Run For Your Wife, its Ray Cooney’s YouTube channel

Each of Ray Cooney’s YouTube videos begins the same way. From stage-right, the 82-year-old playwright shuffles into view, chuckling all the while, and bellows his signature catchphrase: “Morning, afternoon, evening – whatever!”

From there, he introduces one of the dozens of old friends he’s enlisted over the last 18 months to help promote Run For Your Wife, the film adaptation of his smash-hit 1983 stage farce. Guests are mostly familiar from 1970s British sitcoms (Christopher Biggins, Maureen Lipman) or contemporary police inquiries (Rolf Harris, Cliff Richard) but each comes bearing lessons gleaned from a lifetime in light entertainment.

The result is surprisingly compelling. Ray has all the cosy charm of a favourite uncle, and he delights in deploying jokes from a comic arsenal eight decades in the making. His comfort in front of the camera, no doubt honed during innumerable 80s chatshow appearances, is a welcome antidote to the strained eccentricity and please-subscribe desperation of other YouTube vloggers.

The dialogue between Ray and his guests is a dizzy blend of the frivolous and the profound. A light-hearted conversation with Lionel Blair on the subject of Saga ocean cruises takes a sudden turn for the pensive after Ray asks, only half-rhetorically, “Aren’t we lucky?” Lionel responds soberly in the affirmative.

It’s clear that Ray takes pleasure in these conversations, but his focus never strays too far from the matter at hand, namely counteracting the avalanche of negative press received by Run For Your Wife (this very newspaper called the film “stunningly unfunny”). In one video, he turns his attention to the senior citizens of Colchester, canvassing their opinions as they exit a matinee screening of the film. “I would give it 10 out of 10,” declares one punter, “because that’s my sense of humour.” True to form, Ray is ready with a punchline: “Well then, why don’t you write for the Guardian?”