Nick Mohammed is Mr Swallow: 2012

Nick Mohammed, polymath and character comic extraordinaire, is 164cm tall. But as a show-off of the highest order, what he lacks in stature he makes up for in just about everything else. He returns in the guise of Mr Swallow, the shrill and garrulous lifestyle guru whose 2010 outing taught us how to enhance our memories.

"What's this year's restrictive theme?" he asks, knowing full well that he will digress from the set subject of numbers. His height is one of a grab bag of digits thrown up via slides as he wages war on "mathematical bullshit". With pace and pedantry Mr Swallow tears through supermarket deals and the Twelve Days of Christmas, taking issue with zero and infinity. His instinctive, turbocharged chitchat evokes a small-town gossip in the grip of a manic episode. 

Mohammed has a whole menagerie of characters at his disposal, but here he lets Mr Swallow hog the limelight. Threads of his backstory are toyed with and abandoned, and when Mohammed breaks off for a caricature of his absent-minded accountant it comes out of nowhere — but the show's scattiness is part of its charm. 

Like all the best cartoons, Mohammed's style is larger than life yet demonstrates a fine eye for people's verbal ticks and mannerisms. The accountant intermission is rich with idiosyncracies; having her apply hand sanitiser as she rambles is a tiny but considered detail.

The work put into this show is plain to see, and not just in the arithmetical acrobatics of its finale. From the first words Mohammed squawks, he finds fun and innovative ways to earn our attention, whether he's challenging us to rig a Countdown number round against him or asking inane questions to which we could not possibly know the answer. An impressive, dense and relentlessly funny hour, this adds up to astonishingly good value.