Public art can’t be used for adverts. But my subconscious is up for sale - May 2014 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - May 11th, 2014

Last weekend, the world woke to find Morrisons had projected an image of a cut-price baguette on to the outstretched wings of Antony Gormley’s iconic public artwork The Angel of the North. The stick of bread was the perfect shape to occupy the Angel‘s wingspan, and one wonders what other products Morrisons might have filled…

Why I’m a leading contender for the Great British fruitcake bake off - May 2014 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - May 4th, 2014

As homemade fruitcakes continue to rise in the nation’s ovens, the political and culinary establishments are sinking to even greater depths to smear them. In some Birmingham schools, traditional Christmas cake, the famous fruitcake of English festive celebration since Dickens’s day, has even been banned. But moist fruitcakes composed of dried fruit, flour, margarine, eggs…

The maggots that changed my life (and the future of the Tory party) - March 2014 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - March 23rd, 2014

From 1989 to 1991 I lived in Finsbury Park, decades before it began to show signs of gentrification. I’d get home late from unpaid standup try-out spots, and it was hard to hold down a day job. At the end of my street, outside a hardware shop on Tollington Park, was a contraption so unusual…

Sarah Vine sets a new bog standard. But will Mr Gove leave the seat up? - March 2014 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - March 16th, 2014

Conservative politicians, and their husbands and wives, have always been obsessed with toilets. Last week’s Daily Mail carried a full-page picture of Sarah Vine, partner of the education secretary, Michael Gove, emerging from a “bog standard” public toilet in Westminster, waving an ordinary toilet brush, and declaring that her family will be using public toilets…

A vision of life under The Ukip’s steel-capped Hush Puppies - March 2014 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - March 9th, 2014

The inevitable victory of the Scottish independence campaign and the subsequent collapse of the Labour vote in the sorry remnants of the UK will see the next election won by a coalition of The Ukip and The Conservative party. Then the Bullingdon boys’ lack of appeal to the common man will eventually leave the country…

Another goddamned appreciation of the late, lamented Bill Hicks - March 2014 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - March 1st, 2014

Twenty years after the tragic injustice of his goddamned death, isn’t it time we canonised Bill Hicks as the best goddamned stand-up comedian contemporary broadsheet newspaper critics have ever heard of? If only for belatedly providing dozens of desperate hacks and pro-celebrity columnists working in the last days of dying print media with the opportunity…