Dara Ó Briain wants to talk about great ways to waste your time

Is it the minutes you spend picking Lego pieces up off the floor that will find their way back there as soon as your back is turned? Or perhaps it’s the weeks you spent organising your CD collection into those big black plastic-wallet thingamies with cumbersome zippers and flimsy sleeves that now collect dust in the garage? Or the months or even years you’ve spent searching high and low for your car keys because you wouldn’t just leave them in the bowl in the hallway like any functioning grown-up? Asking for a friend, obviously.

The point is, whatever your own personal brand of timewasting, as long as you are human and therefore have at least a passing familiarity with the whole temps perdu concept, the brand new Dara Ó Briain’s Timewasters is 100 per cent relatable. Also funny. And somehow, surprising as it sounds, kind.

Here’s the premise: two comedians compete for the title of biggest timewaster over the course of three rounds slotted into a compact half hour or so. In the first, they must deliver a story of tiny time wastes, where seconds or minutes were lost on futility of some sort. In the second, the stakes increase to hours or days wasted, while the final round homes in on that exercise in futility that has gobbled up months or years of the contestant’s life.

What these six episodes are really doing is reminding us how barking mad we are as humans

Presiding, judging, hosting, and affably mumbling, Dara Ó Briain anoints a winner each round, and then crowns an overall champion at episode close, giving them all that lost time back as the prize with which they can do whatever they see fit. Somehow, the sum of these parts is a jaunty slam dunk, a laugh-out-loud podcast both structured enough to feel distinct and even purposeful, while at the same time pleasingly, winningly rambling.

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The six episodes, exclusively available on Audible – the audiobook service that expanded into podcast streaming in 2020 – bring Ó Briain’s friends and familiar Mock the Week guests to our ears in pairs that patter nicely while ostensibly competing for lost time. What they’re really doing, though, is reminding us how barking mad we are as humans and how all of us, somehow, make strange and inexplicable choices that reveal something intimate and sublime about our experience of the world.

These conversations, elicited by the particular parameter of a three-round timewasting contest, can feel deeply personal

It’s Laura Lexx talking with some trepidation about her childhood banking hobby or her complicated relationship with show theme tunes. It’s Mark Watson showcasing his redundant but still impressive superpower, train timetable memorisation. It goes from trivial to tragic: Athena Kugblenu troubleshooting ways to dry her nails quickly, to Ria Lina sharing the heartbreaking realisation that she could have moved on from her marriage years before she finally did. It’s Ed Byrne getting into it with Ó Briain about whether learning Irish in school can qualify as a waste of time, and Ahir Shah catastrophising.

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There are some unsuccessful punctuation marks provided by a robo-voiced interstitial that lists jocular time-saving tips – replace your stairs with an escalator and a fireman’s pole, or buy a bungalow etc. These canned gags usually fall flat, though in doing so they make clear how successful the less-scripted parts of this podcast are: there’s just something about asking people how they waste time that nets some fascinating, rich material.

These conversations, elicited by the particular parameter of a three-round timewasting contest, can feel deeply personal and serve as a reminder that you can laugh at almost anything in life if you just shift your perspective a little. And hang around with a comedian, I suppose. We measure out our lives in coffeespoons after all – sometimes it’s in the timewasting that we find the wonder.