UKTV’s Zapped returns to Dave tonight for a fresh helping of sword and sourcery and sauce – and Alasdair Stuart was invited to the darkest depths of suburbia to see it being filmed…

Zapped is a hidden treasure of a show. Original programming on Dave, written by Dan Gaster, Will Ing and Paul Powell and directed by Dave Lambert it’s the story of Brian Weaver. An office temp who accidentally gets sent a magic item, Brian is transported to the kingdom of Munty. Ruled by hulking cockney Elf secret police, Munty is also home to cheerful soothsayer Barbara (Sharon Rooney), barman and retired warrior Herman (Louis Emerick), professional activist Steg (Kenneth Collard) and professional drunk sort-of-wizard Howell (Paul Kaye). Brian wants to get home, they want some money and find him fractionally less annoying than everyone else. Hilarity ensues.

And the thing is, it really does. Brian is played by James Buckley of The Inbetweeners and White Gold but anyone worrying that this is ‘The further adventures of Jay the sex pest in a fantasy realm’ need not. Brian is a resolutely normal, average guy and Buckley finds a tremendous amount of comedy and likability in that. There’s no special destiny, just a guy called Brian slowly realizing that this deeply weird life may be better than the one he was taken from. In fact, the show gets more than a little poignancy out of the fact no one notices Brian has gone…

Better still the ensemble are great. Rooney’s endlessly chirpy Barbara provides a lot of the absurdist humour and the relationship between her and Brian is honest and sweet. Emerick has a blast as the fount of wisdom, and terrible fish pie, no one seems to want to listen to while Collard’s endlessly self righteous Steg is quietly the hero of the show. When he’s not enjoying the briefest legal career ever as we see in a season 2 episode. Finally Kaye is the pinwheeling drunk icing on the show’s cake, an endlessly, cheerfully squalid figure who plays like Gandalf with 18 gallons of Babycham in him and on a desperate hunt for crisps.

The scripts are just as good. Episodes include Brian accidentally starting a very very slow war, the perils of keeping fantasy pets, what happens when the trendy (and slightly blood-sucky) new bar down the road opens and Howell’s continual inability to pay his debts. It’s always fast moving, always funny and always has a surprise or two ready.

I visited the set earlier this year when they were rounding the corner on season 3. It was an amazing experience, if nothing else because it turns out the pub where much of the action takes place… is a stage. A boiling hot stage. On the hottest days of the year. And the cast were all wearing multiple layers of furs and wool. With massive fans kicking in between takes, we saw them shoot multiple versions of a scene involving Munty’s most dangerous disease, the Woodpox. Each one worked, each one was a little different and the cast kept on working.

While they did, I was shown a cut of the trailer that began airing yesterday and some later scenes. These included Brian as an exhibit in a circus, Barbara having an extended conversation about what actually constitutes a pet and whether or not fruit could be one, and a sauna scene.

The sauna scene is one of the best pieces of comedy I’ve seen this year. I really hope they keep the full length version.

Even if they don’t, I’m really happy Zapped is back. Everyone I saw and talked to on set, from the writer to the stars, is working flat out to make the best show possible. If you thought this was a string of cheap jokes about nerds hung off a pair of performances, then trust me, it really isn’t. Zapped is a show that, unlike its lead, doesn’t just visit fantasy, it lives there. Clever, funny, gloriously odd and just a touch squalid it’s a hidden treasure ripe for discovery, and now’s a great time to jump aboard.