Staged ★★★★½

There have been very few good things to come out of the COVID-19 pandemic, unless you own a mask factory, but one silver lining to the cloud that set up shop above us all in 2020 was the production of Staged. The comedy of spark-showering joy took the concept of necessity being the mother of invention and ran with it triumphantly.

In the beginning, with the pandemic shutting down live entertainment in the UK, writer-director Simon Evans got together with estimable thesps David Tennant and Michael Sheen to cook up a comedy about the pandemic shutting down live entertainment in the UK. Thus, in the first season, we saw Tennant, Sheen and Evans trying to rehearse a play – to be performed when lockdown lifted – over Zoom. With the cast filming themselves at home, the premise turned the enforced limitations into a strength and won the hearts of millions of locked-down viewers eager for someone to find the funny side of the global predicament.

Thus, a second season was produced, in which things got increasingly meta, and we have now entered the third season of Staged, during which that journey of conceptual labyrinthinism continues.

In season three, Evans is attempting to wheedle his way back into his stars’ good books, having burnt some bridges. The actors, finding their egos easily manipulated, soon come to regret succumbing to the wheedling. But just as the plans for a Christmas radio play, and those for a birthday party for David’s wife Georgia, are seemingly at their most shambolic, the series turns itself inside out again. Suddenly we’re on a whole new track, as the actors who were playing themselves start playing themselves playing themselves and … it’ll all make sense when you watch it.

And watch it you should, because plot aside, this is a tour de force of comic writing and acting. The vast majority of the show is simply static shots of the cast sitting in front of laptops, but the energy created by the pinballing dialogue and whiplash banter is utterly compelling.

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The great attraction of the show, from episode one, has been the glorious chemistry between Tennant and Sheen. The pair, so brilliant together previously in Good Omens, bounce off each other as well as any seasoned double act: a Zoom-generation Abbott and Costello. It is clear that both men are having the time of their lives playing versions of themselves that are, if not exactly flattering, very easy to love.

Each man plays up the actor’s ego to full effect, with Tennant assuming a somewhat more whimsical, childlike charm, contrasting sweetly with Sheen’s boisterous over-confidence. The show has changed shape several times since the beginning, but the delight in the interplay between Tennant’s Scots charm and Sheen’s Welsh ebullience remains, recalling the best of Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan in The Trip series.