HOW will the regulars and guests get on this week as more tall tales are intermingled with 100 per cent correct statements in Would I Lie To You?

That remains to be seen as host Rob Brydon welcomes team captains David Mitchell and Lee Mack, along with guests Dara O Briain, Denise Van Outen, Rhod Gilbert and Vernon Kay.

The six players will dish out absurd facts and plausible lies about themselves, but who’s telling the truth?

Given the fact Mack returns an hour later for Not Going Out, you might think he has some grand plan to take over Friday nights on BBC1.

While that is just a happy coincidence, there is no denying he is giving fellow guest O Briain a run for his money in the ubiquity stakes as the second run of School of Hard Sums also began this week on Dave.

Does rib-tickling get easier as Mack gets older? “It doesn’t get easier, but you have more experience. You get better and obviously if you’re better, your job is easier,”

he says.

“You don’t write a joke and think, ‘If this doesn’t get a laugh it’s the end of my career’. You start realising as the years go on that no one job is going to end your comedy career. And it is very rare that one job makes it as well. It’s not the beall- and-end-all if a joke is bad.” Like Mack, O Briain seems to have mastered the art of winning over a crowd in a short space of time.

For example, he once left many gamers nodding their heads by bemoaning the fact he is rarely able to finish more than 11 per cent of a game such as Gears of War.

Does he think great comedy is about finding such universal truths that touch a chord with the masses? “It can be, or it can be sufficiently emotionally true that even if people don’t know quite what you mean by ‘11 per cent of the game’, they get the idea,” he says.

Fellow guest Rhod Gilbert has a different take on it. “I’ll analyse why something isn’t working and how it can be changed, but I certainly wouldn’t approach it in that way of saying I need to find a universal truth that people recognise,”

he says.

“I just talk about what I want to talk about. If I can make that funny I’ll analyse it and make that funny, and if I can’t, then I get rid of it.”