Flight of the Conchords

Or this: We’re both in love with the sexy lady With the eye that’s lazy She’s smokin’ with an eye that’s broken I think it’s hot, the way she looks left a lot...

it can only be the songwriting genius of one band – Flight of the Conchords, AKA Bret and Jemaine, the best thing to come out of New Zealand since kiwifruit-flavoured Crowded House lollipops.

These two are unique, and so is their comedy. Ditto their show Flight of the Conchords (BBC4, Tuesday, 10.30pm), where they play a couple of laidback, ridiculously naive Kiwi musicians trying to make it big in the Big Apple, hindered in part by their own stunning lack of ambition but mainly by their monumentally incompetent and frankly insane manager Murray.

But he’s not quite as mad as Mel, the boys’ number one fan who has a hefty whiff of the Annie Wilkes in Misery about her (as in the “God I love you!” after hobbling with sledgehammer scene).

The first series of FOTC was superb, attracting an instant cult following, thanks to the fact that its perfectly enjoyable surface silliness hid smart, layered storylines, running in-jokes and, the thing that really set it aside, endless, stupidly good music video spoofs, where no genre was safe, no depth left unplumbed for the sake of a cheap rhyme or a convenient segue.

This is a quirky comedy in all the best ways and, considering how out-there and unusual it is at times, it still amazes me that it is part of the mighty HBO stable, famous for top-notch but mass-appeal shows.

Series two had a lot to live up to (that could be one of their lyrics).

And watching the first episode a few weeks ago, my heart sank a little.

Murray seemed too contrived, too successful, for goodness sake, and the choons didn’t have quite the same nonsensical feel to them.

It all seemed too polished, a bit too well-rehearsed, the very antithesis of what the Conchords are all about, and suddenly there was the prospect of the whole series suffering from that difficult second-album syndrome.

But, good news, dear reader, the following week’s episode The New Cup was so great, so cry-your-eyes-out funny – especially on second, yes, second viewing – that all my worries disappeared. By the fifth episode, I could honestly say it was just as good as before and after this week’s sixth, I reckon it’s got better.

Basically, this was the age-old story of two friends falling for the same girl but, this being the FOTC, they fell in love in a matter of seconds with a complete stranger who was searching for her missing dog, Charlie, in a park.

As the story unfolded we realised that the object of their desire, Barbra (or BrahBrah, they were never quite sure) was, shall we say, a smidgeon odd.

The pronounced tick and the dressing of her now-missing and epileptic dog in a kitten suit to sneak it into a kittens-only party should have sounded alarm bells, but no, they both fell head-over-heels with the “girl who was fly, with the wonky eye” and vied pathetically for her affections.

The resulting video, Love is a Weapon of Choice, was a mighty, air-machine swirling, satin night-gowned, sword-fencing hybrid of Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell and Bonnie Tyler’s Looking Out For a Hero that will be YouTubed forever.

Desperate to impress BrahBrah (this turned out to be her name, natch), they staged a benefit gig for epileptic (or pepileptic, they kept getting that mixed up too) dogs where their human/canine audience lapped up Think About the Epileptic Dogs, featuring lyrics such as Somewhere out there there’s a Golden Retriever having a seizure Somewhere out there there’s a Labrador shaking on the floor and the sublime Make a donation for a shaky Dalmation.

Disaster soon followed, though, as the boys moved on to the remix version and turned on... the strobe lights.

Cut to BrahBrah telling the guys she thought all along they were gay, them saying no way, followed by a crazy-eyed Mel appearing with “doctored” photos of the pair of them posing as a mum and a dad with a baby that looked like both of them.

In the end, Bret got the girl and as they wandered off into the sunset, he asked her: “So, how long has your dog been missing?”

“Six years,” she replied before calling “Charlie!”

• Next week Bret and Jemaine meet the Prime Minister of New Zealand and pay homage to Simon and Garfunkel – one fan in particular is overly impressed by Jemaine’s Garfunkeling.

Now who could that be?