STAYING IN
DRIVING FORCE
As his Comedy Vehicle keeps on moving, Stewart Lee tells Brian Donaldson why he loves being ripped to shreds by Chris Morris and why there only seems to be room for one clever TV comic at a time
W henever you read below-the-line comments on an internet article which discusses Stewart Lee, one thing is guaranteed. Someone somewhere will describe him as smug and self-satisi ed. Yet, at almost every step of the way on Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, the nuanced character that he is portraying for the live studio crowd and the extended one at home, does just about everything he can to undermine the real Stewart Lee.
There’s the passive-aggressive attitudes he displays towards his audience, the over-repetitive annunciation of a certain idea or image, designed to annoy and alienate, and most memorably of all, there are the cut-aways to him being interviewed backstage by a ‘hostile interrogator’. Previously, it was Armando Iannucci, now it’s another long- term Lee collaborator, Chris Morris. As the
former Day Today co-creator witheringly lays into Lee’s coni dence with close analyses of the ways in which the comic is getting this all wrong, it becomes pretty obvious that someone of a smug nature would surely be making themselves look much better to their public, employers and family. ‘I think Armando worked out questions in advance but Chris looked at all the scripts and came in and just asked stuff,’ insists Lee. ‘Although it’s totally improvised, there was one line I went in wanting to say about bumping into my wife in the street. I knew that if I could get that in, then it would act as a set-up for the start of episode six. Armando realised he couldn’t do it this time around, because he had to be in Baltimore to work on Veep. I went into a panic but Chris was there and we just got on with it.’
As well as recalling some of the interviews he conducted in Brass Eye, where Morris made famous people look rather silly, these interrogations work in re-establishing Lee’s persona as a loser.
With the increasing success (both critical and audience) that he has received in the last decade since returning to stand-up after a hiatus during which he co-wrote Jerry Springer The Opera, it has somewhat pulled the rug from under the feet of his live act which operates from the perspective of a perpetual failure trying to punch above their weight. Morris’ role is to hammer away at that vulnerability until it bleeds. ‘When I look at the i rst series, it feels like a different person; the character has changed by circumstances and by ageing, so Chris was the right person for this now, because he
32 THE LIST 13 Nov–11 Dec 2014