After being deprived of live comedy by the Covid pandemic, the island is currently under an onslaught of some of top UK comedians making up for lost time.

And, not to be outdone, next month sees the return of five adlibbing, quick-thinking and generally hilarious comedians to the Isle of Man.

‘Paul Merton’s Impro Chums’, namely long-time collaborators Mike McShane, Suki Webster, Richard Vranch and Kirsty Newton, are back for a night of mind-melting improvised comedy at the Gaiety Theatre, on Saturday, April 2, from 8pm.

The gang of five last appeared in the island in 2018 and were looking forward to a repeat show in April 2020, when the dreaded Covid struck.

Fast forward almost two years to the day and the team are excited to be back on the road and ready to be led down any particular path the random shouts from the audience may send them.

The genre of improvisational comedy sees the comedians on stage ask the audience to shout out things like a place, an activity, an object or a theme, and then act out a scene purely on the basis of the suggestions and their own comedic intuition. In the right hands, such as Paul and his gang, it invariably leads to utter hilarity.

You may be forgiven that one of the main suggested themes may well be ‘Covid’ and, while apart from the fact there is precious little to joke about with the pandemic, none of the comedians think they will hear it being mentioned.

‘My own view is that people would want to get away from it,’ said Paul.

‘Not every comedy show has to hold up a magnifying glass to society and be about how we live today. The whole idea of entertainment, for me, is to take you somewhere else, not to remind you of where you are.

‘What audiences like about what we do is that we haven’t lost our sense of play, our sense of fun, the sort of thing that gets knocked out of you because you have to get married or get a mortgage or find a job.

‘We play and they enjoy watching us play.

Suki added: ‘I think the particular form of comedy we do is about us having fun and being silly.

‘It doesn’t lend itself to satire or in-depth discussion on difficult subjects because you’ve got four or five minds on stage all weaving in and out.

‘The depth of it is in the joy and connection with each other and the audience. And we’re all going to be so giddy with excitement at being back together that I can’t see it being a focus.’

After so long off the stage and, with the exception of Paul and Suki, who are husband -and-wife, away from each other, you could be forgiven that the intuition that underlies their inprov comedy may well have gone rusty.

‘However, Paul and Richard Vranch are confident that they’ll be able to fall back into the swing of things.

‘The most important thing is to be together beforehand,’ said Paul.

‘So we’ll throw a ball around to be in each other’s orbit and to just tune in to each other.

‘And we also do a vocal warm-up to make sure the pipes are working and we don’t start off croaky.’

Richard, who appeared with Paul in the Channel Four show ‘Who’s Line Is it Anyway’, added: ‘The preparation for the show is the decades that we’ve known and worked together.

‘With a scripted show or a rock band, you’d start to get “musical differences” round about year 15.

‘I think I first appeared on stage with Paul in 1984, and with impro it’s about a group attitude and sense of fun. Weirdly, that matures like a good cheese or wine over the years and doesn’t fester like a rock band. So we put the work in by simply having done it for all this time and it just gets better and better.’

‘As Richard says,’ quipped Paul, ‘you can compare our group to a ripe cheese.’

Tickets to ‘Paul Merton’s Impro Chums’ are £23.50, available frmo the Welcome Centre and the Villa Gaiety box office, on 600555, and online from villagaiety.com