The second series of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle began last night, hidden away after Newsnight on BBC Two and post-Midnight if you wanted to watch it in HD. Of course, in this age of iPlayer and Sky+ it shouldn’t matter to many viewers, but it doesn’t bode well for the future of the series, the scheduling making it seem that the channel controller had regretted their decision to recommission it.
Like the first series, it consists of a stand up set based around a different subject, recorded at The Mildmay Club in Newington Green, North London. The first series also included sketches based on, or in a few cases simply spelling out, what was being said. Although there were a few excellent ones, the sketches were generally the weak point of the programme. Wisely, they appear to have been toned down for the second series, with only one appearing in this first episode, with a reprise for the closing credits.
Instead, the show is now broken up by snippets of an improvised “interview” between Lee and Armando Iannucci, who has worked with him since Lionel Nimrod’s Inexplicable World, the Radio Four series which first brought them both, along with Richard Herring and Rebecca Front, to the attention of comedy audiences. Similar interviews appeared on the red button after each episode of the first series and were often as good as, and sometimes better than, the main programme. Using them to replace the sketches has turned it from a very good programme to an excellent one.
The stand up set itself is one I’d already seen in a small room above a pub last summer, but I still enjoyed watching it immensely. Most of the material being used in this series is taken from Vegetable Stew, his most recent Edinburgh show, so I might as well pluck a relevant quote from a review I wrote for another website at the time:
One of the funniest and most intelligent comedians around, Stewart Lee would top the “must see” list for anyone visiting the fringe. The show covers a variety of topics, from charity work to the Bullingdon club, touching upon Mock the Week and the World Cup presenters along the way. As always with Lee, as fantastic as the material is, much of the delight comes from playing with the form and style of delivery, toying with the audience’s expectations and breaking the rules of stand-up comedy.
Despite the loose format of the programme, I was surprised by how much the stand-up was constricted by the duration of the episode. Stewart Lee is a student of the detail of comedy, his recent book, How I Avoided my Certain Fate, painstakingly annotating his shows and showing how each idea is developed at almost a line-by-line level. Having seen just how carefully each beat of his act is considered, and comparing the live performance to the television version, it’s clear that some compromises had to be made. For example, there wasn’t quite enough time to linger on Lee pondering “all the different flavours” of crisps, leading the audience to expect a list which eventually consisted of “plain”. It worked fairly well here, but worked so much better with the time and space that live stand-up affords, with pauses, repetition and rhythm building up to somehow make it that little bit funnier. On a more practical level, there was some very good material that had to be excised for timing reasons.
But would I prefer to watch a live DVD Vegetable Stew rather than the Comedy Vehicle? Not really, because as well as the chance to see Lee and Iannucci riffing with each other, there’s the extra layer the invisible television audience brings to Lee’s stand up. The trick seen in last night’s first episode, of splitting the “mixed-ability audience” into the clever ones who get it and the ones who need to catch up, is one he’s done for many years. It was a delight to see him able to look down the camera lens at the people watching at home and create another “us and them” divide, describing this week how he prefers the television audience to the people in the room (next week it might be the reverse).
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.
Transmission 