I’m not saying Michael Gove is a bit of an animal… - June 2016 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - June 19th, 2016

The so-called EU Referendum debate on so-called ITV (let us not dignify either by naming them) filled me and all my ABC1 liberal friends with despair. Oh! The humanity!! Drunk on Belgian wine, I watched the Barrier Reef of the Britain I know bleach to nothing in the twin glare of Brexit’s burning certainties and…

Here’s a piece about the BBC recipes fiasco that I prepared too early - May 2016 The Observer - May 22nd, 2016

Six days ago, this week’s column looked like it would be a piece of cake so basic it wouldn’t bother a BBC Bake Off reject. It was the sort of column I could knock out in a cafe in a couple of hours, I imagined, on the back of an old G2, after the morning…

Pity David Attenborough – the BBC’s Galápagos tortoise - May 2016 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - May 8th, 2016

In 1997 I looked into the pre-atomic age eyes of Harriet, the then 166-year-old Galápagos tortoise, in an Australian zoo, and saw myself reflected back, a traveller in time. And earlier this year, I looked into the pre-digital-age eyes of David Attenborough, on the platform of Oxford station, and saw myself reflected back, a traveller…

The EU debate is a cynical battle of big beasts, not beliefs - May 2016 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - May 1st, 2016

Last weekend I found myself trapped on an isolated, monster-infested Pacific atoll with a pair of twin psychic Japanese schoolgirls. A skyscraper-sized lizard, with three fire-breathing heads, the result of careless radioactive experiments in the 50s, and now a huge clumsy metaphor for both the dangers of human scientific meddling with Mother Nature and postwar Japanese identity…

Defy John Whittingdale and a dominatrix will whip you into line - April 2016 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - April 24th, 2016

Today, if I worked as a cartoonist for a tabloid newspaper, I could simply hand in a hurried scrawl of heaven, where Victoria Wood now plays the piano alongside Prince on guitar and John Whittingdale’s political credibility on slap bass. But instead, I must write. Does it matter that the torture-porn fan, free-market fundamentalist and…

Curating… you are the disease, I am the curator - March 2016 The Observer - March 27th, 2016

The television food personality and chef Angela Hartnett, formerly best remembered as the Rod Hull to Gordon Ramsay’s Emu, is curating something called Kitchen Tales at the Chipping Norton Set’s cheese and music festival, Wilderness. But I can’t work out from the blurb if it is an exhibition, an event, a shop, or just some…