Stewart Lee Tickets

In another parallel world, Stewart Lee might have formed an intimidatingly obscure indie band or become a respected music critic. Instead, the devoted record collector and John Peel listener met Richard Herring at Oxford University and the two forged hugely successful careers as daytime TV hosts. Except not quite.

Lee moved to London after uni, embarking on a stand-up career while also working with his friend Herring, most notably as writers on The Day Today’s radio forbearer On The Hour Lionel Nimrod’s Inexplicable World, Fist Of Fun and Lee And Herring. Following two series of Fist Of Fun on BBC2, the duo then descended on Sunday afternoons like anarchic aliens with This Morning With Richard Not Judy, resulting in a flurry of complaints from viewers.

Never one to follow the standard route to success, in 2001 Lee wrote and directed the musical Jerry Springer: The Opera, which resulted in even more complaints when it moved to the West End in 2003. A precedent was set.

All the while, Lee was refining his confrontational, sarcastic, ironic, exasperated, world-weary-to-the-point-of-exhaustion stand-up persona, berating most people for most things they liked. This earned him 41st place in Channel 4’s 100 Best Stand-Up Comedians. In 2007, Lee wrote a new show called 41st Best Stand-Up Ever.

In 2008, Lee returned to BBC2 for a new series Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle. The show ran for four seasons and won a BAFTA in 2012.

In 2018, his book Content Provider and its unrelated stand-up show of the same name earned rave reviews, including one from Alan Bennett. In 2020, Lee had a resounding musical one-two, with one of his routines forming the basis for Asian Dub Foundation’s Comin Over Here and Sky Arts screening his King Rocker documentary about Brummie punk band The Nightingales.

In 2021, Stewart Lee announced that he was taking his double stand-up show, Snowflake/Tornado, on an extensive 2022 UK tour. The show would consist of two 60-minute sets from Lee, one dwelling on how COVID and Brexit have shaped the “culture war between lovely snowflakes and horrible people”. The other examines Lee’s existential crisis after Netflix mislabeled his stand-up show as a Sharknado film. Stewart Lee’s 2022 UK tour dates were set to run between January and July 2022.