Stewart Lee

Stewart Lee launches attack on Edinburgh Comedy Awards

Stewart Lee has launched a verbal tirade against Edinburgh Comedy Awards organiser Nica Burns over new plans to ask the public to vote for their 'comedy god'.

Stewart Lee Comedy Vehicle warm-up shows

Stewart Lee has announced about a million shows at the Leicester Square Theatre across October, November and December.

The Diary: Stewart Lee

A week in the life of Stewart Lee.

Gervais's comedy army

Bill Hicks, Stewart Lee and a nursery rhyme with a 'blue' ending. Ricky Gervais reveals the moments that put comedy hairs on his chest.

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.