episode 2 Review

It's abundantly clear why so many fellow comedians adore Stewart Lee. Everything about his work is acutely observed and taken to places that outreach your average comedian. Even when you don't necessarily agree with his targets, it's great to follow him down.

Stewart Lee takes a discursive romp through television, taking swipes at everything from BBC1's The One Show and its host Adrian Chiles ("like being trapped in the buffet car of a slow-moving express train with a Toby jug") to TV audiences ("What do you want?"). The latter is an extended rant against anyone who's ever taken part in a "top TV funny moment" poll and cast their vote for "Del Boy falling through the bar". Lee obviously isn't a fan and he's quietly furious. He goes on too long, but you can see his point. But Lee is at his best when he's firing pellets of wit at everything from BBC founder Lord Reith's supposed "jazz racism" to Andrew Lloyd Webber's Any Dream Will Do.

The primary concept is one of baffling unreasonableness. Members of the public are encouraged to write in with their "wacky" suggestions for future inventions - basically rehashes of the "Letter Bocks" pages of Viz. If they are chosen, they then have to stand up and fill five minutes of prime-time television sparring with two professional comedians - who, additionally, have had time to prepare relevant material - in order to "win". As you would expect, it's a bloodbath - like a light entertainment Wounded Knee, but with a studio audience.

In the opening episode, Dave Gorman and Catherine Tate "challenged" four members of the public on their inventions, which included an anorak with an extra hood, for sharing with a friend, and some surrealist, sub-Vic Reeves nonsense about winning a race on stilts. As soon as Tate and Gorman started on them it was like watching two cats idly biting at frogs they'd found in the garden.

The BBC amazes me. It takes four years for Stewart Lee - a comedian with 17 years' experience - to get a six-part series; yet in Genius wholly inexperienced members of the public are expected to deliver five minutes of broadcast-quality improvised material at the drop of a hat. What, literally, is that all about?

The brilliance of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle

Anyway, is Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle very clever and funny, and full of things that you are still thinking about the next morning while you jog in the spring sunshine at 8am? Yes. Of course.

Review: The Stewart Lee Comedy Vehicle 1x1

This was intelligent, funny stuff that actually makes you think and stays with you afterwards, which is more than can be said for Horne & Corden.

Spending far too long in the TV comedy wilderness, Stewart Lee finally returned to our screens last night. Across 30 minutes on BBC2's Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, he swept away all the awful, pointless, moribund 'comedy' that has been stinking up the TV schedules for the best part of this millennium.

If you haven't seen it, set aside half an hour today to watch him on the BBC iPlayer and applaud loudly as erudition and daring is brought back to UK comedy. His show is a reminder of how great UK comedy was in the past and how great it can still be.

Let's hope that this show is seen by those journeymen comedians with their own mediocre shows and endless lukewarm panel show appearances. And let's hope that they are shamed into realising that their 'Will this do?' approach simply won't do. Not any more.