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"We don’t have a political system, more like the US, where people are more empowered to act for their area, to act independently. I think the British political system and MPs individually would rise in the public’s esteem if they were able to act with more independence on an everyday basis and say what they really feel. Maybe we’d have a more vibrant political debate if people went into interviews and said what they were feeling, as opposed to what they’ve been told to say." Andy Burnham talks to Hardeep Matharu from Byline Times.

Stewart Lee once described Twitter as "a state surveillance agency staffed by gullible volunteers". Jason Koebler and Matthew Gault come to much the same conclusion about more recent developments: "The CEO seemingly having an affair with the head of HR at his company at the Coldplay concert is a viral video for the ages, but it is also, unfortunately, emblematic of our current private surveillance and social media hellscape."

Gary T. Gunnels reviews Hayek's Bastards by Quinn Slobodian: "Slobodian’s central thesis is that Hayek’s intellectual edifice, rooted in his arguments for spontaneous order and market mechanisms, has been warped by a group of unwanted 'bastards' into a justification for a racially hierarchical social order."

Kate Moore argues that, for many people, ageing means lost independence in a digital online world built without them in mind."

"I first heard of Baron from Iain Sinclair's description of him (and Gerald Kersh) as being amongst 'the Reforgotten' – British writers brought back in and out of fashion over the decades." Discontinued Notes on Alexander Baron.

Kelefa Sanneh considers the strange persistence of prog rock: "The genre’s bad reputation has been remarkably durable, even though its musical legacy keeps growing. Twenty years ago, Radiohead released 'OK Computer,' a landmark album that was profoundly prog: grand and dystopian, with a lead single that was more than six minutes long. But when a reporter asked one of the members whether Radiohead had been influenced by Genesis and Pink Floyd, the answer was swift and categorical: 'No. We all hate progressive rock music.'"

Alexei Sayle and Stewart Lee discuss comedy

Here's a treat from four years ago: Stewart Lee appears as the guest on Alexei Sayle's podcast.

They talk about the inevitable apocalypse, Beryl Reid, dinner parties, comedians of the Music Hall era and Lee's film King Rocker.

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Zoe Crowther asks what the Westminster social media landscape will look like in 2025.

"You get people saying they can’t say anything. But a lot of them are filling stadiums, winning Grammys, and getting $60m off Netflix. Jimmy Carr carries on despite the idea he was cancelled for his joke about gypsies. Ricky Gervais would love to be properly ‘cancelled’, I think, but ... he doesn’t seem able to say anything actually controversial enough to be as controversial as he’d like to be." Stewart Lee talks to Prospect.

Far from displaying intelligence, argues Baldur Bjarnason, chat-based Large Language Models replicate the 'cold reading' techniques of fraudulent mediums.

Sugata Srinivasaraju pays tribute to his friend Jeremy Seabrook: "He was so much different from all that the colonial curriculum had imparted to us of a British life and character. He was like us, I thought. Very much like us. He was like a family elder. He happily fit into that very avuncular Indian role. He had no position to proselyte you into."

"In late December 1831, white Jamaican planters slept restlessly in their beds. Rumors had long been circulating of disquiet among the enslaved Africans residing in plantations across the island. Before they knew it, the island would be set ablaze as tens of thousands armed themselves to fight for their freedom." Perry Blankson on Christmas Day 1831, when 60,000 enslaved Africans carried out the largest uprising in the history of the British West Indies.

Ruth Lewy and Maxine Beuret present a photo essay on Britain's last milkmen: "[Beuret] first photographed an electric milk float while undertaking another project called Familiar Interiors of Leicester – her hometown – in 2005. As well as creating a record of the library, the hospital, the pub and other cherished places, she visited the local dairy, Kirby & West, and "instantly fell in love" with the milk floats, she says. "I loved the compact, functional design, clean lines, and fragile sense of history they carried with them."

Stewart Lee: The John Robb interview

Stewart Lee on psychogeography, being adopted, the history of comedy and the decline of regional differences between audiences.

Seeing him so engaged and amused reminds you that his stage persona is not the real man.

John Robb runs Louder Than War.

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"What was the Liberal Democrats’ aim at the 2019 general election: to maximise the number of Liberal Democrat MPs in parliament or to stop Brexit? That was the tactical question the party never answered." Stephen Bush looks at the Lib Dems' post mortem on their 2019 general election campaign.

