Stewart Lee: Carpet Remnant World

Stewart Lee's life is now mostly driving around and looking after kids so his frame of cultural references has dramatically shrunk and at the same time his ability to compete with the more modern stand-up style of the Mock the Week regulars and the like, with their stadium shows and sound-bite gags. Of course it is made even harder for him when a third of the Sheffield audience have clearly never seen him before but heard good things and were perhaps not prepared for his rather unique style of delivery.

I like Stewart Lee and recently I watched the 41st Best Stand-Up show and enjoyed it a lot and soon after got this one. The approach is the same in Carpet Remnant World because Lee gives a comedy show while also pushing against the norms of the stand-up circuit whether it be the delivery and jokes of the big names who pack stadiums, or the audience who struggle unless (in his perception) they are given what they are used to and don't have to do anything themselves. Previously he has walked that lined really well and there are times in this show where he gets it right – pushing back against his craft and his audience but not so much that he pushes away, just challenges. However in this show I think he does it too often, for too long and with almost too much effort to attack. It isn't helped by the feeling that the show is too long – and it does feel it.

This sort of hurts the material more than it should because he is joking that the audience isn't with him and that the material isn't working at the same time as the audience are unsure and some of the material is falling flat. Despite this this, Lee himself is still funny even if some of his morbid moments make him seem like Jack Dee more than he would like I'd guess. Lee's greatest skill is to deliver a great comedy show while also deconstructing it, you and the craft while you enjoy it – here he does a bit too much of the latter and is weaker than normal on the former – although I'd still watch this again and again over the generic big Christmas DVD's from "proper" stand-ups selling out Wembley Arena.

Carpet Remnant World now sits as kind of... mid period Stew stand-up, there's a lot in here that's very strong, but there's a baggy amount of extensive crowd watching that only really works if you're in the room with him and can sense the atmosphere. It's a fantastic trick live but he overplays it here (or it could have been edited down). The whole concept is one about utopian visions gone to seed and middle-aged listlessness, some of it lands fantastically, some of it drifts off into nothing but there's a nicely unintentional "before the bad times" warmness to the whole thing and that he says he was inspired to film at the Lyceum due to his good reception there the time before (a show I was at) warms me cockles.

The first time I saw Lee was back in 1985, before he got famous and everyone else got into him. He was then a promising young stand up.

The second time I saw Lee, in 1996, he was was working as an apprentice fitter at Quik-fit and was responsible for replacing tyre-valve caps. He was rubbish at his job then and still is. He managed to put one valve on the end of my aerial and lost the other three. So too, in this video, he misplaces the focus of his foul temper and has a go at the audience for not understanding his jokes and not laughing and calling them 'stupid'. However, it was filmed in Sheffield.

The third time I saw Lee was behind the Manchester Apollo where he was kicking the **** out of Des O' Connor, demanding that he share his material with him, so I find it a little hypocritical that Lee criticises other classier acts and calls them 'stupid'. He also criticises Scooby Doo, unfairly, in my opinion.

The fourth time I saw Lee, I was siting in the upper-circle at the Sheffield arena where the show was filmed, and for your information, Lee, I did understand the jokes, but chose not to laugh at them because they were like you; not funny, or was it because I had car-tyre valves misplaced in my ears?

However, I would describe the show as 'quite good'. Lee just needs to include some more observational humour and include some more jokes about old people or something.