Content Provider

by Stewart Lee

Over the last few years, often when David Mitchell has been on holiday, the comedian Stewart Lee has been attempting to understand modern Britain in a weekly newspaper column. Why are there so few right-wing stand-ups? Who was Grant Shapps? What does your Spotify playlist data say about you? Are Jeremy Corbyn and Stewart Lee really the new Christs? And so on.

Introduced, annotated and, where necessary, explained by the author, Content Provider is funny, grumpy and provocative.

Genres: Nonfiction, Humor, Comedy, Essays, Journalism, Politics, Short Stories

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2017

About the author

From Wikipedia (accessed Oct 2010):

Stewart Lee (born 5 April 1968, Wellington, Shropshire) is an English stand-up comedian, writer and director known for being one half of the 1990s comedy duo Lee and Herring, and for co-writing and directing the critically-acclaimed and controversial stage show Jerry Springer - The Opera. In a review of the comedy of the previous decade, a 2009 article in The Times referred to Lee as "the comedian's comedian, and for good reason" and named him "face of the decade".

Lee has been described as "Unflinching in his scathing satire, unapologetic in his liberal, middle-class, highbrow appeal, and fiercely intelligent, his comedy certainly does not pander to the masses". His stand-up features frequent use of "repetition, call-backs, nonchalant delivery and deconstruction".

Reviews

[Michael Legge · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shame he dies in the end.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

For non-Britons unfamiliar with Lee, he is the stand-up mash-up of David Foster Wallace and Flann O’Brien. His prose evokes the latter writer’s sense of form-breaking impishness per his Cruiskeen Lawn columns: the skill to write with insightful ease on a serious subject, and have fun skewering the process of paid opinion-making. These Guardian pieces can be read as meta-columns (never mere columns) or outright prose fictions, as the author seems to prefer (subheader ‘Selected Short Prose’), and tend to take a topical event as the springboard for a surreal mocking amplification of the sort of ludicrous hyperbole common in the right-wing media, flights of indulgent satirical fancy crammed with esoteric references, and some sincere-seeming commentary (readers seeking Lee’s actual opinion might find these frustrating—Lee writes as a ‘character’ version of himself, a man who wants to be sacked from the paper each week). From the online Guardian website, below-the-line comments are included: a howling catalogue of readers missing the point in the most toe-curling manner possible, a patchwork of droll trollery. Newcomers to Lee should watch online stand-up clips. For fans, this is as entertaining as his annotated stand-up book, How I Escaped my Certain Fate.

[Helen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I adore Stewart Lee. He is one of my favourite comedians, and I have followed him for many years. I really loved him when he was part of a comedy duo in the 90's called Lee and Herring, with Richard Herring, and during his recent BBC Comedy Vehicle series. He is the very rare comedian who can make me laugh out loud, even when I am watching his work from an iPad, with headphones on, alone in the middle of the night.

There's something about him which has always resonated with me, and that I can identify with. Do you know when you see famous people on TV and think that if only you could meet, you just know that you would hit it off and be great friends?! You don't do that fantasy? Course you do!

Not only do I firmly believe we could be pals, I also harbour a secret fantasy that he could be my brother, born out of sheer wishful thinking, rather than from any concrete evidence or rational explanation. Over the last twenty five years, I have fantasised about Stewart being the elder brother I so desperately wanted and needed, imagining whimsical scenarios of me going to his house for tea, having a good laugh with him out and about and in the pub, getting on with his wife (my sister-in-law!), giving each other advice and support and being each other's shoulder to cry on, sharing a camaraderie and close sibling connection, and having an ally to join forces with me to stand against our abrasive, mean and dysfunctional family. Nothing weird, nothing pervy, just a straightforward, salt of the earth, big brother.

So it was not without huge joy and excitement that I had the opportunity to go and see him live in October 2017. As my husband isn't really into Stewart Lee, and my daughter was too young to be able to see him, and as we don't really leave our daughter with babysitters, he took my daughter out for a real treat on that same night: a currie in a swanky Indian restaurant in Chester. It was win win, as I am severely allergic/intolerant to Indian food (most food actually, but that is a long, boring story I will spare you), my husband and daughter adore Indian food, but won't go out to eat without me, because they are so lovely and feel guilty (although they needn't!) leaving me home alone with scrambled egg and boiled rice. So, we were all very excited indeed about the night Stewart Lee, my pretend big brother, came to Chester.

