The received wisdom is that, as the northern hemisphere tilts nearer the Sun – causing the Earth to warm, buds to flush, and bees, once more, to fly in through open windows – that we watch less television.

Britain, it is presumed, strolls out for a gigantic game of cricket around March 15, should the weather be clement, and doesn’t really come back inside until the end of September, when it has a hot bath, a bowl of lentil soup, puts its snuggle-socks on, and can’t wait to settle down for a new series of Antiques Roadshow.

Myself, I find this not to be the case. For, as the days get longer, is the fact not simply that we have more day? And, therefore, can we not fit in even more television than we did before? With the spring sun so clement before breakfast, I’m now fitting in fully half my life before 9am, which means – as the day progresses – I’m running at least two hours ahead of my winter self, hit the wine around 4pm, and by 9 I’m on the sofa, rat-arsed, banging on my saucepan with a spoon and screaming, “Telly!”

And to the vinous cry of “Telly!” there can be few more pleasing answers than “Here’s the new programme from Stewart Lee”.

Lee has a unique place in the hearts of those, roughly, between 25 and 40. As half of the Nineties comedy duo Lee & Herring, his BBC Fist of Fun show was basically The Mary Whitehouse Experience, but without Punt & Dennis. Or, perhaps more crucially, a subsequent series of sell-out gigs at Wembley. What I’m basically trying to say is that Lee and Herring had a similar line in greasy hair, puppyish postmodernism and alt-rock reference points – they had a character called the Kurious Oranj – after the Fall track, after all – but they were both much cooler, and much less successful.

With Lee this cool/cash ratio imbalance was vastly magnified with his first solo project, which was the seminally profane Jerry Springer: The Opera. How I feel about Jerry Springer: The Opera is a bit like how Kevin Spacey felt about Mena Suvari in American Beauty – rose petals hurtle from my heart when I think of it. Not only was it Chris Rock-funny, with a Scorsese-level of symphonic swearing, but it also was the most lucidly sustained piece of cold, moral fury I have seen. Hypocrisy, intolerance, media bear-baiting – Jerry Springer: The Opera played out the ultimate conclusion of them all, with sopranos and contraltos, and the energy of a small car plant.

It was with no small measure of irony, then, that its broadcast on the BBC received a record number of complaints and, for a time, Lee faced charges of blasphemy. These were eventually dismissed because, as Lee put it, “It’s not 1508”. But Lee hasn’t really worked on TV since then. Quite why seems veiled in mystery – he left his management company, the monolithic Avalon, and toured a lot instead – but the fact remains that, for nearly half a decade, one of the most talked-about, relevant and clever comedians around hasn’t had a weekly credit sequence to call his own.

This omission has now been corrected with a clearly costly opening montage in which Lee drives around in a specially commissioned, primary-coloured clown-car, the “Comedy Vehicle” of the title. It feels a little bit like the cashing-in of a successful compensation claim against the BBC for inexplicably ignoring him for four years.

Anyway, is Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle very clever and funny, and full of things that you are still thinking about the next morning while you jog in the spring sunshine at 8am? Yes. Of course. The End. Except it’s not – because if you missed it, I want you to realise how very much you need to go on i-Player and listen to Lee talking about, this week, books. Having bought six Jeremy Clarkson books from Amazon – “which changes your profile in a way which takes literally thousands of man-hours to correct” – Lee starts to invent future Clarkson titles, such as “Saplings I Have Crushed”, and “Women – and their Four Uses”.

He moves on to J.K. Rowling (“Harry Potter and the Tree of Nothing”), the pitiful, invertebrate lack of ambition in Chris Moyles’s claim to have “written a great toilet book” – “Oh, Icarus, fly not too close to the Sun, lest your waxen wings melt” – and, ultimately, merges his anger with Dan Da Vinci Code Brown’s remedial writing style (“This is a man who has written and published the line ‘The famous man looked at the red cup’”) with his rant on the “misery-memoir” genre, to imagine a misery-memoir written by Brown: “The bad man’s cruel hand hit my nice face.”

How very little we see of people who can throw a slouchy reference to William Tyndale – martyred for making unauthorised translations of the Bible – into a rant about a Radio 1 DJ’s cash-in hardback. There’s a skit about an abused goat that misfires but, generally, this was the kind of stand-up/sketch show that ultimately makes you relax about the state of this country’s IQ.