Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle

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.

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.

Stewart Lee, stand-up comic par excellence and TV partner of Richard Herring, returns to prime-time television with this six-part series of sketches and routines, each week taking a new theme. His first is the "toilet book", by which he means the kind of publication one might keep in a bathroom, rather than a Bathstore catalogue. "For some reason," says Lee, "someone, somewhere, thought history, fiction, poetry and the like weren't enough any more, and so they invented celebrity hardbacks, tragic lives and Dan Brown." That gives Lee an excuse to examine works by Asher D and Paddy McGinty, and to wonder what would happen if Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown got a job where he had to break bad news - melodramatic doesn't exactly cover it. Indeed, Lee's strength often comes from a peculiar sense of tongue-in-cheek but nevertheless righteous anger about his subjects: "What does it say about our culture that the word 'toilet' can be appended to the word 'book'?" he asks. "Toilet seat, yes. Toilet paper, yes. Toilet duck - you can even have toilet duck. But toilet book - surely not?" It's hard not to agree. Simon Munnery is among Lee's impressive line-up of co-stars, while comedian Peter Serafinowicz provides the voice-over.

Stewart Lee is a stand-up comedian who specialises in telling unfashionable truths. He has the manner of Gordon Brown at his glummest, but instead of being downbeat, this is comedy so accurate and courageous that its effect is exhilarating. His target tonight is the debased world of book publishing. "Did William Tyndale," he wonders miserably, "burn at the stake in 1536 in the cause of vernacular English literature so that you could read The Gospel According to Chris Moyles?"; He demolishes Dan Brown, explains why he has never read J. K. Rowling and disrespects the rapper Asher D's autobiography. "I like this book," he says, "because when I read a book, I don't like there to be too many words in it. What I prefer is for it to be pictures of the same man, over and over again, in a variety of different hats." It's the comic highlight of the week.

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.

In the first of a witty new stand-up-cum-sketch series, comic Stewart Lee focuses on 'toilet books'. Having risked a good smiting from The Almighty for penning Jerry Springer: The Opera, it's not surprising stand-up stalwart Stewart is tackling big issues such as political correctness and religion in this darn fine mix of themed routines and sketches. First up, though, is the topic of literature, in which Stewart challenges Dan 'The Da Vinci Code' Brown's style and asks when it became acceptable to take books into the toilet.

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.

It's easy to have a pop at telly executives (for example: telly is run by complete morons. See? Easy) but whoever decided that Stewart Lee was such a stand-up artist that he deserved his own show deserves much, much praise. The first ep sees him rail angrily against the modern world of publishing; Chris Moyles, Jeremy Clarkson and pity publishing all receive a marvelous dose of controlled anger. Crucially, despite the clear, genuine rage, he remains funny throughout (check out the brilliant pay off to the Asher D rant). A fantastic show.

Off The Telly Review (Link expired)

Some will undoubtedly berate the show for an apparent tendency towards 'predictable' targets such as The Da Vinci Code, as recent reviews of his live shows have done. The important detail is Lee has plenty to say on these subjects - much of it both new and extremely funny - and any such criticism is doubtless founded more on a personal jadedness with the subject matter than with any problem with the actual material.

Blog Post (Link expired)

In terms of delivery, Lee is unfaultable here. The slow, needless hammering into the ground of his points has always been one of his signature moves.

London Paper Review

Stewart Lee is one of those comics who can sometimes be a bit too clever-clever for his own good. And by clever-clever, I mean finding irony-within-irony, making jokes about jokes, and being so self-referential he's in danger of disappearing up his own allusions. But fear not, because Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle is one of the funniest 30 minutes of TV you'll have seen in a while.

Stewart Lee, when on form, is almost untouchable. Recent stand-up shows have seen critics, fans and innocent bystanders agog at the stream of brilliant words tumbling out of that weary gob. He's tackled weight issues, made light of the death of Princess Diana and told Scottish people that Braveheart was a child-abuser. He's brave and darkly comic. Lee turns his eye to the TV world after a decade of absence, starting off with peering at the phenomenon of books you keep in the bog. Where did these books come from? Who decided that we needed books in the lavatory? Lee will have all the answers. Just don't expect him to be nice about it...