Garry Shandling’s brand of comedy was not to everyone’s taste. His confessional, neurotic schtick, and his fretful tone, was representative of a strain of American comic giants which includes Woody Allen, Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, but, unlike them, he never quite infiltrated the British mainstream.

Shandling died eight years ago at the age of 66, but there is every reason to reassess his life and work, or even to discover it for the first time.

The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling, first released in 2018 and now showing on Sky Documentaries, may be the most extraordinary piece of television you will ever watch.

It’s long – almost four-and-a-quarter hours, over two discreet parts – and rarely will you see a more authentic, more intimate, more moving, more thought-provoking, and funnier exposition of someone’s life, told through personal journal entries and recollections from colleagues, friends and family members.

This is much more than a dissection of the comedic art – it is a searingly honest, often dark, account of the universal........

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