My husband, Chris, and our daughter dropped me off at the theatre, and arranged to meet me there afterwards. I remember talking to Chris on the drive there, who was very familiar with my brotherly fantasy, and I was excitedly musing as to whether or not I might be lucky enough to meet him after the show. He said that would be great if I could, but to try not to be too weird and tell him about my sibling delusions, as that would just be creepy. As if, I replied. No one is that stupid to reveal something so odd.

The gig was excellent. I laughed so much I had an asthma attack. Stewart was his usual hilarious, outrageous, wicked, acerbic, scathing, wonderful self.

To my sheer delight, after the gig, Stewart set up a table in the auditorium to sign merchandise/tickets/ have photos taken with him. Unfortunately my husband had the beginnings of a bad cold, and had just started to feel really rough by the time we met up, so he grabbed one of the sofas close by, urged me to go and meet my "brother", and crashed out. My daughter joined me in the very long queue. I was beside myself with giddy anticipation, as my daughter and I happily chatted to each other about what a fabulous night we had both had. She kept telling to reveal my "secret". Go on, Mum, she encouraged me. He's a comedian, he'll see the funny side and love it!

So it was with exhilaration I came face to face with my hero, my beloved pretend brother. My mischievous daughter goading me to tell him I imagined him to be my brother and how much he'd love to hear this, and my voice-of-reason and bringer-back-to-earth husband almost asleep on a sofa too far away. I was like a rabbit caught in headlights. I was soooo nervous, so excited, so overwhelmed... that I just blurted it out in a rabid, crazed moment of madness. Stewart stared back at me, and I waited, with bated breath to see if he could feel our connection, to agree with me wholeheartedly that, yes, we had a strangely, undeniable, spiritual bond. But nah, he just smiled politely and the pr woman asked what I'd like written in the book I'd brought to be signed. That should have been it, I should have left it at that, but I continued the crazy and asked him, all red faced and giggly and slightly hysterical (with a small voice inside screaming loudly, stop it, for god's sake, just stop it) to sign it , "To my fictional sister, Helen, of 25 years". Which he duly did. Then bravely, kindly and patiently allowed me to gurn next to him for a photo.

And so it is, reading this magnificent, beautifully written book, which is a collection of newspaper columns he wrote for various British broadsheets between 2011-2016, full of political snark and contempt, satire and grandiose piss taking, and whilst loving every part of it, I am also simultaneously remembering and cringing at what a complete dick I was when I met my hero, my brother from another mother, the glorious Stewart Lee.

[Daniel Clausen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would like to write something very clever and charming. Something contenty and topical.

Alas, the book made me feel like simpleton. content provider. It sounds like a a full fiction stripper in Floirda...no wait, more like a waste disposal manager. Some function needs to be performed. Somebody has got to write this shit! In a Murakami Haruki novel, a character called this writing shoveling snow. You write it and every week there is more snow to to shovel. his is harder than it looks. At one point, I tried to write and finish an 8000 word something ready for publication every day and failed miserably. I wrote 13 short articles and then fizzled out. As imaginative as I thought I was, I just couldn't manage an idea that could be finished in a day. I do feel the world would be better if it could stomach a little more quiet. The need for new content, especially in the "attention economy" is what is pushing us toward this bizarre apocalyptical moment.

It didn't help that was ignorant of British politics and pop culture. But even if I were, I might think of the references as nostalgic and quaint. 2011-2016 was probably a crazy time, but 2016 turned out to be a whole another madhouse altogether -- not a great time for humanity, devotees of truth, science, and enlightenment. But probably the best of all times for content providers.

Was this a provision of content? Have your content needs been fulfilled?

If not, check out some of Stewart Lee's stand up.

Content, free but monetized I suppose, on YouTube:
-- From a quaint time of quaint concerns: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWFCi...
-- From the current madhouse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uovt1...

Now, your content needs have been fulfilled -- to the degree that any full friction stripper in Tampa, British comedian named Stewart Lee, or guy name Daniel would -- I would appreciate some form gratuity.

A like...anyone...anyone...

