Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle

Paul Sinha: Inside Stewart Lee's vehicle

I was utterly delighted to be asked to do the show being a massive fan not just of Stewart Lee, but also of the first series.

This week saw the return of Stewart Lee's less-than-conventional stand-up show on BBC Two.

If you want to know who unconventional it is, let me put it this way - the show was meant to be about charity, but instead it consisted of Lee talking about crisps (he repeated the word "crisps" over 100 times during the show), and the programme had only four jokes which Lee deliberately deconstructed, giving advanced warning of when they were due to appear and explaining the jokes in detail.

This show is therefore not going to please everybody. Having said that I fail to understand why the BBC decided to broadcast the show at 23.20, where it would fail to get a larger audience. At least there is the iPlayer.

There were some changes to the format. Most of the sketches had gone. There was only one sketch at the end of the episode featuring Scottish comedian Arnold Brown. However, the original red button feature of the programme, in which Lee was "interviewed" by Armando Iannucci, now appears in the main show, breaking up the stand-up routines.

I am not sure whether this new format works. Maybe it is best to let it settle down for a little while, but I quite liked the original sketches, primarily because they featured comedians not usually seen on TV such as Simon Munnery and at one point Jerry Sadowitz as Jimmy Savile.

It is however a funny, interesting and above-all clever show. Lee makes you laugh and also think about the way comedy is presented. Just a shame it is on so late.

TV review: Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle

Crisp tasty and easily ruffled.

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'Stewart's Lee Comedy Vehicle' 2.1 - "Charity"

If a comedian draws attention to their unique style of avoiding traditionally-constructed "jokes", does this make them immune to complaints they're still not very funny?

Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, BBC Two

One of the great pleasures of being a critic is watching a career develop, and Stewart Lee's is one that I've had the pleasure of, so to speak, for many years. I'm not a Stewart Lee completist but I enjoyed his early days on television with comedy partner Richard Herring in Fist of Fun (just about to be released on DVD for the first time) and This Morning With Richard Not Judy, his solo stand-up shows, his work on the wonderfully subversive Jerry Springer: The Opera and much, much more in between.

Comedy Vehicle clamped by schedulers

Judging by the timeslot it's been given, I wouldn't expect to see another series of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle in the pipeline. So I intend to savour the remaining five episodes of what might turn out to be the funniest and most intelligent but least-watched comedy series of the year.

A welcome return for Stewart Lee and his brilliant comedy vehicle - one of the most inspired rants you'll see on TV this week. As with the first series, he uses a single topic - tonight, charity - as a jumping-off point to take the modern world apart with forensic precision via the odd detour (crisps, his grandad and just how many actual jokes this series will get).

Put some more jokes in it. That's what they told Stewart Lee after the first series of his stand-up TV series.

And so he has, but ­­not like you'd expect. Lee - the ­self-styled thinking person's comedian - is above jokes.

He's better than that, or at least pretends to be. And so what he's done is very cleverly deconstruct stand-up - alerting the audience to when "jokes" are coming.

He's also interspersed this with clips of himself being given a pep talk by Armando Ianucci. "Give a joke to me and I struggle with it, as you know," he tells Armando.

It all hangs together like a well-cut suit - right down to a mad bit at the end.

Lee is less angry and, consequently, much funnier than he was in his first series and once you start laughing it's hard to stop.

In that series he seemed to have a chip on his shoulder about not being as successful as less clever ­entertainers.

Tonight, he's replaced that chip with a bag of crisps - the main topic of his comedy.

A welcome return for this most brilliant of alternative comedians, who earned a Bafta nomination last year for his intimate, themed stand-up shows. To kick off this second series, we get a great routine that is supposed to be about his attitude to charity - he's a regular face on comedy circuit benefit shows - but ends up mostly being about crisps.