"Seventy years ago my dad needed to change his weird foreign name to avoid the sly glances of bigots. Stewart Lee is that bigot - a man who thinks the best response to a foreign sounding Jewish name is to ridicule it in a national newspaper." Ouch. Read Stephen Pollard in the Jewish Chronicle.

Kathryn Rix surveys bizarre turnip-related deaths among Victorian MPs.

Following the death of Florian Schneider, Owen Hatherley looks at the influence of Kraftwerk.

Mackenzie Nicholls marks the 20th anniversary of Gladiator. Russell Crowe tells him: "The standout thing with this film, and 20 years later I can say with confidence that somewhere in the world, today, tonight, that movie will be played on primetime. And it’s 20 years since it came out. Not every movie lasts in that way."

Wyrd Britain reviews a collection of horror stories by Arthur Machen.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Somewhere in High Leicestershire

Reader's voice: Isn't this meant to be political satire?

Liberal England replies: Lord Bonkers and his diaries are protean. This week I am deepening readers' understanding of his character and those of his associates while exploring the landscape he loves.

Reader does not give up: So you are just being self indulgent?

Liberal England has the last word: Yes, but you have given me the chance to do the sort of self-referential piece that everyone has copied from Stewart Lee.

Thursday

The morning begins on a distasteful note when I find the Elves of Rockingham F. have charged me mooring fees for yesterday evening – particularly galling as these are my woods. I find myself somewhat in sympathy with Cook’s view that they are “nasty heathen things,” but it is best to keep in with these fellows. I have Tom post a cheque at the first sub post office we encounter.

Matters do not improve, for we find the canal increasingly hard going. Locks are jammed, the channel silted and weeded, and the sun beats down without mercy. If it were not for the brute strength of Alfred (and Jo Swinson and Layla Moran) we should make no progress at all. “It’s all too reminiscent of the Barnsley Central by-election,” Alfred remarks.

In the cool of the evening we moor outside a public house somewhere in the wilds of High Leicestershire. The landlord and locals are adamant that we should venture no further west, warning of “pirates” if you please. What rot!

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.

Previously in Lord Bonkers' Diary...

• The Rutland Union Canal
• A crew for the Flower of Rutland
• The Great Seal of Rutland dives in

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Caron Lindsay has the floor: "Can I just make a very polite suggestion to those who are briefing the press about potential changes to the way we elect leaders and who can stand in those elections to make sure that they understand our party’s processes for doing these things?"

"It is late, but not too late, for Lord Hall to withdraw his “guidelines” and admit an honest mistake. If he does not, history will judge both him and BBC coverage harshly, when it is too late to do anything about it." Raymond Snoddy says the Beeb's policy on Brexit is not impartial.

Anthony Broxton reminds us how hard the Tories fought the introduction of the Minimum Wage.

"Material that had generated playful hysteria live read as wilfully obscure on camera, and the axe soon fell." Stewart Lee on the cancellation of his BBC series Comedy Vehicle.

Nigel Kneale's 1968 television play The Year of the Sex Olympics foresaw the advent of Love Island and much else, argues Jonathan Hayward.

Jeannette Catsoulis reviews Nico, 1988 - the film about the singer's tormented final years.

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"The fact that the Windrush generation is not our outgroup du jour means that they are available to be treated as a human interest story of the type that sells newspapers and enables (some of) us to feel good about ourselves, without (probably) actually changing anything." Rob Parsons tells it like it is.

Tim Holyoake says our political discourse is being poisoned by childish name calling.

"One reason the film's ending seemed so odd to its first critics is that - in what is ostensibly a mystery-story - it denies the mystery-story's need for punishment and retribution. Instead its ending is full of blessings; and at the end of a pilgrimage, sin is swallowed up in grace." Eleanor Parker penetrates deeper into the magic of A Canterbury Tale.

Cynthia Ozick reviews William Trevor's final book of short stories.

Lionel Nimrod's Inexplicable World, a radio comedy from the 1990s that starred Stewart Lee and Richard Herring, is celebrated by Tim Worthington.

"I don’t think that I have ever seen a side as affected by a result as Leicestershire were by this one. Carberry looked in a terrible state, and some of the younger players seemed on the verge of tears." Backwatersman watches that rare thing: a Leicestershire victory in the county championship.

Stewart Lee and Iain Sinclair on The Last London

We've heard Iain Sinclair talking with Alan Moore about London. Here he is doing it with Stewart Lee.

As the blurb from the London Review Bookshop says:

Iain Sinclair has been writing about London for most of his adult life, and if any of us can even begin to understand this peculiar sort of city that we sort of call a sort of home, then it's with Sinclair that we begin. 

