“I used to be a comedian,” says Kim Noble in part three of his new podcast. Comedy barely describes what he’s up to in that episode, interrogating his use of antidepressants, and the ignorance of the industry that manufactures them. But then comedy barely describes the whole career of this self-styled “failed performance artist”, whose work tightropes between self-lacerating confessional, pranksterism and reality TV. Labels aside, Futile Attempts (At Surviving Tomorrow) is, judging by its first three instalments, as twisted and tender as Noble’s best stage work: a bleak, blissed-out game of chicken with the abyss, in 20-minute audio instalments.
The podcast, Noble tells us, is about “my attempt to find ways to survive life. Because it’s fucking wank, isn’t it?” Each episode considers another of Noble’s adventures in the search for meaning, splicing narration, dreamy music, and secret audio recordings made as our host goes about his unglamorous life. We meet Anish, his suburban spiritual guide, and Stevie Chang, to whom Noble wants to apologise, 36 years on, for a mild schooldays dust-up. We hear Noble reassuring a church warden that he isn’t a paedophile, and persuading the head of research at a pharmaceuticals firm that he, Noble, is the company’s new assistant vice-president.
It veers between, or improbably combines, cringingly awkward, darkly comic and beautiful – as with, say, episode three’s plangent phone dialogue between a travel agent and a synthesised voice seeking somewhere, anywhere, he might holiday without fear. Sound designer Benbrick loops, refracts and fuzzes up the audio; sometimes Futile Attempts is a sitcom, sometimes it’s ambient investigative journalism. It is highly aware of itself as a podcast, the inadequacy of which Noble critiques as he goes. Elsewhere, it stakes out a no man’s land between send-up and psychotic episode. Is Noble’s fantasy about becoming a corporate bigwig satire, pipe dream, or both? Is his confessional journey around London’s churches, mugging vergers with unasked-for intimacies, a prank or a breakdown?
A bit of both, I’d say. It’s certainly morbidly compelling, in a manner reminiscent of Chris Morris’s Blue Jam or the film haikus of Tim Key. You spent each episode terrified of what Noble might do next, as he totters through the world with zero self-esteem and zero inhibitions. But then you’ll be blindsided by a shard of searing honesty, as this glum middle-aged man imagines what a better world, or a better life, might look like. Upcoming episodes focus on sex, exercise and, er, queueing. I’ll be at the front of the queue for all of them.
• Released weekly on podcast apps from 19 August and as a box set on Spotify.
• In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie.