[Alex Sarll]

A collection which does not, confusingly, contain Lee's stand-up show Content Provider; that's in the subsequent volume. This is just newspaper columns plus a press release or two, and being from five long, hard years ago, it has some of the poignancy of the old pre-Event newspaper supplements I've finally been getting around to. In some ways, less powerfully, because you're not getting the whole tapestry; but set against that, there's the advantage that everything here is the work of someone who can actually write, so more of the power is deliberate, less the sheer found gut-punch of some numpty confidently prognosticating on the in looks for spring/summer 2020 without once mentioning trackie bums and facemasks. Still, one can't help sighing at these dispatches from what we can now see as the halcyon age of 2011 to early 2016 (though of course even the subsequent years of Brexit and Trump covered in March Of The Lemmings were far preferable to the present, or what we must still laughingly refer to as the future). "For the most part, I've not included the [2015] election columns in this book, and many of them became swiftly irrelevant, based, erroneously, on the assumption, shared by many, that the Tories could not win again. How long ago April 2015 seems now; and how many of the presumed strengths of post-war British society are being systematically dismantled and determinedly discredited." This note, from April 2016, can be met with no other response than: oh, you sweet summer child. He could still say what a shame it would be if Britain ends up leaving Europe! Elsewhere, grasping for apocalyptic imagery, he tweaks the usual Keith Richards line to fit his own post-punk sensibilities, talking about how only cockroaches and the Fall are likely to survive. Afraid not, Stew. Very occasionally one is struck with a happy thought of the irrelevance of a particular subject now - I can't remember the last time before this that I thought of Louise Mensch, for instance. But then you realise that as with Prime Ministers, whenever one of these tribunes shuffles offstage, the one who takes their place is worse; from Mensch we went to Rees-Mogg, then to Patel, and who dares dream how bad the next term in the sequence will be?

But leaving aside the ongoing and deepening awfulness of everything, what of the pieces themselves? Well, Lee is still finding his feet, both with the columns themselves and the presentation of the below-the-line comments, though certain themes are soon established in the latter: Colin Robinsons po-facedly pointing out the deliberate errors; semi-literates insisting they could have written something more intelligent; nascent culture warriors taking the self-satire of the metropolitan liberal elite entirely literally. Granted, one cannot entirely prove that they are not themselves responding to Lee's deliberate errors and slappable persona with similar efforts of their own, which would be hilarious if one followed all their comments and worked out the figure in the carpet. Yet somehow one suspects that most of them are just below-the-line internet pricks. The pieces are not yet conceived as an ongoing work in the same way as March Of The Lemmings, so at times the repetition can feel less like Lee's deliberate use of it as a technique, and more like just, well, Lee repeating himself – especially when he refers to driving one's plough over the bones of the dead twice in the first fifty pages, without the gloss that something like the golem image gets in Lemmings. Boris Johnson's ever-multiplying string of offences and thus nicknames is yet to get underway, Stew instead contenting himself with insisting on a mention of pencils whenever George Osborne hoves into view. Though had the idea of Osborne as a future director of the British Museum come to him, I suspect he'd have dismissed it as a step too far into the outlandishly distressing. And the fascination with Michael Gove being, like Lee, adopted is much more pronounced than I'd registered when reading the pieces separately, but now I'm deeply intrigued by a 19th century novel version of the story where the pair are siblings (the parents, obviously, should be someone else famous, and equally incongruous for both. Oliver Reed for the dad, maybe?). As with any journalism collection, even a pruned one, they can't all be winners, and some of it is self-confessedly puerile, not least the one about a poo in the shape of Tony Blair. But in a sense, isn't creating a persona where you can incorporate stuff this stupid as part of the project the smartest move of all? Aaaaah.

[Patrick Sherriff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Part of me wants to entirely miss the points this finite number of monkeys (one) at a typewriter who wrote the articles was making, just so my scathing review could be posted under one of Mr Lee's stories, or better yet on the front cover like the Daily Telegraph that opined: "Stewart Lee is not funny and has nothing to say." But, I couldn't because he is funny to me and does have a lot to say. Granted, I had to skip a handful of the 50 or so articles in the collection, not because they weren't brilliantly written and probably very funny if you could get all the cultural references, but I've been living in Japan since 2007 and some of the articles focussing on lesser Conservative politicians and other Brit-only TV folk Mr Lee was presumably lampooning, left me out in the cold. But that's not Mr Lee's fault. Probably. He's still my comedy hero, and I think he's my writing hero too now that I've moved on from PJ O'Rourke but find I'm still not smart enough to enjoy proper authors.

Download my (not as good but bigger than Mr Lee's) starter library for free here - http://eepurl.com/bFkt0X (less)

[James Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

The important thing with this book is that you have to love Stewart Lee, either his stand up work, particularly Comedy Vehicle, or his articles in the Guardian and the Observer. If you don’t, you’ll hate this, if you do, well, you’ll love it. I love the way his writing is so dry that you’re never quiet sure of his personal stance, but more importantly, under many of the articles are comments left under the online articles by clueless sociopaths. The book is almost worth reading just for those.

