Farewell, BBC TV Centre. You were Britain’s very own Disneyland - March 2013 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - March 31st, 2013

Last week I attended the ceremonial destruction of BBC TV Centre, which was enthusiastically blown to pieces in a controlled nuclear explosion by a delighted David Cameron. With one hand on the detonator and the other jiggling in his pocket, David Cameron was flanked by representatives of the principal faith groups, as well as leading…

Fists full of sausage, Michael Gove declaims his vision of the future - March 2013 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - March 24th, 2013

When I first met the future education secretary Michael Gove in 1992, I was writing jokes for him when he was a satirist on the groundbreaking Channel 4 opinio-tainment show A Stab in the Arras. Last summer I attended the programme’s 20th anniversary reunion, a sausage-on-a-stick event at M&M’s World in Piccadilly Circus. Also partying…

Some mothers do have the power to give me a God delusion - March 2013 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - March 17th, 2013

On the day before Mothering Sunday I got up early and drove alone to Birmingham to put flowers on my mother’s and my grandmother’s graves, a timeless act of ancestor worship. Two years ago, when I took my then three-year-old son with me, he accidentally flung a 2ft-long branch into the door panel of a…

Never mind endangered animals – it’s the thinkers that we need to save - March 2013 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - March 10th, 2013

The reintroduction of the otter into British waterways is one of the conservation success stories of recent years. Indeed, the Otter Trust has now closed its Bungay captive breeding centre to the public, its once apparently impossible aim of repopulating the rivers with capering otters brilliantly realised. There is a slight blip in the story…

Pop culture’s past is growing faster than its present - February 2013 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - February 3rd, 2013

Saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell: appreciated by 17-year-olds and septuagenarians. Photograph: Massimo Valicchia/Demotix/Corbis Just before Christmas, I saw the early-80s Boston hardcore band Mission of Burma in a Shoreditch cellar, playing to a crowd of young people barely born this century, typically too inarticulate to explain exactly what had led them to a room I expected to…

Sun Zoom Spark - February 2013 Beaux Arts, London - By Stewart Lee - February 1st, 2013

Sun Zoom Spark takes its title from a song by Anthony Frost’s beloved Captain Beefheart, the Mojave desert avant-blues auteur and abstract neo-primitivist who died in 2010. Much has been written already of the importance of music in Frost’s work. Perhaps, on arriving in Cornwall, critics can’t help but expect artists to cite the light…