Iain Stirling’s Roast The Internet launches on Comedy Central next week. Here the comic tells us all about the show... and about his use of social media.

How would you describe the show?

It’s basically myself and, I’d say, the best comedians in the country finding the weirdest and most idiosyncratic places of the internet,  deep-diving into them and slagging them off, just getting into the bones of what makes it such an insane place.
It’s an hour-long programme and if it wasn’t we wouldn't be able to have five-minute stand-up sets from, like, Katherine Ryan, which have been written for the show. 

Are there any internet trends that you’ve particularly loved or hated recently? 

I don’t really trust any of them, they’ve all got this weird undercurrent of bandwagon-jumping but  I’ve bandwagon-jumped and enjoyed it! The Jet2holiday music over just disastrous holiday footage will never not be funny. And I’ve given that a go myself and thrown my hat in the ring. I love that they’ve got Jeff Goldblum on it too! It’s sort of mad.

@jeffgoldblum Nothing beats a Jeff2 holiday #jeffirmations #holdmyhand ♬ Jet2 Advert - ✈️A7-BBH | MAN ????????

What’s a clip you’ve watched on the internet that lives in your head rent-free?

Yeah, like so many! I think my favourite one was the two Scottish girls who are doing a performance and the mum walks in and asks which one of them’s gone to the toilet and not flushed it and she says it in a very Scottish-mum kind of way. 

 If we were to check your phone usage, how many hours would it say you spent a day on social media?

Too many, like three or four I reckon, which is really bad isn’t it? Really bad but also probably not that bad in the grand scheme of things either, which is even more worrying. Sometimes I’ll listen to a podcast on YouTube while I go to sleep which knackers my screen time! It looks like I’ve been watching YouTube all through the night, which I haven’t!

 Any fun stories from filming that you can share?

There was one challenge where we saw this trend where you get those inflatable animal suits that people wear and you spray this really stinky fart spray into the suit and it’s really funny because the person, like, writhes around in this suit.

 Anyway, we did it on the show and I basically had to take an hour to bin the clothes I was wearing under the suit, go for a shower and throw up because it was literally unbearable so I think if that makes it in that was pretty wild. 

Did you find making the show changed your view on the internet, especially social media?

I am definitely now more aware of the underlying ‘invisible guiding hand’ and the motivations of social media in terms of what they’re trying to get, they’re selling your attention to companies, all they want to do is keep your attention. When you learn that and you see the ways they go about it, it’s sort of scary. 

You’ll get emails saying ‘you’ve been tagged in something’ but you’ll never get shown the thing you’ve been tagged in, you have to click to open the app to find it. Remember the depression you felt when it would say ‘you’ve finished Instagram for today’, that message will never show again now! 

Someone said to me once ‘if a product’s free, then you’re the product’ so I have got that in the back of my head now. 

Also the way people use it to try and push their own brands. There are people out there who will set up 200 plus accounts and just post loads of stuff all the time just so they’re in people’s feeds, and they don’t care whether the stuff is good or bad, kind or not, they just want it out there. I learnt things like that from the show and found them quite scary

Were there any particular trends that surprised you?

The thing I found really interesting, we did a deep-dive on the show into this thing called ‘what-about-me-ism’.

Because the internet is custom made for you because of algorithms, that main-character energy, people have an issue when something isn’t immediately ‘for them’. 

There was this trend where this woman posted a video about this bean-soup she’d made to help with pregnancy pains and there were these mad comments like ‘Excuse me, what if you don’t like beans?!’ and I’m just like, don't watch a video about bean soup then! Use just 1 per cent of your thumb muscle and just skip to the next video. So there’s been this whole generation now created that just thinks people should make everything for them all the time and if it’s not for them it’s terrible and shouldn’t exist.

What’s an internet trend you’d like to see make a comeback?

I don’t think people plank nearly enough these days and I think kids on nights out should be planking on water features and fences, it’s absolutely pathetic that they all dance now and look good for TikTok and do Instagram posts, they should be hammered in a pair of G-star jeans planking on a wall like we did in the noughties!

And taking about a hundred pictures to put up on Facebook! There was always that one friend with a camera, the weirdo with a camera who would take a hundred pictures and then he’d wake up the next morning and the hungover job for that day was Domino’s pizza and untagging the pictures.

What kind of viewer response are you hoping for?

What I’m genuinely hoping for is they find it really really funny and really accessible 

Also I’m hoping they learn some stuff, maybe not ‘learn’ but this isn’t a show where we’re just like ‘haha look at this funny clip from the internet’, we’re also like ‘look at the way the internet is used, look at what it’s doing to our psyche’s, look at what it’s doing to our personalities’.

So I don’t think we’ll be teaching them anything but I think they’ll have these thoughts they’ve had about the internet actually represented on telly which I don’t think has really happened on television yet.

It’s all very much like You’ve Been Framed style-clips which are great and we obviously have in the show but we also have really interesting hot takes and ideas about how the internet can be a better and more useful place. 

I am genuinely really proud of it, it is an actual topical take-down of the internet in maybe a more critical level than television has done before.

•  Iain Stirling’s Roast The Internet launches on Comedy Central on Monday. The guests will be: Amy Gledhill, Asim Chaudhry, Babatunde Aléshé, Desiree Burch, Ellie Taylor, Fatiha El-Ghorri, Guz Khan, Harriet Kemsley, Jamali Maddix, Joe Thomas, Jon Richardson, Josh Jones, Katherine Ryan, Kerry Godliman, Kiell Smith-Bynoe, Lara Ricote, Layton Williams, London Hughes, Maisie Adam, Tom Allen, Vicky Pattison and Vogue Williams with guest performances from Celya AB and Lou Wall. This was an edited version of an interview supplied by publicists.