Inside The Comedian

Inside The Comedian sounds, for a moment, like a reverent sit-down with a comedian. David Reed offers the guest a seat, thanks them for coming, and heads for the career questions. It rarely gets far. Within a few exchanges a plain question has become a false memory, a fake scandal or a television programme that never existed, and both people are treating it as settled history. Elis James is congratulated on being lined up as the next James Bond, a version of the character taken in a more whimsical direction. Talk of performing turns into a bit about working the room during an operation and distracting the surgeon, then into a tour on which he supported himself. Mark Steel's visit is declared a marvellous honour, and the conversation goes on to reach Regal Paranoia Syndrome and a habit of collecting zebras. Mike McShane helps assemble a mock-serious history of Fort Knox and rat hole tanks, small enough for tunnels and crewed by one soldier at a time. Josie Long claims to be in the best shape of her life, too good for the Olympics by the committee's own reckoning. She also recalls a childhood squabble with Roy Chubby Brown over the television remote, Children's BBC against CBeebies. Justin Edwards is introduced with a string of job titles that includes aromatherapist, lifeguard and jester. The talk then reaches his role in Phil Whelan's O'Clock, a programme described as a chaotic mix of Newsnight, Blue Peter and Def Jam. The method holds across these conversations, and it is the reason to listen. Exchanges are short and reactive: a question, a correction, a yes, then a bigger claim stacked on top. The show does not stop to explain itself, and the laughs come from commitment rather than from set-up and punchline. Callbacks compound fast, so a throwaway detail from one minute becomes the foundation of the next. Because everything depends on the guest agreeing to impossible things, each conversation takes its texture from how far that guest is prepared to go. When someone runs with a premise, as Mike McShane does with the tanks, the fiction grows line by line. The show's own title is a running source of mischief too, wrung for innuendo from the welcome through to the goodbye. Real career detail is not absent, but it returns by a crooked route, and the next genuine question tends to arrive as if nothing strange had just happened. What a listener gets is less a portrait of a comedian than two quick comic minds agreeing, at speed, to believe the same nonsense.