Stewart Lee branches out into high culture while staying rooted in comedy for this postmodern revue Stewart Lee’s writing is becoming increasingly confident. Having won plaudits and awards for his stripped down standup material and for the overblown Jerry Springer – The Opera, his new work Late But Live falls somewhere – very roughly –…
‘People think I’m calm but I’ve got a flash temper’ Miles Jupp, 28, is a popular stand-up comedian and regularly appears on stage and screen. He is also well known as Archie, the inventor in the television series ‘Balamory’. He is performing his stand-up show ‘Johnson and Boswell: Late But Live’ at the Edinburgh Festival…
Samuel Johnson didn’t mince his words when identifying deficiencies in the Scotland he travelled through with his friend and biographer James Boswell in the autumn of 1773. In his Journey to the Western Islands he variously identified a “sullen scrupulousness and warlike ferocity”, bemoaned the lack of trees (“a tree might be a show in…
“I had desired to visit the Hebrides of Scotland so long that I scarcely remember how the wish was originally excited. And was in the Autumn of the year 1773 induced to undertake the journey by finding in Mr Boswell a companion .. whose gaiety of conversation and civility of manners are sufficient to counteract…
Penning a late-night Fringe play about literature’s greatest double act isn’t the most obvious career move for a stand-up comedian. Then again, Stewart Lee’s 20-year career hasn’t exactly followed the usual path. He directed and co-wrote Jerry Springer: The Opera, moonlighted as a music journalist and recently made his debut as a fiction writer in…
Some of the most memorable sketches featured on Fist of Fun – the cult BBC 2 series created by Stewart Lee and Richard Herring – involved the pair applying their double act dynamic to historical and biblical tales. Almost a decade later, Lee’s Johnson and Boswell – Late but Live feels like a natural progression.…