After directing the music for Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy Radio Series Live! and starring in the touring show, Philip Pope needs something with fewer bells and whistles.

It is his old friend, straight-talking funny man Rory McGrath, who is the antidote to the complex visual feast of Douglas Adams’ epic.

“Rory, despite his image, is quite a good folky type guitarist and sings as well,” explains Pope, as he outlines why the friends have reunited to rework and add new material to their two-man Edinburgh stint, Bridge Over Troubled Lager, last year.

“I’ve always been involved in music, so between the two of us we do a whole mixture of things.”

The pair first met in the corridors of the BBC radio comedy and light entertainment when Pope was working on the comedy series Radio Active and McGrath was doing Injury Time.

They got together to help create Who Dares Wins for Channel 4, which was one of the early outlets for alternative comedy on television.

“It was innovative,” says Pope. “It was sort of a sketch comedy show but also with an eye on current affairs, a bit like That Was The Week That Was. It felt quite topical.”

Among the skits was one where Christ is handed a cigar while he is on the cross. The aim was to send up the mid-eighties Hamlet ads. Another sketch referred to a possible abuse scandal in government.

“There were rumours of these when we did Who Dares Wins, and we did a sketch which referred to that. We took a roving camera into a toilet where someone had written graffiti on the walls saying who the minister involved in the child sex scandal is, with a slightly obscured name.

“It got us into a lot of trouble,” he admits.

The new show sends up things that made the pair irate in the 2014. There are funny songs written by the duo and a few impressions by Pope, who was formerly the musical director of Spitting Image and the Fast Show and wrote music and theme tunes for Whose Line Is It Anyway? and Through The Keyhole.

“There is lots of new material. We do stuff about the English language, a crossover between classical and heavy metal, a French love song, a Beach Boys style love song about cars, our take on the vote for Scottish independence and our view of social media and reality TV.

“We do take a slightly extreme view on some things. People using Twitter to post the minutiae of their everyday life, for example, because of course most people don’t find what most people write very interesting; we put things under the microscope.”

McGrath’s daughter’s double-act, Twins, will open the show with an hour-long preview of their Edinburgh Fringe debut, which is billed as “an hour of pseudo-animosity, pessimistic-charisma and offbeat charm”.