‘What you’re about to witness is going to seem weird.’ Ah, Nathan Fielder loves a bit of understatement. The weirdness that is subsequently witnessed arrives late on in this six-part second season of The Rehearsal and frankly takes weirdness to whole new levels of oddballery. Like many things in this series, giving too much away would be a bad move and very unfair when you consider the ethos of Fielder’s project.

But is there ever an ethos or larger purpose at play in his work or, as some critics have wondered, is he an unfiltered sensationalist who puts his subjects in positions of awkwardness merely to revel in their discomfort. For the record, he just isn’t the latter; indeed, if anyone comes across as awkward and in clear discomfort during The Rehearsal (but also back in his brilliant Nathan For You days), it’s Fielder himself. Barely anyone in his shows will avoid going through the wringer, but no one gets it in the neck quite as much as the creator himself.

But what is it that he’s creating? Some TV shows can be neatly summed up in a nutshell: depressive mob guy has problems at home and at work; guy with cancer starts cooking meth to provide for his family when he’s gone; a middle manager is an embarrassment to himself and his colleagues, especially when he does a mad dance. You’d need a whole page and a half to even get close to giving an uninitiated reader the barest clue about what The Rehearsal actually is.

But oh well, here goes. In the first season, Fielder used fake babies but also real children to help a woman prepare for life as a mother. Except, it also featured Fielder himself taking on the role of a surrogate father and spying on other potential partners. He also recreated, to the tiniest detail, a bar where a pub quizzer was gearing up to tell a team member that he had lied about his education prowess. In its simplest terms, The Rehearsal is just that: people attempting to prepare for a life-changing event or, to say it again, awkward social situation.

In this new season, the stakes are ramped up as far as they can possibly go. But this time, Fielder does have a clear social purpose: he wants to prevent more airplanes from crashing. His theory is that pilots and the right-hand people in the cockpit aren’t familiar enough with each other so that when a potentially perilous scenario unfolds, the co-pilot freezes and is unable to raise their concerns, with catastrophic results.

Wrapped up into all this are segments where a number of pilots judge a talent contest, a couple clone their beloved dog, an Evanescence chorus is analysed for its life-saving properties, and a dozen lookalikes follow a person around repeating what they say and do in order to give them more confidence. Yes, you’re right, it’s impossible to get across exactly what The Rehearsal is. Just know that it’s like nothing else that’s on television now or has been on before now, and most likely will never be repeated again.

All episodes of The Rehearsal are available on Sky Comedy and NOW.