THERE is a great big gap in British comedy, especially on radio, where the late Jeremy Hardy used to be and this book of his writing and ad libs goes a little way towards filling it.

Its pages are joyful, caustic, daft and provocative  — “I was born on a council estate but once I’d been called Jeremy we had to move” — and the material, edited by his widow Katie Barlow and long-time producer David Tyler, is the kind of tome you can dip into and devour.

Hardy, who died early last year at the age of 57, could be fierce on politics. “Racist journalists ask why we should help asylum-seekers ‘who have done nothing for this country,”' he commented on his long-running radio show Jeremy Hardy Speaks to the Nation.

“Well, give them a chance — they’ve only just got here. A newborn baby’s never lifted a finger for anyone else but you do the spare room up for them.”

Hardy was never unkind — there was honey mixed in with the granite — and he was unafraid. He was an Everyman, exasperated by bullshit.

The right-wing press, he complained, would do a piece on prostitution “and find one sex worker who says she’s glad she was trafficked because... she gets to meet all sorts of people.” He compared that unrepresentative example with “being the one bondage freak in Guantanamo who finds it all very empowering.”

A chapter on death and funerals is poignant but achingly funny: “We scattered my parents last year. We did cremate them first.”

Humanists don’t come out of these pages so well. That’s not surprising, as many of his friends remember the memorial service for his friend, fellow comedian Linda Smith, when a pompous celebrant wanted them to pause and think of their departed pal.

“Thanks for that advice. I was going to take that moment to think of General Franco,” said Hardy, destroying the solemnity.

For a chap often self-deprecating about his own class status, he could be forensic in reprimanding anyone who’d opine that they knew some nurses from middle-class backgrounds:“What have backgrounds got to do with it? When you’re up to your elbows in giblets and poo and pus, it’s probably small consolation that you once rode in a gymkhana.”

Many will remember him from marches, as well as News Quiz and his stunningly tuneless singing on I‘m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, so here’s one for all of us who miss him: “For thousands of years the rallying cry of the Left has been ‘I thought you were bringing the leaflets.’”

Published by Two Roads, £20.