‘I was miserable for a lot of this century’: Stewart Lee on divorce, his adoption and the twisted children’s poem that explains his life

30 August 2026 at 08:00

After a rocky few decades, the standup is nearing 60 – and finding contentment at last. But what does his grotesque retelling of The Owl and the Pussy-cat tell us about his inability to connect with people?

Stewart Lee is somewhat fretfully tidying his kitchen. Nothing is exactly where he left it two months ago to go on tour. Plus, he says, “I’ve come back with a load of records that need to be alphabetised, and that’s really stressing me out.” His house is miles from minimalist – posters everywhere, for spaghetti westerns, avant-garde Welsh harpists, the Fall (who he said in an interview in 2005 were the love of his life) – but if anything was an inch out of place, he’d notice. He puts things away with theatrical flourish, like a guy doing an impression of a guy who needs things just-so, for the comic effect of how absolutely impossible that guy would be, but at the same time, it’s funny because it’s true.

In the show he’s been away for, Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf, he – a 58-year-old lefty – enters into breakneck dialectic with toxic masculinity in werewolf form (age unknown). “Things have got worse in the 18 months I’ve been doing it,” he says. “I need to really amp the werewolf up. He would be much more explicitly racist and homophobic and transphobic now. But you don’t want people to be really upset in the room.” It feels quite a 2026 dilemma, being unable to even satirise the right without causing the distress it lives for.

Ina Garten Says You Can Either Get on Her Train or Get Out of the Way

NYT > Top Stories

By: Lulu Garcia-Navarro

29 August 2026 at 12:15

At 78, the cookbook author and Food Network host knows what she likes, knows what she wants and isn’t stopping anytime soon.

Tell us about the TV shows that that have turned sour for you

The Guardian

By: Guardian community team

28 August 2026 at 19:34

We would like to hear about the TV shows that you simply can’t stomach anymore and why

From Euphoria to The Great British Bake Off Guardian writers have compiled the TV shows that are now part of their viewing history they feel tainted by. Now we want to hear from you.

Which TV shows that once thrilled have now turned sour for you?

Memo to Ridley Scott: no one needs more Alien: Covenant movies – get the franchise back to stalk’n’slash

The Guardian

By: Ben Child

28 August 2026 at 14:44

News that Scott is working on a follow-up to his maligned 2017 film leaves me worried the franchise has run out of shocks

If any science-fiction saga looked beyond recovery, it was the Alien franchise. For the 38 years that followed James Cameron’s Aliens, film-makers contrived to find every imaginable way of not making a good Alien film. They tried killing everyone the audience cared about before the opening credits, marooning Sigourney Weaver on a planet populated entirely by bald British character actors, cloning Ripley, pitting xenomorphs against Predators, and sending scientists across the universe to ask an enormous, hairless space bodybuilder why he made them. They even ponied up the thick end of $100m for a film in which Michael Fassbender teaches himself to play the flute.

And then in 2024, we got Fede Álvarez’s Alien: Romulus, in which actual xenomorphs chase actual human beings down actual corridors for the clearly defined purposes of either killing them or putting smaller xenomorphs inside them. Better still, a year later we got Noah Hawley’s Alien: Earth, which reminded us that giant, murderous space insects are in fact less awful than tech trillionaires.

Fightland review – 50 Cent’s farcical boxing show is featherweight at best

The Guardian

By: Jack Seale

28 August 2026 at 00:05

This boxing drama wants its sex, drugs, bling and violence – but isn’t willing or naughty enough to truly go for it. Instead, it ends up as just a long, bruising slog

Fightland is what you might, for a joke, have called a drama that’s like MobLand but with boxing. That they have gone with that as the title of the new show from G-Unit Film & Television, the production company founded by the rapper Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, is an immediate warning that this is not a series that bursts with originality, passion or technical finesse. At best, Fightland asks whether what it’s got will just about do, and hopes you’ll distractedly say yes.

Howard Charles is Maduka “Duke” Kilroy, a British boxer who, when we first meet him, is in Las Vegas, winning the world heavyweight championship. Everything’s going for him: he’s the champ and Joy (Deborah Ayorinde), the woman he enjoys a post-bout warmdown with on the silk sheets of a penthouse suite, seems receptive to his plan to take their relationship further. It’s a risky goal given that Joy’s husband is Kingsley Marshall (Nicholas Pinnock), Duke’s manager, who is also London’s top drug dealer; we’ve seen him brutally break the leg of a journalist who asks him about the secret drug-based wing of his empire.

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