There is a particular kind of character who refuses, stubbornly and magnificently, to stay inside the television set where he belongs. Super Hans — the wild-eyed, bass-line-obsessed hedonist of the British comedy Peep Show, which ran from 2003 to 2015 — is precisely that kind of character, and now he has colonised an entirely new medium. Matt King, the actor who played him across all nine series, has written a novel in which his most famous creation discovers a legal loophole in his own marriage certificate, navigates the wreckage of a moped-rental business in Macedonia, and generally continues to inhabit a universe where consequence is optional. King describes the authorial process with the deadpan precision that characterised the show itself: Super Hans, he says, comes around every morning, borrows his computer, and King makes himself scarce.

What makes the novel's existence more extraordinary is the shadow that fell across its writing. In April of this year, King suffered a stroke — a rare variety affecting the lower spinal cord — which left him paralysed for thirty-six hours and unable to recall his ambulance journey or his first day on the ward at Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton. Doctors warned him that a wheelchair, or worse, had been a genuine possibility. He considers himself fortunate, and says so with a lightness that feels hard-won rather than performed.

Cognitively, he acknowledges, he is a different person from who he was before the stroke, though he continues to improve. Roughly a quarter of the book remained unwritten when it happened, and he has noted, with the kind of oblique optimism that Super Hans himself might recognise, that a brain leaping unpredictably between thoughts was not entirely a disadvantage on the final stretch. Whether the character will ever return to screens is, for now, an open question. A Peep Show reunion was hinted at on the last day of filming — "See you in ten years," the creators Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain reportedly told the cast — but the decade passed without a call, perhaps because Armstrong had become rather preoccupied with a small programme called Succession.