Appreciation of comedy is a deeply subjective thing, but it is my honest belief that anyone who can sit through more than five minutes of the National Theatre of Brent without laughing is officially humourless.

I once made the mistake of taking a copy of their Sony-winning Complete and Utter History of the Mona Lisa into hospital with me, listening to which caused frequent visits from nurses to check that I wasn’t having a seizure. More recently, I listened to their Messiah on a train to Norwich. It was the second time I’d listened, but I found myself laughing just as much as on the first go, more so in some places as I caught references and nuances that I had previously missed. In particular, I treasure the innocent ‘Ooooooh’ emitted by the company’s artistic director Desmond Olivier Dingle as he played Joseph, trying and failing to understand the concept of virgin birth.

This innocence makes for a large part of the comedy, as the entire company – Dingle and his assistant Raymond Box - struggles to tackle weighty historical topics without, you feel, truly understanding what it is they’re tackling. Dingle claims to be a man of the world, but more importantly, a man of the theatre and an old pro. In reality, he’s a bombastic spoilt child who would be thrown out of most amateur dramatic societies for ineptitude. Box – part-time actor, full-time foam salesman -suffers from an even worse case of arrested development, looking like he was dressed by his mother and acting as though she’s still standing next to him, ready to wipe rogue splashes of jelly off his face with a spit-drenched Kleenex.

And yet, behind the laughs, this pair of uncured hams can pack an emotional punch. The end of the first episode of their 1999 Channel 4 series Massive Landmarks of the 20th Century, set on the battlefields of the First World War, manages to be both hilarious and moving.

I’ve been a fan for a good few years now. Regrettably, I failed to catch any of their televisual outings on Channel 4 in the 1980s in which Dingle - was assisted by Wallace (played by Jim Broadbent), and live in the hope that someone, somewhere recorded and kept them. For the last 10 years, Broadbent’s shoes as Dingle’s sidekick have been filled by John Ramm, and love Jim Broadbent though I do, I can’t believe that anyone would make a better Dingle sidekick than Ramm. His timing and delivery are perfect, his in-character mugging is sublime and he is living proof that to play a bad actor convincingly, you have to be a very good actor. The same goes for Patrick Barlow, the genius behind the whole thing, who writes most of the material and plays Dingle, best known for starring in the sitcom Is It Legal? and his recent appearances as the vicar in Jam and Jerusalem.

Last Sunday, I saw Desmond and Raymond (with the help of director Martin Duncan) tackling the building of the Taj Mahal and the literary awakening of the Bronte sisters for their forthcoming series The Arts and How They Was Done. The series is intended to challenge “Omnibus, the South Bank Show and Alan Yentob’s massive Imagination”. The Taj Mahal show was a delight, with the malapropically-inclined Raymond rendering the name ‘Shah Jahan’ variously as ‘Charlie Drake’ (complete with a creditable ‘Ello my darlings’) and ‘Charlotte Church’, provoking Desmond’s derisive “So the Taj Mahal was built by Charlotte Church, was it?”. It was good, but the Bronte episode – based on the inverted idea that they became authors so that they would be famous enough to have their house turned into a museum and tea room - caught fire. There was a five-minute stretch in the middle of the recording where I was laughing so intensely that I wished I knew more about circular breathing.

The series starts on BBC Radio 4 on 4 April. I can’t recommend it highly enough. In the meantime, if you haven’t heard it already, beg, borrow or BitTorrent a copy of the Messiah, if only to hear Desmond’s story of spiritual awakening on the South Downs. Midway through the laborious set-up, you’ll already have a rough idea of the punchline, but that doesn’t diminish the joy of its arrival one little bit.