Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle

Radio Times review

Stewart Lee is on nasty, bilious form tonight. A long routine about how much he hates dogs is almost self-sabotaging. But then he later implies it was all designed to mock that sort of routine anyway. When he's like this, you'd be hard pressed to argue with someone who found him insufferable, but then the mini-interview segments with Chris Morris make exactly that point.

Similarly, Lee talks straight down the camera lens to address us at home several times ("You can carry on watching if you like, but you need to raise your game"), then has Morris berate him for doing so. All of this would be too self-referential to bother with, if it weren't also funny, inventive and acutely observed. And who else would imagine a stand-up routine aimed at a roomful of oligarchs?

Radio Times review

Early in his monologue, veteran comic Stewart Lee delivers a traditional, well-turned, stand-up gag. Then when it gets a laugh, he deadpans, "You see, I can write jokes. I just choose not to."

What he mostly does instead is meander around a topic - here it's prejudice - working from his experience as a prickly liberal with a short intellectual fuse. The results are a kind of post-stand-up comedy.

A long routine involves the imaginary black wife he claims to have invented as a put-down to a racist cabbie, then branches off into a discussion of his imaginary gay husband and his actual Irish wife - each painted in deliberately stereotypical colours.

More than any other comedian, Lee keeps folding the jokes back on themselves like origami, critiquing himself and the audience. It could get wearisome but he knows exactly how far he can take it.

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Radio Times review

Another excellent cameo from Chris Morris as a ruthless inquisitor allows Stewart Lee to bask in his navel-gazing style from the get-go tonight. But satire is far from the "cry of the loser" in the first half of Lee's set. He's on top form with a biting take on Margaret Thatcher's death, tax and the current state of the political parties - garnering big laughs as well as the temporary mass liberal consensus he claims to strive for.

The standard slips a little in the second half, where he returns to hammer-it-home tactics to explain to us what satire is. Turns out it's the same as ordinary reality, "but with animals". It seems Lee has decided that animals are unequivocally funny, and so he's shoehorning them in at any opportunity. It works.

Stewart Lee: Beware - this man may be only joking

To some he is toxic and scornful. But behind the contemptuous on-stage persona is a family man who wants his own garden - and counts his luck. James Hanning meets Stewart Lee.

Radio Times review

As the series that forms the BBC's sole bastion of alternative comedy continues, Lee deconstructs the idiocy of false nostalgia and knee-jerk xenophobia by examining Ukip's fears that Britain is about to be "swamped" by Bulgarian immigrants.

While observing that the Bulgarians are merely the latest scapegoats in an eternal stampede of small-minded cultural hysteria, he takes familiar bigoted arguments to their absurd conclusions. It's typically audacious stuff: when was the last time you found a reference to the ancient Beaker People in a stand-up comedy routine?

Meanwhile, hostile interrogator Chris Morris takes the crumpled comedian to task over his disingenuous methods and dwindling sense of purpose. Morris simply shaking his head in mute dismay is one of the funniest moments in the whole episode.

And watch out for a truly bizarre filmed epilogue starring those twin titans of cult character comedy, Kevin Eldon and Paul Putner.

Stewart Lee: The BBC don't promote the series

Comedy Vehicle's return was hastened in part because of a routine about UKIP in tomorrow's episode, which had to air before April 11th to comply with BBC rules on not broadcasting political satire too close to the European elections.

Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle Season 3 review

It's great to have him back and here's one element of the license fee that is a great investment. Stewart Lee never was the 41st best, but his current work suggest he's in a league of his own.

Stewart Lee declared he's "not the cheeky chappy next door" in response to criticism from the likes of fellow comic Lee Mack who accused him of being part of the "Oxbridge mafia".

"I'm not the cheeky chappy next door," declared Stewart Lee helpfully at the top of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle (BBC Two), just in case we were in any doubt. And what a relief that was from the faux mateyness of clichéd panel game banter, the safe zone of popular comedy. Lee's sour chops are the perfect antidote to a world that's pathologically pleased with itself.

Lee's shtick hovers on the grumpy git line but rarely crosses it: he communicates a restless disillusion with the state of things without coming off as a terminal pessimist. His rebuttal of fellow comedian

Lee Mack's claim that he "couldn't cut the mustard" on a panel show - "you don't cut mustard, you spread i"' - was a priceless piece of tongue-in-cheek, prompted by Mack's reference to Lee as a "cultural bully from the Oxbridge mafia".

Lee's riposte was an exercise in neatly judged apathy: "What have I ever done to him? Nothing." It undercut the idea that panel shows are comedy's Holy Grail rather than scripted easy paycheques.

The second episode is even better, Lee building an entire 15-minute rant around a taxi driver's (alleged) off-the-cuff remark to him that "these days you get arrested and thrown into jail if you say you're English, don't you?"

Alleged? Not content to undermine the absurdity of that casual racism, Lee gleefully undermined his own reputation, floating the idea that he fictionalises the folk bigotry of taxi drivers to suit his own nefarious punchlines. It's comedy that makes you stop and think, and there's not enough of it about.

Why Stewart Lee is wrong about slapstick

In his TV series Comedy Vehicle Lee pours scorn on slapstick by berating Del Boy's fall through the bar for being voted number one in a Funniest TV Momentclip show: "Is that really what we've come to, Britain? Del Boy falling through a bar, and Trigger making a face?!" Significantly, many of the other top clips were also sight gags - Cleese's silly walks, Dawn French collapsing into a puddle... It seems that 80 years since the advent of sound technology we still favour the sight gag over the verbal. Why?