When you’re off your face on mushrooms and spliff, surely the last thing you need is to have a couple of tooled-up warriors from another dimension burst through your roof and sword the bejesus out of one another? Well, that’s the fate which muscles in on one timid dude’s fuzzy state in the opening scene of E4’s new comedy-drama Tripped.

Even more worrying for Milo (George Webster) is that one of the swordsmen appears to be Danny (Blake Harrison, he of the Inbetweeners robotic dancing fame), his best mate in this dimension, a rising star in the pet insurance world who is preparing to marry Kate (Georgina Campbell). The other more aggressive baddie-like fighter looks a lot like on-the-edge Scottish stand-up Richard Gadd wielding a typically intense performance.

But don’t worry, all will be explained soon enough: except, of course, it’s not as this is a modern sci-fi affair so things just get more complicated by the minute. The gist is that there are variations of all the main characters stomping around many parallel universes and for some as-yet unknown reason Callum (Gadd) wants to destroy all of them with his heavy blade.

And here’s where everything a bit more cluttered as Milos and Dannys from other universes (past and present and probably the deep future) meet in this one: this leads to Danny trying to get rid of his own corpse and Milo kidnapping his church-going previous self before meeting the grandmother he believed had died seven years earlier. Head sore yet? Probably, but if you have the stamina and patience, this four-parter might be what you need to get through December.

For now though, Tripped is more wry than anything close to laugh-out-loud, and lurches towards the rather icky and mean-spirited by having an elderly person put themselves in a rather compromisingly incestuous position. Those seeking encrusted blood and dripping entrails might be slightly disappointed but the Game of Thronesy final scene of the first instalment might suggest something more gruesome to come. Such as a second episode …

Tripped starts on E4, Tuesday 8 December, 10pm.