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Plenty of good work - the first piece raises facetiousness to an art form. Some hit and miss pieces and perhaps more filler made the final cut than should have done.

[Ross Maclean · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a longstanding fan of Stewart Lee since way back, I have to say that I’ve not always appreciated his newspaper columns in the same way I have his standup — constrained, as they are, by limitations that the careful pace of his live comedy is not. Reading all these together en masse has given me a new appreciation of the dribs and drabs I’d read over the years and it is possible to see a honing of his style and his fine tuning of the ‘Stewart Lee columnist persona’ as it progresses. Of course it’s very funny and his reveries which push to the extremities are beautifully realised, with a heavy folk horror influence, which I found compelling. (I’d love to see Stewart Lee tackle a straight-up folk horror). Reading this at a distance from the events depicted of between 9 and 4 years, it inevitably robs the pieces of some of their contemporary impact but his characterisations of figures like Michael Gove and Grant Shapps stand the test of time. The contextualisations add an extra layer and the inclusion of counterpoint below the line opinions are an inspired diversion. It would have been nice to see a little more variance away from Observer pieces but the sojourns into ShortList and ghost story territory were welcome punctuation points, as was the final positive note of the band Wolf People’s press release.

[Chakib Miraoui · Rating 3 out of 5]

i read most political pieces, and a few non-political in this collection. i never heard of this bloke before, partly because i am younger, and new to England press, and partly because i have no interest in tabloids, such as the observer and the guardian, that feature this.

i found the pieces to be very witty, improved by the fictitious narrative, and the story style. a jab at Quinten Letts in one piece angered me, as he is my favorite columnist.

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

I only read this book to look clever even though Stewart Lee, the middle-class liberal elitist smug-faced champagne socialist, never has anything good to say anyway. I prefer Clarkson.

[Richard Vernon · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of comedic columns done for UK newspapers by an overweight middle aged white man that has been bound together into a book, a bit like Jeremy Clarkson you might ask? Well, no. Let's start at polar opposite and go from there.

In the spirit of openness I'm a fan of Stewart Lee so am clearly going to be pre-disposed to liking this, and for the most part I did.

There are one or two articles that I didn't get on with, mainly due to something like an analogy that I found a bit jarring (dead cat / Olympics for example), but in the main it was good Stewart Lee fayre but in writing rather than stand up - and if you've spent a lot of time watching his stand up like I have it is an interesting angle.

Most columns have a short introduction and some having comments made online appended - and whilst cherry picked for their value they do provide a good source of fun as people can be fairly ludicrous when they want to be.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Stewart Lee's insider's take on William and Kate", which opens this collection, should be read alongside Hilary Mantel's "Royal Bodies", published two years later in the London Review of Books.

Lee writes of the moment of the Royal Wedding ("... like some giant illuminated penis flying over the rooftops of suburban homes and frothing at random passing women, William has pointed himself at Kate Middleton, the Susan Boyle of social mobility ..."), while Mantel places the commoner bride in her historical role (" ... a jointed doll on which certain rags are hung .... Once she gets over being sick, the press will find that she is radiant.").

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stewart Lee is an absolute treasure but it must be admitted he's operating at an advantage here. For all of his clever literary pastiche, his scathing deconstruction of right-wing ideology, and his agile maneuvering between character comedy, self-détournement, and autocritique, this is still a collection of ephemeral and topical social commentary, and would be consigned by genre consideration to the 4-star range.

But what satirist would not be elevated by the inclusion of below-the-line responses from a terminally dense and aggrieved subset of the Guardian readerbase?

“More evidence of the ongoing even worsening BBC bias to the left: this ‘comedian’ is just a left wing activist paid by the BBC for his sixth form level ‘humour’. I suppose the BBC is now the propaganda arm of the Blob. When will the public get any chance to have this vast media empire put under some sort of democratic accountability? Whitingdale is clearly not up to this task.” Peel

“The reference to flatulence suggests the author really is not up to the job.” Namenottaken

“What an utter utter load of bizarre, garbled bollocks! !!!What is this guy on? This is a typically pseudo intellectual article written by the introverted academics in their little Ivory Towers somewhere. The sort of article that the ‘Guardian ‘just loves to publish. The introverted academics on about £100,00 a year plus expenses and totally out of touch with their country or its people. Just nauseating claptrap really. It is a wonder this guy isn’t called Toby or Tristan Farquart -Smythe or something! !!!!” Alice38

