Stewart Lee

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.

Grumpy old men, like policemen, are getting younger. Take Stewart Lee, pushing 40 and furious, who took Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle as his invitation to drive a toxic sleenwagon at anyone and everyone who gets his goat. With the world of books as his first target, he had plenty to career into.

TV Scoop Review

A lot of what Stewart Lee said irked me a little. In last night's episode, Lee turned his admittedly sharp mind to books, and in particular toilet books and celebrity hardbacks. Perhaps it is just me, but isn't it a little obvious to suggest that these genres are inherently crappy? Taking potshots at the likes of Jeremy Clarkson and Chris Moyles felt pedestrian, and to suggest that he shouldn't read Harry Potter because it's intended for kids seems close-minded.

On his Comedy Vehicle Stewart Lee drove a cross between a tractor and the field it was ploughing into the debate that should start now about the purpose of BBC Two. After the silliest opening titles Lee could dream up, in which his tractor-field was followed by a troupe of circus performers, Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle provided the most intelligent half hour of stand-up you will see on television this year - outside, one trusts, the next five episodes of this series.

"The sat-nav is off," promised Lee at the start of his set, and for once the promise of unpredictability was not broken.

Lee, who has not had his own TV series since the juvenilia that was Fist of Fun, demonstrated that in the intervening years he has become the master of deadpan stand-up. A routine in which he repeatedly tried to explain who rappers were was almost surreally brilliant. But that is not the reason Lee's show was important: it suggested that intelligence might be valued again on BBC Two, after some decades in which intellectual snobbery was considered almost as vile as racism.

Last Night's Television - Keep taking the mic

In my front room, Stewart Lee was preaching not so much to the converted, as to an ayatollah. He did so brilliantly, though. And what I love about his act is that he does not feel remotely bound by the conventions of showbiz brotherhood.

A welcome return to the small screen for Richard Herring's taller, (marginally) slimmer and deadpan former partner. Mixing standup comedy about a particular subject - in this case, the phenomenon of 'toilet books' - interspersed with relevant sketches, this showed Lee at his witty, caustic best. We'll definitely be tuning in again.

Chortle Review

Lee destroys his topics with the precision, relentlessness and brutality of a medieval torturer; repeatedly and meticulously attacking the same small point until it becomes weakened to the point of collapse.

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.

This is seriously funny. Lee is an absolute master of stand-up, his brilliantly measured delivery enabling him to weave gold from even the most unpromising material. Tonight, in the first of six themed shows, he's talking about books - and, in particular, celebrity autobiographies. If you're Chris Moyles or Russell Brand, I'd advise you to look away now.

Stewart Lee is a raconteur who might remind you of Dave Allen; he's clever, discursive and very funny. Though best known for co-writing Jerry Springer: The Opera, which made him the focus of a national hate campaign, Lee is a gifted stand-up with a laconic style. In the first instalment of a new series, 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. I loved his dismissal of the latter's second autobiographical volume, The Difficult Second Book, as a title that showed "a degree of irony and self-awareness largely absent from the text". The sketches that smatter the show don't work very well (they never did for Dave Allen, either), but just go with the flow, because everything else works a treat.