One of the great podcasts is that by The Word magazine, in which men blessed with wit, insight and centuries of poptastic experience sit around and shoot the breeze about music and its environs. Other casts dealing with other topics attempt the same, but with only a sliver of wordmagazine.co.uk’s je ne sais quoi.

Now we have a contender for the crown. Robin Ince’s Utter Shambles has the same selling point of bright, articulate people with a shared interest getting together and recording whatever happens.

Those who know Ince will know that this is a man who takes his fun seriously (he even hosted the long-running BBC7 series Serious About Comedy). He is comedy trivia on legs. He could probably deal with a half-hour programme as a monologue, but here he is joined by the comedian Josie Long as well as a guest star per pod. So far we’ve had Chris Addison, Mark Steel, and Robert Newman – no rubbish, then – and, most recently, Stephen Merchant.

So what did Ince, Long and Ricky Gervais’s less aggressive half discuss? Let’s see. After a bit of flummery about how America looks like a movie set of America, whereas London doesn’t (except those bits, such as Notting Hill, that do), the talk turned to the cultural values of the On the Buses films, as opposed to the TV series. Ince was in pig heaven, as not only is he one of the few people able to make an informed comparison, Merchant is too. Long ate her apple.

Cutting out some other entertaining diversions, we came to the revelation that Merchant had recently spent £2.50 on a 1976 edition of TV Times, which he had brought in for the others to see. Ince exploded with pleasure. Merchant read out some of the more obscure programme details and they swapped reminiscences.

Long told a story about seeing some men delivering pig carcasses to a halal butchers (pigs? Halal?) at four in the morning, which led to a lively conversation about bizarre jobs at unsociable times, and thence to musings on how young people these days can’t smoke a pipe without seeming affected.

And then Merchant brought out salt and pepper shakers he’d bought shaped like willies. Which in turn led Ince to recall how, when he was 7, he had bought a box of phallic matches as a birthday present for his father. It’s a cornucopia, it really is.

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