“‘But, like an anarchist Fagin, I have trained my children, aged two and four, to wait until the barista has turned round and then knock as many of the chocolate coins off the front of the display as they can. These I then pocket while pretending to tie my lace, thus costing Starbucks more on each transaction than they make.’ I presume this is a joke otherwise I think it pretty poor parenting to teach your children to steal/take the law into your own hands.” BJzoo1

“Typically smug attitude from a privately educated out-of-shape-Morrissey comedian whose jokes don’t even have punchlines. Cook your own steak. Why should I be out of a job because a foreigner will cook steak more cheaply than me? Disgusting.” Esistgeschlossen

and my personal favorite

“Eternia is a planet not a realm. Etheria, where She-Ra is primarily based, is a different planet.” John Yard Dog

[Ewan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’ve found Lee’s columns to be a lot more esoteric and hit-and-miss than his stand-up. Both have the a fairly similar flaw in that he will claim in his commentary that he is presenting a ‘character’, and not the actual Stewart Lee, and yet the intention of this portrayal is not made all that obvious in the work itself. It’s obvious that he’s employing sarcasm, absurdity, and being scathingly satirical (the online comments from people who don’t seem to understand even this provide some amusement), but the finer points like how he’s apparently ‘writing like someone trying to get fired’ seem somewhat dubious even when you have been told that’s the case.

This collection is presented in chronological order, which has an interesting effect in that it’s not front-loaded like a lot of collections of short works, and so the better columns are spread out. I would say that it probably gets a bit better towards the end as he starts to find his footing a bit more. Early on he perhaps over-employs the whole ‘here’s a ridiculous analogy for a real thing’ angle. It probably only works when presented in order anyway as there are so many references to events and people that have faded from public memory, that the only way to make sense of some of them is from following the internal narratives that run through these columns.

I would not give this book to someone unfamiliar with Stewart Lee, and to be honest it’s probably more of a curio for fans of his work - though worth reading if you’re one of those. As he says in his newer book, a lot of the subject matter here now seems quaint in comparison to events that have happened since.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stewart Lee is one of my favourite comedians, his stand up shows can have you crying with laughter one minute while making you feel uncomfortable the next as he questions why you're laughing at what he just said. His comedy won't be to everyone's taste but then Stewart Lee doesn't care as is shown by the quote he uses on the front of this book from The Daily Telegraph; "Stewart Lee is not funny and has nothing to say".
This book is a collection of articles he wrote for The Observer and Guardian between 2011-2016. All articles are based upon socio-political stories that were in the news during this time. Obviously this is the downside of the book as the later you read it, the vaguer the news stories will be to you. However, I still felt a lot of this was very relevant, well written and very funny satricial takes on many stories from recent memory. He even includes the negative comments he received online at the end of his articles which makes them even funnier.

[Gavin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought I should go [to the British Comedy Awards], as it’s hard to make the stake back in a world where the public expect to steal all content for nothing.

Besides which, I have become the sort of person who declines attending events on principle, but where my absence is not noticed anyway. When I won two British comedy awards in 2011, it wasn’t mentioned in any newspapers. And my 2012 BAFTA acceptance speech was cut from TV, perhaps because I told the presenter, Kate Thornton, that acclaim was a random phenomenon, like cloud patterns, into which you read significance at your peril.

Like Francis Wheen or Clive James' collections, a useful critical record of the dumb minutiae Britain obsessed over, over the last ten years. Good prose and there's usually one laugh every 6 or 7 pages to boot.

He uses "comedian" as an honorific, but "TV comedian" as an insult.

God bless some smug wankers.

[W · Rating 2 out of 5]

A pretty fun read, if nothing new or revelatory. Only about 10 out of 300 pages are not from Lee's Observer column, all of which is on the Guardian website. The book's innovation is to set varying selected quantities of that website's dreadful comments section underneath the articles, and it is a zinger. The Lee pieces establish his hyperbolically satirical tone, which is then suddenly supplied to the reader comments, against their intentions. So the (generally livid) responses gain an unearned feeling of clever irony, suggesting that real outrage is ultimately the funniest thing. I suppose that's the point of the book.

Problem is these columns are intended to be read within the context of more serious news and media developments, and reading them all together you lose that startling and soothing effect.