The Last London (Oneworld) is the culmination of Iain's London project, although 'project' is far too determined a word to describe a body of work so many-layered, so prodigiously polyvalent. 

At our event at St. George's, Bloomsbury, he talked about the book and the city with comedian, writer and film director Stewart Lee, another Londoner from elsewhere.

Stewart Lee joins the Liberal Democrats

He probably looked fat and depressed when he did it, and he is certainly operating two levels of irony beyond the appreciation of his keenest fans, but Stewart Lee has joined the Liberal Democrats.

The news was announced in an Observer column yesterday:

My constituency voted 78% remain. On Wednesday, my MP was too ill to vote. I’m joining the Liberal Democrats, itself on some level a hopeless admission of defeat.

Welcome aboard, Stewart. Some of us admitted defeat when we were teenagers.

These passages in his column caught my attention:

But, with Trump’s trade deal help, at least our bananas will be bendy again. And on 1 February 2019, a man dressed as a sensible pirate will stand at the foot of an obelisk in Ripon, North Yorkshire, and blow an enchanted bendy horn, a horn only to be blown in Britain’s hour of need. And when that bendy horn is blown, as if by magic, all the straight bananas in Brexit Britain will suddenly bend once more, never to be straight again.

And:

Ripon constituency’s referendum split reflected pretty much the national percentages, at 52% to 48% in favour of the reinstatement of perpetually bendy bananas, hence its horn duty. I have already booked a room at the Weatherspoon’s in Ripon square for 2019, in order to be at the epicentre of the people’s populist banana-bending revolution. 

Weatherspoon’s owner Tim Martin, a vocal opponent of straight bananas, funded a boisterous chapbook ridiculing the insolent yellow fruits, First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Straight Bananas. And Tim has promised to be at his Ripon outlet personally on bendy banana day, handing out free bendy bananas to his regular clientele of terminally nostalgic drinkers and plucky all-day breakfasteers, toasting their own imminent obsolescence.

It did so because I have stayed at the Weatherspoon's in Ripon square. There it is in the photograph above.

I am not a Weatherspoon's fan, but it was a large, clean room with a big television and there was another pub serving the rarer Timothy Taylor's brews just round the corner. What more do you need?

I like Europe and Stewart Lee and the Ripon hornblower and its obelisk. One day we shall draw them all together.

Stewart Lee talks to Alan Moore

Stewart Lee's last television series was hard going at times even for those of us who admire him.

But I suppose the BBC's decision not to commission another series represented a comic triumph of sorts. It's just what the character Lee becomes on stage would have expected.

In this video Lee talks with the great Alan Moore about his new collection of columns Content Provider.

I was not such a fan of these, but Lee is not David Mitchell and for that we can all be grateful.

Stewart Lee in conversation at Oxford Brookes University

If you enjoyed 55 minutes of Stewart Lee talking about comedy, then you may enjoy this hour and 25 minutes of him doing so even more.

Stewart Lee gives a talk on comedy and writing

Stewart Lee discusses the fantasy that stand-up comedy is spontaneous rather than written, and describes the evolution of stand-up over the last few decades.

His talk, given at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, takes in a wide range of subjects from the first app he ever came across to a discussion of the value of culture in society.

Stewart Lee can be funny about Islamophobia

Those of us who ground our way through Thursday's Comedy Vehicle will be relieved to see this video.

It shows Stewart Lee using the same material and being funny.

Stewart Lee on his new series of Comedy Vehicle

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We have seen Stewart Lee talking to Will Self and Alexei Sayle.

Here he is being interviewed by The Quietus:

Have you noticed a similar change happening in comedy? 

SL: I have. If you went to the alternative night with all the weird acts, which 25 years ago was downstairs at the Market Tavern on Islington Green on Essex Road, you'd see Simon Munnery who is the son of a plumber. Or Johnny Vegas, who is not a member of the upper classes. 

The same thing now, which is the Alternative Comedy Memorial Society at the New Red Lion, is a very good night, but there's a higher proportion of people whose parents bought them a flat. Inevitably, because you can't do that sort of stuff that doesn't pay, unless you've got some sort of fallback position.

The interviewer, Simon Price, takes Lee Terribly Seriously, but then maybe we should.

Stewart Lee talks to Alexei Sayle

The new series of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle starts at 10 this evening on BBC2.

