Dave Gorman’s comic dissection of 21st-century coincidence and absurdity is back after a seven-year hiatus, for a sixth season that was meant to run for four episodes. But check the schedules and you’ll notice there are only three episodes of Modern Life Is Goodish. What happened? The answer lies in the sort of low-key calamity that feels very Dave Gorman.

“We made four,” the comedian explains. “But one of them is 75% about Gregg Wallace. It’s in the bin.” This lost, cursed Goodish episode was filmed and finished just as news broke that Wallace, a presenter on BBC1’s hit cookery show MasterChef, was the subject of multiple accusations of inappropriate behaviour – which he has denied – instantly cancelling the cult hero status Goodish was drawing on. “It’s sort of taking the piss out of him but in a very loving way, tongue in cheek,” says Gorman. “There’s a routine that sets up the idea that I’ve invented a product. I need to get a celebrity endorsement for it. The punchline tying all the routines together is that he’s filmed an advert for it.”

Frantic meetings were held to try to salvage the episode by removing all mentions of Wallace, but the task was hopeless. “It’s a structured piece with a flow to it. Every routine connects to every other routine.” He can’t resist a joke: “What I’m saying is: I’m the real victim.”

Gorman pivoted away from regular standup in the early 2000s with the true-life odysseys Are You Dave Gorman? (adapted into the TV series The Dave Gorman Collection) and Googlewhack Adventure, both based on his obsession with pinning down the quirkiest elements of life. In Modern Life Is Goodish, he pours that same curiosity into what amounts to a series of comedy PowerPoint presentations: armed with a clicker and a big screen for showing screengrabs, photos and videos, Gorman hunts for oddities, riffing off them before tying them into ingenious comic bundles that suggest our smallest eccentricities are all gloriously connected.

In the episodes that have made it to air, the new season sees Gorman talk about everything from annoying packaging to his online critics, from bad magicians to obscure telly. One lecture mines for gold in the workings of a company that rents out meeting “pods” in unlikely locations, apparently with limited success; another locates wonder in the logical inconsistencies in Brian Conley’s guest introductions in the mid-2010s daytime BBC series The TV That Made Me, a segment that becomes pure TV Burp when Conley himself appears and reprises his old routines. “I love TV Burp!” says Gorman. “I’ll take that as a huge compliment.”

Airing from 2013, Goodish originally ran for five seasons and was a big hit for Dave – the channel, that is – with audiences hitting 1.5 million. Then, when it seemed the perennially check-shirted Gorman had found the perfect vehicle for his singular brand of optimism and exasperation, it ended. “We stopped because I used to work 100 hours a week for nine months of the year,” Gorman says, talking in a bookshop cafe in London. “Which I did very happily. But at some point you say, ‘I have a kid, I’d like to be at home.’ It isn’t sustainable.”

Having paused Modern Life when his son Eric was two, Gorman had some enforced time off due to Covid, before returning to live work: his shows have been PowerPoint-based for a while now, which made it easier to bring Modern Life back. “I did two tours in those seven years. So there was a store of material that hadn’t been on telly. But also, somebody had the smart idea: we don’t need eight episodes. How about a smaller number?”

It’s now perhaps a more playful, not so political show, with less railing against exploitative or idiotic corporate practices. Not that Modern Life has ever really sought to right big wrongs. “I never overtly talk politics on stage,” Gorman says. “I said to the producers when we first sat down for series one: if there’s something I really care about and I have a point to make, you’ve got to steer me away from it because the audience sniff sincerity and it stops being funny. But then I get angry tweets from people who have intuited my politics, and they don’t agree with them. ‘Another one of you lefty remainers’ – point me to the bit where I said that! I think what you’ve done is, there’s hopefully a kindness in it, and you’ve extrapolated from kindness and arrived at a worldview that you disagree with. That’s … weird.”

But modern life has changed in the seven years for which Modern Life Is Goodish has been away: everything feels political now, and darker with it. Does Gorman worry that people have lost their ability to find joy in trivial things? “I don’t want that to be the case, for obvious, selfish reasons. There’s two things you can do with that: you can do comedy about it, making those difficult points and confronting people with that truth head on … or you can have an hour off. That’s also healthy. Even the person who has the truest moral compass, who is aware of all the inequities in life, gets pissed off when their train is late.”

Modern Life Is Goodish, however, approaches the arcane with considerable rigour. Gorman is not like other standups who tell anecdotes on stage that they have fairly obviously invented for the purpose: “I can’t do that. I’m not a very good liar. Which my wife is delighted about.” Instead, he embodies the cliche “it’s funny because it’s true”: if he says something has happened, you know it really has when he brings up the next slide and lets you see for yourself. “Part of what I do is provide the evidence, so there has to be an underlying truth. There’s something great about knowing that that thing you’re finding funny is out there in the real world for anyone to discover. Then, the world’s a bit more magic.”

While Gorman was away, he found a new source of magic: as well as being a comedian, he is now a professional compiler of cryptic crosswords. Gorman is Bluth in the Independent (in Gaelic, “Gorm” is “blue” and “An” is “the”) and Django in the Daily Telegraph (David James Gorman = D, J an’ Go). In the Guardian, his setter pseudonym is Fed. “Feds in America are also called G-men. And there are two or three people who would call me ‘G-man’.” Crossword-setting has taken a back seat now that Gorman is back on TV, but before then he was setting a grid a week. “At one point if you’d asked my boy what I do for a living, he’d say, ‘He sets crosswords.’”

It may seem like a strange choice of side hustle, but crossword setters come up with clever and surprising combinations of words for the entertainment of an audience, just like comedians. “Clues and jokes are sentences that mean one thing, and then don’t. There are penny-drop moments when you’re solving that will make you smile. You’re in company with the setter: it’s playful and teasing and when you realise what someone’s doing, it can make you … maybe not laugh, but there’s an enjoyable emotional response.”

As a setter, Gorman is known for being able to create a fluent, pleasing “surface”, which is the term the cryptic community uses to describe the literal meaning of the sentence. Clues are not obliged to make sense, but it’s a bonus if they do. He recalls setting a clue where the answer was “Ernest Hemingway”, and the cryptic part of the clue was “Eagles on the smallest golf course” [ernes/the/min/g/way].

“That’s a legitimate sentence you can make out of the elements of the name Ernest Hemingway. That’s just the coincidence of the world and that’s beautiful. It was always there.” Fans of Modern Life will see the parallel: Gorman regularly turns up happenstances that are almost unbelievable, but are real and have been waiting to be found. “That synchronicity makes the world nicer. I think the world’s fucking great.”

Even the world we live in now? “Yes. Obviously loads of it is shit. But it’s also the only one we’ve got, so you might as well enjoy the stuff that’s amazing.”