Nobody would say that Michael McIntyre is a particularly prescient stand-up, but this special, recorded in March at the London Palladium just before lockdown, contains not one but two jokes involving face masks. Typical. You wait ages for a joke about PPE and then discover MM was doing them before they were a thing without even realising it.

He is not the kind of hard-hitting political comedian who takes the temperature of a nation either, but give him the subject of the temperature of a bath and he can get an almost infinite number of gags about how hard it is to get into hot water. He certainly has a good ear for a nifty phrase, talking about the "red skin socks of pain" – when you put your feet in and then swiftly remove them because the water is almost at boiling point.

So most of what we get here are dispatches from the front line of McIntyre's everyman home life. Grains of truth turned into grandstanding riffs about weak bladders, children glued to computer games and his wife's shoe habit. The only hint that his life and marriage is different to ours is one of the punchlines about his wife buying shoes online when he goes to the toilet: "That piss cost me £600". That's £300 a shoe, so he must be doing well...

The subjects are nothing special but boy can McIntyre sell a gag about Australia, being chubby, remembering passwords, accents and dogs. He can even get away with a gag about the Titanic which is so old it would have sunk lesser comedians. There are lots of nice callbacks too, underlining that he is a comedy craftsman as well as a showman.

This is classic observational comedy, which will all be relatable to almost everyone. Well, almost all of it. He just needs to point his wife in the direction of some cheaper shoe websites.

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Picture: Netflix

Michael McIntyre is on The One Show on September 15.