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…

What to do if millions of Romanian vampires pitch camp at Marble Arch - January 2014 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - January 5th, 2014

During the Thatcher era, wealthy British people leaving the National Theatre skirted British homeless people in the cardboard cities of the South Bank subway. Today, wealthy Arabs, Russians and Europeans, leaving the Princess Diana memorial playground, skirt Romanian homeless people in the Marble Arch underpass. Can there be any better proof of the astonishing progress…

Stewart Lee: what the National Theatre means to me - October 2013 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - October 20th, 2013

Jerry Springer: The Opera. ‘The staff at the National are like the civil servants in Yes, Minister’ says its director Stewart Lee. ‘They save you from making terrible mistakes.’ Photograph: Dave Benett/Getty Comedian Stewart Lee co-wrote and co-directed the National’s first new opera, Jerry Springer: The Opera, which started life at BAC before running at…