“Dear Everyone Who’s Not Enjoying Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle,
Please, by all means, go ahead and don’t enjoy it. It’s not going to be to everyone’s tastes, you can’t please all the people all of the time, and some of you might never even have seen any rap singers, on the Top Of The Pops, next to The Corn Exchange, running along the handrail and jumping down onto the disabled access ramp etc etc.
Nonetheless, here’s a quick tip – if you don’t like like it, why not say you don’t like it and then quietly withdraw from proceedings, instead of apparently launching yourself into some sort of self-appointed mission to explain to everyone who likes it why they shouldn’t like it for a variety of flimsily-concieved reasons most of which don’t make sense anyway until you have achieved your ultimate goal of ensuring that nobody watches it by force and hurrah we can have another series of Lab Rats in its timeslot instead and all will be right and good in the world except oh no hang on you didn’t think that one through did you etc etc while still continuing to sit through every second of it including the post-transmission Red Button extras despite claiming not to enjoy any of it in any way shape or form?
Honestly people, give it up. You’re starting to sound like those Rubbish Gay Agenda Boobs Woman Catherine Tate Is Ruining Glorious Legacy Of Meglos RTD Must Go!/Heroes Is A Load Of Rubbish They Had A Politician Who Can Fly I Don’t Like That Rubbish Like You Do I Like Joss Wheeeeebon’s Dollhouse Instead Look At Me Everyone I Am Best And I’ll Tell You What I Don’t Like Them Level 42 Either/GRR GRR OBLIVION BOYS idiots, and you know how sensible they all sound. After all, you’re not on The Friday Night Armistice now…
Or, as Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand might say, “Stop being an End Of The Roadshow wally!”.
Yours,
Christopher Tolkein’s Patrick Marble Thicket”
Come come, since when did one shut down criticism?
Believe me, if you’d had even a quarter of the ridiculous emails, private messages, and unpublished comments on irrelevant posts on here that I’ve had since fairly restrainedly saying I quite liked the show on Off The Telly – most of them fairly unhinged rantings about ‘betraying’ my ‘ideals’ (whatever they are exactly), some of them asking for a public apology, and all of them seemingly determined to explain to me why I am wrong to have watched it and must never do so again – you’d be wanting to shut down criticism by force too…!
I’ve never had an experience this overwhelming and frankly depressing in over twenty years of writing, and that includes when Momus ridiculed me by name on his blog, when some Blake’s 7 fans demanded a ‘written’ apology for getting some minor facts wrong, the weird uproar about the deliberate deployment of grammatical errors on here, and all of those times I deliberately set out to provoke highly strung Doctor Who fans. I really can’t understand it… at the end of the day it really is just a man telling some quite funny jokes.
*pulls ‘Trigger Face’*
It’s just sad to hear it from someone on this side of the fence.
For the record I agree with the doubters, there’s a lot of ‘goodwill’ laughs here. The Channel 4 ‘sewage torrent’ sequence was a low point – exactly the type of gross-out comedy that we dislike in Little Britain etc. No inherent joke, repeated three times without alteration. Filler!
I hope you’ll understand that I’m too tired and baffled by the whole situation to take up the very good point you’ve raised there, but I should say that as the above is reasonable, concise and utterly devoid of personal attacks it isn’t the sort of thing that sabres were being rattled at in the original post… and is pretty much the first of its kind I’ve recieved all week!
Seriously, it’s been a straight fifty fifty split between epic-length brain-unspooling from people who make even the Fans Of Silents look both emotionally restrained and pushed for time, and short and rude three-liners consisting of little more than personal abuse and pleas for me to change my mind before ‘it’s too late for all of us’. No, seriously. I do get a lot of weird stuff like that, on all kinds of subjects, and reading between the lines you can’t help but feel that these people are looking for some kind of revolution (though whether they now *what* kind of revolution is a different question), but if they are then I’m not the person to lead it. Primarily due to the pressures of leading another entirely different revolution by sending Ali Larter text messages saying “DANKO’S MEN NEAR. TRY ‘ACTING’ THEY WON’T KNOW IT’S YOU THEN. PS PLZ GET TITS OUT. ___REBEL”.
People who ask for an apology following a review of something misunderstand the nature of reviewing. Disagree by all means, but the review is, unless motivated ulteriorly, just one person’s honest response to something. Your honest response to the same thing is not better, just different. Now fuck off.
In summary, do you want me to find out their addresses, Tim?
This to do with one specific forum by any chance?
There is a lot of filler in it, 3 hours of stand up would be pretty difficult to do. If he was given a second series and allowed some of his comedy friends to write a bit more for it then the sketches might be a lot better than the current ones which just repeat whatever he said.
I can’t judge the show really cos I know a lot of the material inside out from dvds and bootlegs but in general I find it to be decent with some sparks of inspiration and other sudden drops in quality.