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.

Selected Short Prose Pieces, 2011–2016

Content Provider

Gavin

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.

Content Provider Selected Short Prose Pieces, 2011–2016

Reviews