This is a punt, but I’d be prepared to bet money that Sam Campbell knows Birdemic: Shock and Terror inside out. Birdemic is, of course, one of the worst movies ever made; a comprehensively inept labour of love about a bird attack, made for pennies over the course of four years. It’s one of those films that is so fascinatingly bad from every angle that it ends up becoming a glorious piece of outsider art. It is the sort of film that Campbell’s new sitcom Make That Movie absolutely worships.

You probably know Campbell from Taskmaster and Last One Laughing, two different entertainment formats that he managed to destroy and rebuild in his image, by respectively performing a genuinely unhinged song about female comedians and dressing up as a giant bird. There is something of the alien about the man. About as far from an everyman as you are likely to find, Campbell’s stock in trade is essentially looking a bit like Paul McCartney would if you froze him in time a millisecond after bopping him on the nose.

Unsurprisingly, Make That Movie is a high-concept mockumentary about film production that does not contain a single identifiable human emotion. There are plenty of other things – CGI snakes, animated feet, a grotesque (if self-explanatory) AI chatbot called Superbreast – but on the whole the show should be taken as a sign that Campbell is only interested in catering to his own absurd whims. There will not be a funnier show made this year.

In Make That Movie, Campbell plays a version of himself who was once a big shot movie director. Now, however – and the reasons are never made fully clear – he spends his time driving around in a van with a giant model film camera on top, helping people in need by making bizarre low-budget productions based on ideas they’ve had.

In the first episode, this means a Da Vinci Code-style thriller about a couple who both change into snakes (but not at the same time, and one of them must always be a snake). In another, a group of pensioners want to make a Lawnmower Man-style cyber-thriller about online scammers, where they all physically enter computers by singing songs and then putting USB cables into their mouths. The animated feet are to cheer up a couple who find themselves trapped in a cave. And so on.

All of which means that the episodes here tend to be quite full. In the space of 23 minutes we need to meet a new character, hear the idea, follow production and then watch the finished product. If there’s any criticism to be had, it’s that the format has to sprint so hard to fit everything in that there’s often not much room to breathe. But perhaps that’s by design.

Make That Movie feels like a show that only Campbell could have made, and possibly only in this country. He’s Australian by birth, so the show sometimes wanders down avenues where he is overtly confused about the culture that surrounds him in England. In one episode he’s thrown by a children’s book character – part Paddington, part Gruffalo – who the nation has arbitrarily chosen to clutch to its heart. Elsewhere he’s visibly baffled by our affinity for films about football hooliganism. When these two subjects intersect, as they inevitably do, it makes for one of the most gleefully inexplicable moments in the whole series.

We are coming out of a decade-long tailspin where television seemed afraid of comedy for the sake of comedy, and tried to justify everything with trauma. Had Make That Movie been attempted a couple of years ago, there is every chance that a development executive would have tried to shoehorn in a subplot where we learn that Campbell only made these films as a way to psychologically dissociate from his abusive childhood.

Thank God that time has passed, because what we’re left with is so ostentatiously silly that it deserves to be paraded around the streets. This show is a celebration, not just of bad films in all their various forms, but of comedy as an artform. It might be wrong to want it to run and run, because nothing will kill this thing faster than lapsing into formula, but hopefully it’s a sign that Campbell and his uncomprehending face will become a fixture on television for many years to come.

• Make That Movie is on Channel 4 in the UK, and HBO Max in Australia