Stewart Lee: 90s Comedian

A strange artefact this, from the odd period just before Stewart Lee became absolutely enormous in the late noughties and one of Britain's most lauded art comedians of all time - but here he's off the back of a failed DVD ("Stand-Up Comedian") and a botched musical that got him in serious legal trouble and wondering where he fits into it all. Filmed in a small arts venue in Cardiff and fairly smartly welded together from two different sets it's raw, caustic and contains the skeleton of what he would later build up to be "his schtick". That being sort of blistering self-awareness and a slow and clever build to a sort of semi-breakdown-as-comedy catharsis. It still shines brightly, all these years later, and there's a wild clarity here that frankly only a protracted vomiting session can truly produce.