Migrants and my own modest proposal - November 2020 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - November 1st, 2020

In August, a television producer asked me to contribute to a forthcoming documentary about the 18th-century satirist Jonathan Swift. Swift is best known for writing the children’s story Gulliver’s Travels, which is about a man who keeps going all different sizes and riding around on mice. Swift failed to use the then fashionable travelogue format…

Since we’re talking fantasy Brexit deals… - October 2020 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - October 25th, 2020

In 1981, tarnished by a legacy of nuclear embarrassments, the leaky Cumbrian atomic power plant Windscale was rebranded as Sellafield and the problems of public perception simply melted away, like hot uranium seeping into a water table. Likewise, we are no longer about to embrace a similarly contaminated no-deal Brexit. We are instead welcoming a…

What’s the story with Britpop and Covid denial? - September 2020 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - September 20th, 2020

On Monday, the Oasis pop star Noel Gallagher announced his suspicion of masks: “If I get the virus it’s on me, it’s not on anyone else… it’s a piss-take,” declared the People’s Virologist. “There’s no need for it… They’re pointless.” The previous week, in a punctuation-resistant statement Auto-Tuned into near coherence, former Stone Roses singer…

Never mind Extinction Rebellion, let’s consider Boris Johnson’s charge sheet - September 2020 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - September 13th, 2020

My old university friend, the American geographer William Dyer, accepted my Skype call at a research station on the pebble shores of the Antarctic Sound. Once, it would have been too remote to receive messages and yet here I was, laughing at the Sub Pop Records baseball cap that fixed him temporally and culturally. Will…

The divided land of ‘woke’ and Tory - September 2020 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - September 6th, 2020

Writing last weekend on the scandal surrounding the Proms’ absence of patriotic songs, the former minister of fun David Mellors opined, “the person I feel most sorry for is Edward Elgar”, the composer of Land of Hope and Glory. Not black Britons offended by Rule, Britannia!’s references to slaves; not black Britons annoyed by people…

I’ll tell you what’s got us choking on our granola… - August 2020 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - August 30th, 2020

The nation will fall. The monarchy will collapse. The ravens are leaving the Tower of London. They flee not in anticipation of another Landrover-crash Prince Andrew interview, but because they are bored by virus London’s lack of bustle. I understand. Without live music, live comedy, and live yoghurt, London is the congested, polluted, overpriced hell-hole…