COMEDIAN Mark Watson brings his ‘This Can’t Be It’ show to the Wyeside Arts Centre in Builth Wells next Thursday, May 5.

This Can’t Be It is inspired by taking a life expectancy test using an app on his phone 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. However, there’s one problem left and it really is a big one.

Watson had a pretty lively lockdown. With Tim Key and Alex Horne, he created the game ‘No More Jockeys’ which has now had more than 2 million YouTube views and found a rabid cult following. He published his most critically acclaimed book to date, ‘Contacts’, and wrote another, non-fiction, for release this year.

Before that, in the old days, the future national treasure had been a multi-award winner here and in Australia. A familiar voice on BBC Radio 4, where his series ‘Mark Watson Talks About a bit of Life’ has been one of the station’s most popular fixtures since 2007; and he has most recently been working on a film project with Toni Collette and Studio Canal.

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.

He pioneered the ‘Drive And Dine’ series of outdoor comedy gigs at the depth of the pandemic, and his company, Impatient, were one of the only ones to offer tour shows run through Zoom calls, entertaining thousands of ticket-buyers deprived of other live comedy.

He also completed a trilogy of 24-hour online shows, raising around £70,000 for charities. In March he curated the only overseas shows to be part of Melbourne International Comedy Festival, as part of their digital programme. For all this, he was one of the winners of Chortle’s Legends of Lockdown awards, recognising comics who had gone above and beyond to entertain in these extreme times.

The live arena, though, is where he’s in his element the most, and this will be an emotional return to the rooms where he has, for almost two decades, established himself as one of the UK’s favourite stand-ups.

For tickets call Wyeside on 01982 552555 or visit the website at wyeside.co.uk.