Brian Limond is coping remarkably well with the coronavirus lockdown. “I don’t like going out, so I never really leave the house,” he says over the phone from his Glaswegian abode. “Staying in is fine by me.” It’s a mantra which has come to shape his decade-long career producing some of television’s most irreverent and obscure comedy. Starting out with a series of short-form online sketches filmed largely alone in his house, Limond – aka Limmy – built a cult following hooked on his malleable face, wry observations and pitch-black humour. In 2010 he released the first season of Limmy’s Show on BBC Scotland and introduced recurring characters such as the chronically paranoid stoner Dee Dee, the recovering heroin addict Jacqueline and fantasy gamer Falconhoof. Three seasons on, with three books under his belt – two short story collections and his autobiography, published in 2019 – he is returning to his housebound roots with the first full season of Limmy’s Homemade Show. “It all coincidentally looks like something I’ve filmed since lockdown began because it’s just me and the camera, and if I do go outside, I make sure there’s no one else there,” he says. The result is somehow both inane and profound all at once; a repeated treatise on a kitchen game that involvs throwing a tea bag into a cup, Limond imagining his first day at an office job, a walk through an underpass, all of it underscored with pathos and absurd hilarity. Perhaps this mixture of the mundane and the serious comes from Limond’s writing process. “I just go about the house and see if there’s any ideas around,” he says. “I sit in the living room and look around and think, is there anything interesting here? And then I go to the kitchen and the toilet. If I can think of something funny in there, that’s a good start – I’ll stick with it and see what happens.” Taking observational comedy to its core of simply looking, Limond’s sketches are known for deftly walking the knife’s edge between tragedy and laughter, often incorporating themes of trauma, suicide and violence. “When I’m making something, I prefer it to be darker and maybe that just comes from my experiences growing up in Glasgow,” he says. “I like stuff that isn’t particularly funny, too, just observations we drag out, or making stupid faces and then being serious again.” When it comes to his own tastes, though, Limond is characteristically unpredictable. “There doesn’t always have to be darkness for something to be funny,” he says. “Take Mrs Brown’s Boys – OK, I’m not sitting here waiting for it to come on, but I do like it. People criticise it because it’s straightforward but it’s easy to watch, it’s just people smiling and laughing.” For all his online posturing – building a Twitter fandom loyal to his boilerplate tweets on celebrity deaths, announcing he has met them “at a charity do once and [they] were surprisingly down to earth and very funny” – Limond can be surprisingly earnest. When it comes to writing, “Nothing is off limits in my head,” he says, “But I’m also very aware that I don’t want to cause offence to someone who might have gone through what I’m joking about.” Offence in free speech can be considered like a game, Limond thinks. “It’s like playing Grand Theft Auto, where you’re enjoying doing horrible things to people but it’s just a simulation, it’s just a joke,” he says. “Yet, you’re still mimicking real life and trying to experience what it’s really like, so people can see it as twisted.” Go too far in this game and earnestness and mockery can become inflated, and ultimately you could get “cancelled”. Limond has become something of an arbiter of online cancel culture – where celebrities or members of the public get called out for past wrongdoings – although he sees it as a grey area. “It can be great to hold people to account and make them pay for doing or saying something horrific, whereas before there was fuck all,” he says. “But as much as I like people getting punished for bad things, is it a life sentence for everything? How do we know when people are being genuine and really apologising too? Is there any way for them to redeem themselves?” Parenting his nine-year-old son Daniel, forgiveness and redemption are topics Limond finds himself returning to. “It’s scary with Daniel growing up because when I was 13 or 14, if everyone had a video camera in their pockets, most people would be fucked,” he says. “People would think that since I used to get drunk and get into trouble when I was a kid, that’s all I am for the rest of my life. But people change – I have. We have to remember that we want people to get better, so we can’t just come down on them and not give them a chance to get past their bad behaviour.” Limond describes the teenage years he spent drinking and getting into trouble, on one occasion stealing a car, with disarming honesty in his autobiography, Surprisingly Down to Earth and Very Funny. “I don’t like hiding things. If I can expose the weaknesses in myself, they can’t be uncovered,” he says. “But I didn’t write about my life with the aim of then saying, ‘This is how you can get better’. I just wanted to get it out and it turns out that being open can be a big help in showing people they are not alone.” Does he think he will avoid an online backlash now he has been so frank about his past? “I think I’m all right, but you just don’t know when the day is coming that you get cancelled,” he says, “it’s coming for all of us.” One thing that might help to stave off that impending doom is Limond’s decision to stop writing for the foreseeable future and focus on his other passion instead: trucking. Virtual trucking that is. “Playing games is one of my favourite things to do,” he says, “I want to keep streaming my gaming and chatting to people online for the rest of my life.” Limond is an avid player of Euro Truck Simulator 2, American Truck Simulator and Farming Simulator 19: “These games where you’re not trying to complete anything, you can just drive and yap away to whoever is tuning in.” Again, it’s something that allows him to stay in and stay creative. “I love that you’re not putting on a big show, you just go live and talk about whatever comes to mind,” he says. “That’s my social life.” Limmy’s Homemade Show is on BBC Scotland at 11pm on 10 April and BBC Two at 10.45pm on 12 April