Described as ‘Baby Reindeer meets Adolescence’, Wisecrack is a new six-part podcast where a very British tradition of stand-up is dissected by a very American form of true-crime analysis. The result is something disturbingly compelling and entirely unprecedented. A decade ago, comedian Edd Hedges made a rare visit to his parents’ home in a quiet Essex town. That night, a 23-year-old neighbour brutally murdered two people, including his own mother, and then violently tried to enter the Hedges’ house. The comic told the story in his 2017 Edinburgh Fringe debut which was seen by US producer Jodi Tovay, who set about trying to persuade Hedges to adapt and expand upon it.

‘When I joined the comedy industry in 2013, there was nothing like this,’ Hedges says of Wisecrack. ‘It was just about doing the Fringe and Russell Howard’s Good News if you were lucky. But I guess things have evolved a bit.’ Despite winning the prestigious So You Think You’re Funny title that year, Hedges never fulfilled his promise to break out in UK comedy.

He reckons talking about the horrific incident while he was still an inexperienced act held him back ‘for a very, very long time’, and he laments the ‘toxic pressure for comedians to get a Best Newcomer Award nomination’. As the podcast relates, he was also caught between showing respect for the victims and the demand of his friend and director, comedian Sofie Hagen, that everything in his debut should be 100% true. Other friends and comics, such as Daniel Sloss and Adam Rowe, argued that some embellishment was justified if it made the show funnier and it retained emotional truth.

Tovay, whom Hedges belatedly opened up to, drove him to dig deeper and deeper into the details of the crime, to the point where he lost his temper. ‘I love her to bits but I told her to “fuck off!” at one point because she was pushing and pushing me. There are times that listening to her and Sofie on the podcast are very, very uncomfortable listening for me.’

Now pursuing a burgeoning, transatlantic stand-up career with a modified, updated version of the story, Hedges hopes to become an acknowledged long-form anecdotal master like his heroes Sarah Kendall and Mike Birbiglia, and to one day return to the Fringe. Talks are also underway about adapting Wisecrack for television. Much of what makes the podcast so horribly listenable is the questions it raises about storytelling truth, both on Hedges’ part and that of Tovay. He admits that one nagging issue (unresolved in Wisecrack) about his own inadvertent role in the murders still haunts him. ‘If we follow that thread, then that makes me a cause. And I just don’t want to think about that,’ he confesses.

New episodes of Wisecrack are available weekly on all the usual platforms.