Demetriou’s characters are everyday weirdos. From the anxious and selfish to the mundane and familiar, he’s become a masterful observer of Britain’s culture and people, infusing aspects of individuals he’s come across, as well as himself, into every one. “I like playing people with a kind of confident absence - people who are quite comfortable being completely honest in their own feelings,” he says. “Ultimately, it’s a mirror to the fact that I am a lot of the characters.”

The elements of the journey that make up A Whole Lifetime… could easily be viewed as cynical about the human experience. Its cradle-to-grave acts touch on themes like mass hysteria of royalists, toxic masculinity and many men’s experiences of pressures to act like one of The Bigger Boys.

One sketch is simultaneously about an uninvested dad who tries to strangle holier-than-thou parents at a barbecue, and also the relatable notion of lashing out as a result of social rejection (“they're yet to imply that I'm similar to them”). But the special’s message is one of finding humour as a way to cope through the sometimes repetitive, vain, inane aspects of life. It offers a reassuring, knowing glance that no matter what life might bring, there’s always silliness to be found.

As the first UK comedian to land a Netflix sketch special, Demetriou challenges the imagined Atlantic barrier in comedy culture. In recent years, a powerful executive must’ve assumed a baseless theory that the US is a sketch country and the UK is for panel shows – but we’re a nation whose comedy canon is packed with the gloriously silly vignettes of Vic & Bob, Big Train, Monkey Dust, Smack the Pony, Victoria Wood, French & Saunders and, of course, Monty Python.

“There’s a running joke that’s like, ‘have you heard sketch is dead?’” Demetriou says, “but it’s just some short comedy, how can it be dead? Have you been on social media? Ultimately, we live in a time when sketch comedy is free: Tim Robinson, Ellie & Natasia, John Early and Kate Berlant’s new pilot - it’s so brilliant. It's hilarious that an art form might be dead.”

Demetriou has contributed to some of the most influential output of the last few years, with appearances on This Time with Alan Partridge, Fleabag, Fred Armisen and Bill Hader’s Documentary Now, Friday Night Dinner, Toast of London, and The Afterparty alongside Tiffany Haddish and Ilana Glazer. He’s gained blockbuster credits in Cruella, Pinocchio, Paddington 2 and the most anticipated film of 2023: Greta Gerwig’s Barbie.

It feels even more special, then, that given such a major platform, A Whole Lifetime… stays so true to the deep cuts of Demetriou’s comedic DNA. “I feel lucky to be able to create things that feel like an extension of my sensibilities,” he says. When I ask if, a decade down the road, he envisions still having the freedom to put bowls of eggs around his sets (a reference to the magnificently absurd Year Friends and the subtly-placed background props on Stath), he says, “Oh yeah, I do do that quite a lot. Eggs and rice… and water. That’s my Cornetto Trilogy. I think, especially in comedy, that it’s as important to remain surprising as it is to remain true to your sensibilities. If you’re not satisfied unless something feels new, then by definition you’re going to have to change. If you were to boil comedy down, it’s just about surprise really. In order to surprise, you can’t keep filling bowls with eggs.”

Occupying similarly absurd landscapes as Tim Robinson, the special gives those of us who lap up surreal-leaning comedy the indulgence of seeing Demetriou bounce off some of his usual ensemble - a truly exciting, experimental new canon of comedy greats. Ellie White, Al Roberts, Katy Wix, Emma Sidi, Kiell Smith-Bynoe, Jon Pointing, Sian Clifford and Seb Cardinal make memorable appearances, while Demetriou’s sister and collaborator Natasia was filming the next series of What We Do in The Shadows.

“There’s a big part of me that’s feeling relief I’ve been able to make a multi-character thing, which would’ve been the first stepping stone in the comedy boom of around ‘98 to 2006. All those comedians like Sacha Baron Cohen, Julia Davis, Rob Brydon, Steve Coogan and Ricky Gervais - they were all able to flex and say ‘does this character work? I’ll put a sketch show out,’” he explains.

With Stath, Demetriou felt like he was taking a shot in the dark. He tried out a few characters, notably a set of three who were “struggling to be good at life” in his Channel 4 shorts, but didn’t have a platform to workshop to the extent that he did in his new special. “It feels like I’m kind of doing it in the wrong order, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s a massive relief, because I’m hopefully going to do more stuff, so it’s been a useful exercise to ask, ‘Which one works best for me, and does anyone have something that’s an essence I can capture for something else?’”

It’s satisfying to see him develop the painfully self-conscious teenage couple attached to their phones – a progression of Demetriou and Ellie White’s BBC short Pariahs. There are callbacks to the ‘90s VHS aesthetic of Eurosketch (“so dangerous, so funny, so Europe”) and Internet Nails.

