RECENT events have made us all think more about the fragility of life.

Nothing focuses the mind than having a ‘daily death toll’, but luckily, neurotic Taskmaster-survivor and author Mark Watson has been stressing about the frightening prospect of death since before it became fashionable.

His intended 2020 show – on the cusp of going to Melbourne and Edinburgh festivals, before a typically extensive nationwide tour – was inspired by taking a life expectancy test (there’s an app you can get, if you’re having an existential crisis at 3am) and discovering he could expect to reach 78: in other words, he’s just over halfway to, as it were, the finish line.

What should we be doing with our time on earth, and how can we do it better?

Watson has made a lot of strides towards happiness and fulfilment over the past few years. But there’s one problem left: and it really is a big one.

The popular but all-too-mortal Radio 4 figure, star of Live at the Apollo and House of Games wrestles with some of the fundamental questions of life, with unusually high levels of benign audience involvement and the gag rate of an already fast-talking comedian who’s been imprisoned his house for more than a year.

This show has been some time in the making, thanks to all that unpleasantness with the virus. He’s rarely looked forward to anything in his life. All those 41 years of it to date.

See Mark Watson in This Can’t Be It at Theatr Mwldan, Cardigan, on Sunday, 17 July at 8pm. For those aged 14 and over.