Much A-Stew About Nothing, Leicester Square Theatre, review When I had the temerity to explain - in a Telegraph blog post - why I gave up on Stewart Lee's latest live show at the first interval, I was met with a ferocious torrent of online indignation. On Twitter, for instance, Stuart Baxter got in touch to go "haha what a bell end!," John Dyer called me a "whimp" (sic) and Deep Roy denounced me as a "T--T." On the Telegraph site, assisted by equivalent instances of bilious contempt, the article shot up the most-viewed rankings to eclipse - do we laugh or cry? - reports on the Philippines typhoon. I don't think I can be alone in finding this reaction disproportionate to the complaint I levelled at Lee, which was essentially that - aside from slagging off the Telegraph, its readers and its sketchwriter Michael Deacon - he was being unusually aggressive towards his audience in that opening half, even by his combative standards. Perhaps there are punters who delight in being called "Friday night c---s" and for whom no insult from a comedian who trades in irony can be regarded as unpalatable. I didn't feel massively affronted but I felt sufficiently disappointed to make the decision to skip the rest of Much A-Stew About Nothing, which trials new material ahead of TV recordings, with a view to visiting it again another time. Which I duly did at the start of the week, slinking in at the back of the Leicester Square Theatre, bag at the ready just in case the assembled aficionados turned into a real-life mob. Thanks to that article - which Lee dismisses as "click-bait," written only in order to provoke a reaction - there are some fresh laughs to be had. "I've read in the paper that I have contempt for the public but I don't," he suggested, deadpan-plaintive. I do hundreds of gigs and I try really hard. It would, of course, be delusional to conclude he'd taken on board what I said but I found it interesting that he had moved the most audience-testing section to the end of the evening and didn't refer to the crowd using four-letter words. The mood was more relaxed. Organised thus, with a succession of finely nuanced sets - dealing with UKIP, his being "an impotent, vasectomised, 45-year-old, functioning alcoholic father of two," racism and satire - he delivered an accomplished, intelligent, manifestly likeable and tonally exact show, of the sort he usually gives and I wish I'd seen in the first place.