At the whimsical heart of Demetriou’s output is the purity and joy of toying with linguistics. It’s the same playful nature that positions his writing next to Chris Morris’ “John Fashanu” bit in The Day Today, and the entirety of David Sedaris’ Me Talk Pretty One Day, as some of comedy’s greatest low-key moments. The charming speech patterns of Stath’s family are often grounded in the borderline poetic idiosyncrasies that come with speaking English as a second language. Cultural touchstones of middle England embellish the sketches, like “pesto pasta with sweet chilli sauce” and a doctor’s reality show lexicon, telling the tiny, flaccid character of Clive on his deathbed that “I just wanted to pull you for a chat.”

Many of Demetriou’s characters are based around his own fears. The South African tech expert, Anthony Clance, represents a pressure to rely on tech. “If I have kids one day, I’m terrified of them feeling like life isn’t nice unless you’re experiencing it through your phone. Every time I go to a restaurant and I see a QR code on the table, I think, ‘What about the guy in the sketch?’”

The character is a lonely grandad whose FOMO is piqued as he’s excluded by his grandchildren while they gossip about social media, which he doesn’t understand how to use. “See? It’s nothing! Cat shit! Who is luton_larry and what is he even doing big style?” yells Clance, giving an aggressive glimpse into the often sad reality of social media via a cameo of Baby Cow exec Rupert Majendie - a frequent bit-parter who also starred as a comatosed Natasia’s arse baby in Year Friends.

“Funnily enough, the actor playing that guy said, after he read the script, ‘I never thought there was a possibility that I shouldn’t be on social media,’” explains Demetriou. “He had only ever been in a position where he was like, ‘How do I get on my phone?’ He said, ‘I was ranting to my friends that we don’t need to be on it!’”

The wizened narrator sets up the grand finale by assuring that “you’ll learn to love the minutiae” of life, and it’s an admirably optimistic message. Demetriou explains that all the foibles that his characters display represent the harmony of existence. “The cacophony is the harmony,” he says.

A colourful, choreographed pastiche of a musical is the final sketch, set in a quaint English town, where characters blurt out humdrum remarks. A man tells a heavily pregnant woman he feels knackered, and Al Roberts makes his awaited cameo, singing about how hilarious it is to be “talking about how pineapple on pizza’s not nice”. “It could be seen as cynical,” explains Demetriou, “but it’s more a celebration of how people are quite comfortable getting stuck into mundanity - like me, even. We’re all just having the same chats and it’s quite nice - it’s comforting and it’s OK.”

Demetriou’s musical influences are utterly intrinsic to his comedy. Through the universal language of silly songs and nostalgic, sleazy-cool ballads, he’s created a world where bursting into song as an emotional release flows naturally and hilariously for his characters.

He once said that he hopes the only thing he has in common with Stath is a love of Euro R&B. “If you juxtapose intensity with idiocy, it feels like you're saying something silly,” he says. In A Whole Lifetime…, the excitement of the upper middle class Suffolk couple celebrating their anniversary incites his stiff-upper-lipped character to unleash a cautiously impassioned, two hands on the kitchen counter, butt-out jump - before serenading his disinterested wife with R&B.

In BBC Three’s Ellie & Natasia, Demetriou’s DJ Big Boy with his luminary “Universal Pussy” is a series highlight, and he sings with his food to avoid real-world problems on the peak-absurd Jarressy. It makes perfect sense that Joe Pelling of the incredible Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared worked with Demetriou on the music for A Whole Lifetime…

“There was a real crossroads in my life, whether it would be music or comedy,” says Demetriou. He has a seriously impressive voice – he used to be a session singer. He ushered in his love of singing ballads after burning out CDs by The Temptations, The Jackson 5 and Stevie Wonder. “I would try and recreate any runs and ad-libs they were doing. I would mimic them all day,” he recalls.

“At school, if you weren’t solely listening to Pure Garage 3, you wouldn’t have mates. I remember homophobic slurs coming my way because I said I liked The Beatles. It was a very weird time to be at school! Around the time I got to being a teenager, I entered indie mode and didn’t leave it for a long, long time.”

“I was in a band when I was in my late teens, doing the circuits of London for two or three years. We were called The Alphabeat… and then Alphabeat came out. At the time, I was singing in a sort of faux-London accent - when bands were all called ‘The’ anything. I felt like deep within me was a desire to sing in a kind of harmonious, more power-ballady voice,” he says. “It’s such a big difference between those two things, it’s kind of picking between irony or sincerity.”

Demetriou cites his decision to go down the road of comedy as being partially due to the The Office boom. “Mostly because I worried about writing about how I actually feel to music,” he explains, “and maybe I’d end up writing ‘Free Love Freeway’... Which was a potential choice for this list.” His failed drama school auditions were a blessing in disguise which also led him down the path he’s on.

He certainly understood the brief for his Nine Songs selections. “I want to preface this by saying I actively dislike some of the songs I picked,” he explains. “Because ‘pivotal’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘love’. I’d say only one of the songs I would list as one of my favourite songs. Everything else is just a significant life turning point.”