Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle

This week the subject of Lee's intelligently amusing invective is television. The message is pin sharp. Bewailing the decline of Channel 4 programmes he observes: "The head of Channel 4, when he looks at the old schedules, must feel like an elderly ladies' man leafing through a photograph album of all the society beauties he used to romance, all of them now dead."

A good pun is hard to find. So well done Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle for its opening credits, which feature the comic driving an enormous multicoloured clown car.

The show that follows is basically a half-hour stand-up routine on a given theme, punctuated by the occasional pertinent sketch.

Lee's comedy is something of an acquired taste ranging from the esoteric, through the inventive to the positively bizarre, but he is never less than original and frequently inspired.

Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle is essentially one-man stand-up, televised from a comedy club setting. There are brief interludes for home viewers (a Kevin Eldon sketch, most notably), but most of the trimmings are only there to comically illustrate something Lee mentions. To be honest, these were distractions that didn't really add anything, beyond provide employment for the likes of Simon Munnery.

The joy of stand-up is having someone fill your head with mental imagery, so cutting to an illustrative sketch inspired by one of Lee's comments worked against that alchemy.

Lee has a tendency to stretch certain jokes past breaking point - best exemplified by his describing of "the rap singers" like a middle-aged fart, which overran by minutes. I'm also certain that Lee's brand of withering sarcasm will annoy plenty of people with a cheerier outlook on life, despite the fact it's very tongue-in-cheek.

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.

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.