Who is the nerdiest person in the whole country? This is the question the QI Elves aim to answer during the first half of their latest tour show, Nerd Immunity. The assumption is that “the nerdiest person in [whichever town we’re in] will be at our show. We’ve decided that must be the case, right?” says James Harkin.

On her own birthday, Alison Spittle is in her room, on Zoom, very generously giving us her time. It’s the same room she lived in throughout lockdown, only with more in it. “I’m just sort of surrounded by gravestones of hobbies that I thought I could do,” she says. This year, with things looking more optimistic, her mind is on the Fringe.

ABBA are back. But what can the response to their slightly odd return tell us about our collective appetite for fantasy in 2022?

Almost 20 years have passed since the late Terry Jones first put to Robert Ross the idea of writing Forgotten Heroes of Comedy. In the years that followed, publishers seemed turned off by the word ‘forgotten’. If they’re forgotten heroes, who will want to know? Yet with the arrival of the book’s eventual publisher, Unbound, Ross and Jones were finally able to answer that very question.

Rob Auton cannot wait to get back to performing. “My brain’s been full of stuff that I don’t want it to be full of. Whereas now, the stuff that I’m passionate about is coming back,” he says. After a quiet 18 months, the thrice-rescheduled run of his latest show – The Time Show – coincides with the release of a book, I Strongly Believe in Incredible Things.

Ania Magliano has had a productive lockdown. “I was not one of those people who was able to take a break,” she says. “You know that meme that was going around where it was like, ‘King Lear was written during the Plague’? I was like, ‘I need to write King Lear!’, which I haven’t done, but I have done a podcast.”

Poppy Hillstead's podcast, which has just entered its third season, is a pretty ingenious take on the form. It consists of real conversations Hillstead has had with anonymous people in chat rooms, re-enacted with the help of fellow comedians. It’s a rare gem in a market dominated by cosy chats between friends.

As comedians continue to improvise through the coronavirus, social media has cemented itself as a lifeline. From the homes they’ve found themselves confined to for months now, comics have managed to distribute the laughs usually found in the comedy clubs closed nationwide through videos on social media.

For a nomadic festival like the Taiwan Film Festival Edinburgh, a move to digital could have resulted in an event untethered to a specific place. But with screenings now happening online, its organisers still hope to be able to present physical screenings to Scottish audiences later in the year.

Conducting an interview with Tarot is a lot like attending one of their shows: disorienting, confusing, hilarious and, if you’re lucky, perhaps there's a hint of truth buried in there somewhere. The tricky part is identifying it.