Vic Reeves has invariably shied away from being serious about his comedy so it is a bit of a scoop getting him to present this grown-up documentary about Dada as part of BBC4’s current conceptual art series.

But then again, the subject does give Vic, aka Jim Moir, a chance to do some funny walks, pull some funny faces and generally give us flashes of what makes him so funny. At the same time we also get to see that what he does is not always as original as it seems. I will never look at Man With The Stick in quite the same way again after this.

We soon find out that Dada, which started in 1916 in Zurich, was way ahead of its time. Their irreverent visual style in magazines predated punk lettering, while their penchant for nonsensical performances prefigured Monty Python as well and Vic and Bob.

In one scene Vic meets the current head honcho of Cabaret Voltaire, the Swiss bar were it all started. Vic says it reminds him of the pub in New Cross where he started out. The only difference was the Dadaists drank absinthe, while Vic’s mates drank lager. 

Yet the similarities are striking - before recreating a Dada performance dressed as a sort-of bishop (pictured) Reeves recalls doing an early performance called I, Kestrel in which he dropped potatoes out of a cardboard box. Very Dada indeed. He also claimed he was in a band that had no name but whiffed of curry, which I’d not heard about before.

The funny thing was that the programme is slightly disjointed, or maybe that was intentional. Towards the end Reeves says “yes, but what is Dada?” when I thought he’d already given us an accurate explanation - it was art’s suitably mad response to the madness of World War I.  

Along the way the likes of Bowie, Banksy and Damien Hirst are namechecked and various modern artists chip in as well as Armando Iannucci, Arthur Smith and Python’s Terry Gilliam. It would have been nice if Bob Mortimer had come along for the ride too to say what effect Dada had on him growing up in Middlesbrough, but Reeves is an excellent host. He was, of course, an art student so probably knows his stuff, but I suspect that if Vic and Bob were influenced by Dada it was basically because they were influenced by a combination of lager and Monty Python, who were themselves influenced by Dada. 

Available on iPlayer here.