[Joyce · Rating 5 out of 5]

what lee (to me) has above his peers (in stand up and newspaper columning) is his depth of thought and his heart, his searching probing at the form of what he's doing and exposure of this. this is honesty in a way, as he says here and in his other books he's not pretending this is an ordinary outpouring of daytoday thought.
lee's passionate leftism and humanity mean his work has more long term life in it than say charlie brooker, whose columns (which i was an ardent reader of) i can't imagine revisiting now, so clogged are they with minor things which just don't matter. but what matters to lee (the defence of the environment, the arts, the bbc as a public service) will always matter, and will always need a passionate defence.
it is all the more impressive this defence can be offered touchingly in his conceited pathetic persona.

[Barry Bridges · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I first saw the benevolent face of the Stewart Lee smiling at me from the cover of this book I knew it would be just the image to relax me whilst doing the morning twos. Then, one day, as I tore another page from the inside to maintain human hygiene I happened to notice an amusing phrase, a funny passage (not a reflection of my own) and was absorbed for a few selfish minutes in the world of political satire. One thing led to another and over the course of a lot of mornings (and many twos) I digested the full content provided. Not only are the short prose pieces funny of themselves but I think what really brings the book to life are the comments from Observer / Guardian readers who clearly don't get it!
The Stewart Lee - great for stand up and for sitting down....

[Derek Bridge · Rating 4 out of 5]

A little Lee goes a long way. And this is rather a lot of Lee. True, these pieces contain some moments of brilliance. But, even for a Stewart Lee fan (which I am) and even when dipped into occasionally (which is how I read it), this tome was somewhat wearying.

The problem is perhaps that these newspaper column pieces are an unhappy marriage between Lee's audacious comic persona as groom and topical satire as bride. (Oooh-errr.) Lee's stand-up is the better place for the former and Mark Steel's newspaper columns are a better example of the latter.

[Russio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ok, so it is variable. At times this doesn't work and comes across as too absurd and unstructured. At other times, though, especially in his later writing, this hits the nail right on the head. Stewart Lee is best when taking a serious subject and then illuminating it with absurdity. He is also very good at baiting the kinds of readers he dislikes, who repeatedly fail to see through his (probably) faux egotism and deliberate attempts to lure them out. And with some of their comments included, the evidence of his effect is made even funnier.

[Kevinjwoods · Rating 3 out of 5]

My opinion doesn't really matter compared to the fact when I had this in ny bag the sauce from a packet of chorizo potatoes passed through the foil tin and a plastic bag, touching neither, moved its way through some magazines, a t shirt, a notebook, and various items of groceries, touching nothing just so it could touch and defile the outside of this book.
This is true but nobody reading this believes it for a second anyway

[Tom Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A mix of mostly good/great pieces in here with the odd misfire - essentially if you enjoyed the Observer column he used to write, you'll like this. It's not the kind of book to get really stuck into and read in one go though. (Can you tell from how long it took for me to read?)

The added context before some pieces was really helpful, as it turns out I can barely remember the bygone era of 2015, and the added comments from other readers at the time are often priceless.

[Paul Linton · Rating 4 out of 5]

I came to this one a bit late, but I'd recommend reading this while listening to any of the four albums Voiding my Gussets have released since the beginning of 2019. Having completed this tonight, I look forward to tackling the next volume of Stewart's various ramblings, once the echoes of Brexit stop ringing in my ears. Looks like the snowflake/tornado tour might have been temporarily derailed by the corona virus, so there's no better time to enjoy his writing.

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's funny but it'd be funnier if I lived in the UK. It's fine to laugh at a joke about George Osborne sticking a pencil up someone's ass every 10 pages or so, but I think it might be even funnier if I knew who George Osborne was. The album review of Wolf People's "Fain" at the end is very good. I'd like Mr. Stewart Lee to come out with a book of his album reviews.

[Mancman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was expecting more from this, not sure why, but it all felt a little haphazard and slow. There were diamonds in the rough, but the sparkles were outweighed by the morass. It did remind me of things that happened in this time period, most of which I wish had remained forgotten. It’s been a lot of bad news for a lot of years hasn’t it?

[Sebastian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stew is my favourite comedian but I didn't find these too exciting. But that's only because I'm not from the UK so I don't know or care a lot about Tories, David Cameron, tea and crumpets and so on. Otherwise it's worth reading since his writing is brilliant. :)

[David Freeman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Normally I find these books of collected articles fragmentary. Here, though, Stewart Lee turns a it into an art form. Throughout the pieces here you can see him developing and perfecting his "columnist" persona (and annoying some under the line commentators along the way).

[🌶 peppersocks 🧦 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reflections and lessons learned: Some familiar ideas and gags from stand up routines. Equally mocking of both political sides whilst still being disillusioned but engaged - is anyone one person fully left or right winged or is it better to be a mixture of both?