Toast of London (Seasons 1–3)

Toast of London (2013) is a British absurdist comedy you can watch online on iFILM. Steven Toast is an ageing actor with a booming voice, a messy past, and a rare gift for stumbling into chaos wherever a normal person would just put the kettle on.

Toast is rarely on stage; the mayhem happens everywhere else. There are voiceover sessions where the smug engineer Clem Fandango needles him through the glass, affairs with married women, a bitter rivalry with fellow actor Ray Purchase, and an agent who is no help at all. Matt Berry plays Toast to the hilt — that ludicrous diction, the bloated ego, the songs he drops in for no reason. Plot logic is optional, the stories drift off into pure surrealism, and that's exactly the draw.

Created by Matt Berry and Arthur Mathews for Channel 4, the show sneaks in turns from Jon Hamm, Martin Freeman and Lindsay Duncan. The humour is an acquired taste: dry, peculiar, very English. It suits anyone fed up with tidy sitcoms and ready for something genuinely odd. Stream Toast of London (2013) online on iFILM.