An Actor's Life For Me:Toast Of London.

A Nigerian woman whose cosmetic surgery leaves her looking like Bruce Forsyth, journalists who throw shopping trolleys in canals, loyalty cards for high class hookers, thugs who reference Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard, a director who boasts of cupping Benedict Cumberbatch's balls, and a story of Margaret Thatcher drinking Heineken from a can at Lionel Blair's house.

The world of Steven Toast is both a surreal one - and a very silly one. It's also a highly enjoyable one to watch and though I'd seen a few episodes I'd never sat down and watched them all end to end - so that's what I'm doing. Series one of Toast of London (created by Matt Berry and Arthur Mathews, directed by Michael Cumming) first aired on Channel 4 in 2013 but it's now up, with all other series, on the BBC iPlayer. 

Toast himself (Matt Berry - who seems to irritate many but I find him amusing) is a struggling actor in London with delusions of grandeur. He's going through a divorce (wife Ellen - played by Amanda Donohoe - briefly appears, committing an act of violence at a crazy golf course), he drinks in The Colonial Club, and he thinks himself something of a ladies man despite the fact that he insists on keeping his 'sports vest' on for sex. To be fair, most of his 'conquests' seem more than happy with that state of affairs.

He shares a flat with Ed Howzer-Black (Robert Bathurst). A man who is pretty much never seen away from the kitchen table or wearing anything other than some kind of smoking jacket that doubles up as a dressing gown.

Toast's agent Jane Plough (pronounced Pluff), played by Doon MacKichan, has an office on Wardour Street and from there she sends Toast out on various, usually unsuitable and disappointing jobs, in a very recognisable Soho (in series one alone I spotted the market cross building in Soho Square and The Coach and Horses pub). Not that Toast is incapable of getting himself into trouble alone.

That's the gist of the story really. There's very little to it - and there doesn't need to be. Toast rehearses a play, he wins an award, he loses money playing poker with Andrew Lloyd Webber and Elaine Paige, he visits a submarine called the Penetrator, advertises laxatives, writes a book (without an ending), and he takes a part in the film Prince Philip Scoundrel Dog!

Oh, and he tries to 'have it off' with pretty ladies. Including Mrs Purchase (Tracy-Ann Oberman), the wife of Toast's eternal rival Ray Purchase (Harry Peacock) - a man seemingly permanently dressed in a cream suit and white polo neck and referred to, variously, by Toast as "a massive idiot", "a complete tool", "a total pratt", "a fucking prick", or, quite simply, a "cunt".

While Purchase is Toast's major nemesis, his life is also hampered by a couple of hipsters, Danny Bear (Tim Downie) and Clem Fandango (Shazad Latif), who work in the booth at a studio in which he records various ridiculous voiceovers.

The scenes where Bear and Fandango humiliate Toast shouldn't really work. But they do, and that could be said for much of Toast of London. There's a phone book's worth of ridiculous names to snort at (Derek Sibling, Susan Random, Hamilton Meathouse, Strawberry Rathbone, Martin Aynuss, Sheryl Whelk, Sookie Houseboat, Yvonne Wryly, and Beezus Fuffoon), enjoyable cameos from the ever reliable Geoffrey McGivern and Morgana Robinson, and a running joke about how out of touch with popular culture Toast is.

He doesn't know who Ben Elton or Harry Potter even are. The running jokes about Benedict Cumberbatch don't really add much to the whole thing, the songs (one in each episode, including one sung by Michael Ball who is doubling up as a mob style debt collector) are passable if not particularly hilarious, and there's a couple of jokes that fall a bit flat (some slapstick ten-pin bowling and one about beekeepers) but, for the most part, each episode zips by pretty quickly and provides plenty to grin about as well as a handful of outright chortles.

The jokes about Boris Johnson one day taking 'the top job', in retrospect, seem more like warnings than quips although Ed's obsessing over how Iain Duncan-Smith's doing at 'Work and Pensions' possibly dates the show a little more. But the humour hasn't dated - and how can it when much of the best of it revolves around something as ridiculous as Steven Toast saying the word 'underpants' in a ludicrous German accent and pronouncing Nigel Mansell's name incorrectly.