From the very beginning Matthew McLean’s A Scottish Podcast has been trying to accommodate two things that are essentially incompatible: horror and some genuinely funny comedy. In the second season, the podcast either relaxes into the comedy or else it commits to it more seriously. If this show had been once flirting wistfully with the horror, it has come to accept that it is really married to the comedy. The show is now flatly a sitcom. With this, it has grown at peace with itself and it has also, or consequently, become quirkier and more innovative.

I would probably scandalise the podcastmakers if I was to compare their show to Last of the Summer Wine. A Scottish Podcast, with its laddism, its sharp ear for Wetherspoons’ banter, its monstrous quantities of swearing and sarcasm, and its inadvisable jokes about drink driving, initially seems to inhabit another country to the cosy teatime humour of a “classic” sitcom. In truth, however, this show quickly acquires the nostalgic feel of one of those old standards.

For one thing, all of its characters are very nice. They are good company and we enjoy spending time with them. Everybody is cheerful and down-to-earth; and everything in the plot will be a muddle and then it will be okay; and this is all so nostalgic because stories of such an honestly pleasant character are seldom made any more.

It helps that A Scottish Podcast has recruited a diverse and talented team of voice actors. Even minor characters are kitted out with distinctive performers; Fiona Thraille, for example, seems to float at large within the story, unattached to any character of consequence, and just lending her voice whenever it helps to brighten things up. As ever, Sarah Golding is the standout contributor as Drunk Helen and in this season the writing puts her to work like a donkey, in trying to exploit as much fun out of her as possible. Despite the strain, neither she nor the single joke about Drunk Helen – i.e. that she is always drunk – ever grows tired.

This show’s good humour naturally flourishes in extremis, so that the very nastiest character, the Glaswegian gangster Bruce Mercer (Karim Kronfli) also sounds the nicest. His crimewave is conducted in the politest and most authoritative BBC English. In Season Two, Bruce is somehow not included in the main plot at all and his presence is largely restricted to a two-minute advert for the podcast’s website. This skit, in which he is phoning his parents, turns out to be a sheer hoot and one of the funniest moments in the season.

The amiability of A Scottish Podcast excuses what in any other story would be mere self-indulgent post-modernism when the cast are sent on holiday into a fantasy scenario for a couple of episodes. It is possible that McLean is so annoyed with this year’s finale to Game of Thrones that he has put the entire production on hold to correct it. Dougie’s (McLean) fantasy novel might be point-blank inept, as his pals tell him, but the joke is that it is still better crafted than “The Bells.” Dougie understands a basic fact that has eluded the makers of GoT, that it is impossible within the logic of medieval art for the Army of the Dead not to win. But this podcast’s characters are so nice that it doesn’t particularly matter whether they are dwelling in the SNP’s Scotland or in an absurd fantasy alternative universe.

Let us bid farewell to A Scottish Podcast as a reviewer, though it’s still haste-ye-back as a listener, because there is no point in chewing over something that is so uncomplicatedly smooth. At the end of Season Two, the show is terminated open-endedly, with its paranormal investigator Lee Power (Robert Cudmore) being apparently kidnapped by aliens. I’m not sure whether this finishes the show – it is continuing to twitch on social media and in a recent Christmas special. It will be interesting to see how they talk their way down from the alien abduction.