Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle

We’ve just got around to watching the first episode of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle. I’ve been an off and on fan of Stewart Lee for a long time now — that is, “on” for Fist of Fun and Jerry Springer – The Opera, and “off” for pretty much everything else. It’s been 13 years (eep!) since FoF though, so I was interested to see what he was like now.

I felt like it didn’t start well when he used two of Simon Munnery’s jokes. To be fair, in the end credits it did say


Two Book Jokes
Simon Munnery

but the fact that he blatantly used them at all didn’t really sit right, and then the way that he didn’t deliver them anywhere near as good as Munnery made it worse.

There were also several long sequences which just weren’t that funny but were laboriously spun out. It felt like he was filling time. In the half hour episode I felt like there was at best 15 minutes of material.

But.

Of the material that was good, I really enjoyed it. It was classic Stewart Lee. In the likely mistaken belief that anyone reading this cares about my opinion, I will give the first episode 5/10 and will watch some more in the hope that he hits the mark a bit more often.

Update 2009-04-24: Having watched more episodes, he does still miss the mark quite a lot, and I do still find the repetitive thing a bit annoying, but there have been some real moments of genius and I’m glad I stuck with it. Hope you did too!

Do No Evil

Google Checkout just announced that they’re going to put their transaction processing fees up to 3.4% + £0.20, from 1.5% + £0.15. This brings them to exactly the same price point as Paypal, and represents around a 250% increase in the cost of processing a transaction.

I don’t really see what the point is in pushing Google Checkout now, except for those people who somehow think that Paypal is evil and Google isn’t. Since both of them decrease the per-transaction fee based on your transaction volume, it doesn’t make sense to split your transactions between more than one of them.

I guess Google decided that they had spent long enough undercutting Paypal.