Keep Your Pecker Up:Dave S2.

"I fucked the whole thing up. I did it all backwards. Now I'm all alone with my rap verse. I can barely share a password" - Ally's Song, Lil Dicky.

The first season of Dave was one of the great televisual joys of last year from start to finish. Season two (BBC2/iPlayer) was equally worthwhile viewing but it took a lot longer to get there. The now famous Dave/Lil Dicky (Dave Burd) is finding that life at the top, or at least near the top, of the rap game is not all he imagined it to be.

He's split up with girlfriend Ally (Taylor Misiak), his apartment if full of ants, he's got worrying spots and rashes on his back, he's started being rude to his friends - through stress, he's jealous of the success of his former DJ and beatmaker Elz (Travis "Taco" Bennett), and, despite receiving offers from groupies, he's spending thousands on VR porn and getting his rocks off with electronic vibrating fake vaginas.

Worst of all, he's suffering from writer's block at just the time he's due to release his debut album, Penith, and at a time when his manager Mike (Andrew Santino) and his hype man GaTa (playing himself again) are relying on him for money and employment.

It's quite a grim look at the dark side of fame and, to begin with, season two of Dave doesn't go in too heavy with the jokes. Gross out seems to be more the order of the day as Dave spends a lost, and homoerotic, weekend with his new friend Benny Blanco (also playing himself), shoves things up his arse, and vomits on his ex-girlfriend's back.

There's an awkward, cringe inducing, episode in which Dave meets the 7'3" tall basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and conducts an uncomfortable interview that touches on race and the co-opting of black lifestyles and imagery. It gets worse when Dave tries to impress his woke credentials on Abdul-Jabbar and worse still when the NBA's six times most valuable player (a record) gets locked in Dave's toilet.

And then it gets worse again. But halfway through I'd barely laughed. Luckily things then picked up. Both as regards laughter and genuine drama. When Dave and Elz play a bar mitzvah they get thrown out after asking the kids there which one of them has the biggest cock and when Dave boasts about once licking a hamster's pussy that comes back to haunt him too.

He's accused of performing cunnilingus on a marsupial and, quite rightly, insists that hamsters are rodents and not marsupials. It made me snigger. As did scenes with Dave's brilliant parents, Don (David Paymer) and Carol (Gina Hecht), who elevate bickering to an art form. Don, after being shown a photo of Doja Cat who Dave is expecting to meet via an elite dating app, is found in a cubicle with either pee, or more likely jizz, stains on his slacks.

Which he blames on jetlag! It's crude but it's effectively hilarious. As is Doja Cat's own sexting boast of having a pussy so 'fat' it could host a wedding. But it's not all rude jokes and gross set pieces about Dave's general hopelessness as an adult (he can't blow up balloons and he gets his mum to cut his sandwiches into triangles for him). There are touching moments too.

Some regarding mental health issues and some about Dave and Emma (Christine Ko is, again, brilliant) and their long history of friendship. Most moving of all is when Dave finally plays Mike the surprisingly tender, but still rude - of course, song he's written about his break-up with Ally. They fall silent as it plays until, of course, pathos is instantly turned to bathos with one of Dave's trademark inappropriate, and self-defensive, attempts at self-deprecation.

The series really hits its stride in the final few episodes which see Dave hallucinating in Rick Rubin's flotation tank and meeting a character actor called Biff Wiff ("look me up on IMDb, I'm a real guy"). There's good use of Miriam Makeba's Pata Pata and It's My House by Diana Ross and there are guest appearances from, as well as Doja Cat and Abdul-Jabbar, Lil Nas X, Rae Sremmurd, J Balvin, Kendall Jenner, Lil Yachty, and Desiigner.

Some come off better than others but all enter into Dave's world in the correct spirit. There's a few loose ends. A story about Mike signing prankster duo The Stone Twins as new clients (and GaTa's bete noires) seems to just peter out, the first episode in which Dave, GaTa, and Mike visit South Korea to make a video with K-pop star CL seems designed purely to sell the series to Eastern markets (though the song 'I Did A Shit In Korea' did make me chuckle), and the perfunctory mentions of BLM, #metoo, the climate crisis, R. Kelly, and cancel culture feel just that.

Perfunctory. But none of these things upset the flow of either the series Dave or the incredible, and individual, flow of his raps. Dave can be an idiot but his heart is always in the right place and you find yourself rooting for him even when he's being a bit of an arse. In The League of Gentlemen, deluded former glam rocker Les McQueen would often opine, after being let down by the other members of Creme Brulee once again, that "it's a shit business". Dave gets to see just how shit it is but yet his love for making music, as well as that for his friends and family, is so strong there's never a single moment you doubt he'll shine through.