While we are waiting, here he is interviewing Alexei Sayle about Thatcher Stole My Trousers, the latter's second volume of memoirs .

Something the two have in common is that, rather than flatter it like lesser left-wing comedians, they attack their audience's view of the world.

Stewart Lee and Will Self

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Good news. A new series of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle starts on BBC2 at 10pm on Thursday 3 March.

Stewart Lee is interviewed on the Guardian website today (and in tomorrow's paper?) by Will Self:

On stage, Lee is apparently an embittered, envious, self-lacerating man, caught in a ferocious double-bind: if he’s unsuccessful it’s because his audience are stupid shits who don’t get his jokes; and if he’s successful it’s because he’s a stupid shit churning out jokes that confirm his audience in their prejudices. So convincing is this act – if indeed it is an act – that I became intrigued: was the “real” Lee quite as prickly as his performance persona? In order to find out I asked him over for a serious sit-down.

It's good stuff, but I wish someone would tell Self to stop saying "self-reflexive".

Listening to Dapper Laughs

I arrived at the Battle of Ideas at lunchtime on Saturday and found there was a debate on comedy and offence starting shortly in one of the Barbican's cinemas.

It sounded my sort of thing, so I went along.

When I got there I found Dapper Laughs was one of the speakers.

If it had been any other event there would have pickets or I would have been called "Tory Scum" or spat on by Guardian columnists. Because it was the Battle of Ideas I just wandered in and found him there.

I got the memo. I have written for the Guardian and the New Statesman. I know I am meant to hate Dapper Laughs.

It's just that I have never heard him perform.

I did not rush back to listen to him either. I have reached an age where I don't like many comedians.

When you are younger, comedy matters immensely. It helps form your own sense of humour and even your view of the world. When I was in the sixth form (that's years 12 and 13 by my calculation) we conversed using lines from Fawlty Towers and Reginald Perrin in the way Victorian schoolboys are supposed to have swapped Latin tags.

Today I will admit to liking Alexei Sayle and Stewart Lee, and that is about it.

So I shall review the Dapper Laughs I saw on Saturday.

The first thing to say is that he was intensely irritating. When you look at local papers from the 1950s, you see that if a well-known comedian was in town he felt compelled to pull a face when he was photographed to prove how funny he was.

That approach has crept back in (think Mel and Sue saying "Bake!" in a range of achingly funny voices) and Dapper Laughs has certainly bought in to it. He spent the whole debate mugging to the audience and punched the air if someone agreed with him.

And for those who worry about manspreading - personally, I grew up in an era when radical politics involved something more than telling people to sit up straight - he contrived to take up three chairs.

But his arguments were better,

Because, he told us, he is not Dapper Laughs, His name is Daniel O'Reilly. Dapper Laughs is a character he plays. He is making fun of men's sexism, not celebrating it.

And before you dismiss that, remember how annoyed you get if some right-wing commentator fails to appreciate all the layers of irony in Stewart Lee's act - Will Self wrote well about him the other day - and assumes that something he says in his act is his real view.

As the other panelist, Tom Slater, pointed out, we middle-class liberals celebrate our ability to navigate Lee's shifting meanings but assume that a working-class man who hears a joke about rape will assume rape is just fine.

Well, maybe. But I find arguments that rely on affecting outrage on behalf of some other group inherently unconvincing. Too much education debate today takes place between people pretending to be outraged on behalf of teachers and people pretending to be outraged on behalf of parents. The real issues never get discussed.

So that was Dapper Laughs. Or "Dapper Laughs".

I did not rush to watch his videos when I got home. I expect I would hate him. But then I hate most comedians these days.

Stewart Lee on jungle canyon rope bridges

Young activists do not understand why so many people still hate Margaret Thatcher.

Let Stewart Lee explain why...

Stewart Lee on the ironies of Endemol

From a New Statesman interview with the comedian by Rob Pollard:

Jimmy Carr very kindly got me on 8 Out Of 10 Cats once and they were all making fun of Big Brother, and I said something like: "Isn't it funny how this programme and Big Brother are both made by the same company, Endemol". And it was as if Endemol creates a product which it knows is ridiculous and exploitative, but it also creates a programme which satirises it and it makes money out of both of them. 

And the people in the audience, started booing – I don’t know why – and then Jimmy Carr said to me: "I can honestly say of everything that’s ever been said on this programme, that’s the least likely to make the edit." 

I sort of thought it was funny; I wasn't trying to be obstructive. I just thought it was funny how people can sit there and not realise the irony of that.