YOU’D have to be living under a rock, or perhaps in another country, to have missed the furore about BBC Two’s airing of Jerry Springer — The Opera on Saturday as part of a strand devoted to the London-born former Mayor of Cincinnati and one-time host of America’s most lurid, if occasionally faked, talk show.

Stewart Lee, the work’s librettist and director, and stand-up comic, novelist, music critic and all-round polymath, doesn’t live under a rock (in fact, he lives above an estate agent), but right now he’s in Germany, rehearsing his and composer Richard Thomas’s follow-up to Springer, Stand Up, at the Schauspielhaus in Hanover. His intellectual curiosity is piqued by the news that publicity-hungry fundamentalists plan a private prosecution of the pair (and the BBC, and the theatre staging the work) for blasphemy.

Even before the show was broadcast, an organisation calling itself Mediawatch UK, successor to the late Mary Whitehouse’s National Viewers and Listeners Association, has stirred up a record number of angry calls to Auntie. The BBC and the media watchdog Ofcom received a total of 47,000 complaints in the run-up and 300 after the broadcast.

Although he won’t comment on reports of death threats aimed at BBC executives, including the BBC Two controller Roly Keating and director of television Jana Bennett, which are currently being investigated by police, reports of television licence burning by the offended amuse him.

“Assuming they paid them on direct debit, if they haven’t stopped payment with their bank, it’s just a gesture,” he says. This is the dry logic you might expect from a man currently dealing with a troupe of German actors who sarcastically refer to his and Thomas’s more celebrated work as “degenerate art”, the name applied by the Nazis to their notorious 1937 exhibition in Munich of modern masters.

So an interview which started out as a celebration of Lee’s return to the stand-up circuit has unexpectedly turned out to be more newsworthy than he might have hoped for.

But the return of Stewart Lee, the stand-up comedian, to the boards after a three-year sabbatical should be a cause for celebration in itself. A mere 15 years and 2,500 shows into his career, Lee is about to embark on his first properly scheduled solo tour, after an ecstatically received turn at last summer’s Edinburgh fringe.

“For years, it was, ‘Here he is again, with his cleverly worked-out sardonic material.’ Last year it was, ‘Hooray, he’s back with his cleverly worked-out sardonic material’,” says Lee. “The little space you’d filled becomes a void.”

But inevitably, like a good stand-up routine, the conversation returns to the topic of the day. Many of the complaints about Jerry Springer were from religious organisations, others feared bad language, claiming the work included more than 3,000 f***s and 297 c-words.

In fact there are seven of the latter — “three as a noun, and four as an adjective”, Lee says. But he is facing television licence burners who, according to the Evening Standard, calculate the total of obscenities “by multiplying the number of swear words by the number of people singing them”.

One fears for such sheltered souls should they ever hear a football crowd abusing a referee, or even a film by Quentin Tarantino. More predictably, certain tabloid newspapers have feigned horror.

“Something in popular culture toddles along with thousands involved, like acid house or manga cartoons. Then the Daily Mail finds out,” Lee shrugs. An opposition MP, Peter Luff, has joined the fray too. “He said it was the worst experience of his life, which makes you wonder just what he’s ever experienced,” Lee says. “But at least he saw it.”

Lee was recently asked to comment on radio about the furore over the Birmingham production of the play Behzti. “I refused because I haven’t seen it. When I asked if anyone else on the panel had, I was told no. If someone did that to me — had a discussion about the rights and wrongs of something I’d written without even having seen it — I’d be furious,” he says.