Puppet, highly strung

"He was the kind of guy that if you talked to him for five minutes, you felt like you knew him for 50 years," Carrey says. "I would watch him performing and holding court in the living room; this was before I even understood what a joke was but I saw the connection.

"I saw the connection between my father and whoever was in the house and they invariably always left holding their bellies and going, 'Percy, you missed your calling, you missed your calling'," Carrey says.

The series takes place behind the scenes of the television flagship of the family's television production company, the public television kids show Mr Pickles' Puppet Time.

It also stars Frank Langella as Sebastian, Jeff's father (and the show's executive producer), Judy Greer as Jill, Jeff's estranged wife, and Catherine Keener as Didi, who makes the show's iconic puppets.

In a sense Kidding borrows from two iconic American children's TV shows, Mr Rogers' Neighbourhood and Sesame Street. As we enter this world, Jeff's fragility is palpable.

"I think there's a real concern for his stability and a sense of preserving 30 years of somebody," the show's executive producer David Holstein says. "And when something like this happens to them, how does that person struggle with maintaining who they are when everything around them has changed?"

Carrey chimes in: "They've created an identity through this show, the family identity [and] the fact is, any changes freak people out when they've got something successful that they've been doing. There's a change in the make-up, somehow [in] the chemistry of the show.

"What happens is so challenging that I would think that everyone would assume that there will be a nervous breakdown," Carrey adds.

"And it might not even be that. It might be them who is having a nervous breakdown. We're going to be on a journey to find out that everyone is going through the same change and they're being forced to by circumstances."

When we meet him, Holstein says, Mr Pickles is a morally certain man set adrift in a sea of turbulent emotion.

"It wasn't about crafting an arc about someone having a nervous breakdown or a psycho Mr Rogers, it was about finding someone who, in an age of darkness that we currently live in, with lies and bullying and darkness and all that, doesn't curse, who doesn't lie, who just wants to be good and to stay good against the struggle of everything around him," Holstein says. "[That] felt more of what would give us a trajectory.

"But if you take that and apply it to someone with the moral calibre of Mr Rogers, maybe, just maybe, you could empathise with that person."

Perhaps not quite by design, Jeff Pickles is a dark reflection of another of Carrey's best known creations, Truman Burbank, the hand-reared reality TV star of the 1988 film The Truman Show.

"I think the idea of identity, the search for identity, what it is, who we are, what's an authentic person is a theme that's always been attractive to me," Carrey says.

"And I think there's definitely something in this piece that calls me as far as the idea of being hit by a freight train in life and trying to hang on to the idea of yourself that you had before it happened that's really attractive. That's an incredible concept to me."

The project also reunites Carrey with Michel Gondry, who directed him in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

"He, for me, was the lynchpin," says Carrey. "I was incredibly interested in the material, but when Michel came on board, I thought, I get to go play with a teammate, and that's really wonderful. So it was a thrill.

"You learn to trust somebody and that has a lot to do with it,' Carrey adds.

"There were many times on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind where I said, 'It doesn't make any sense at all to me'. And he said, 'Well, why don't you try? How do you know? How do you know what's in my head?' And it was great that way."

Carrey credits Gondry as "really, truly the maestro. He's the person that is charged with the whole of the purpose and the piece and the way it's executed. And an actor has to try to keep themselves in the reality of every moment; it's just a different focus. He has to do that too but it's an incredible job to have to mastermind all of it."

He also credits Gondry with giving him permission to be himself.

"Being a comic and just the type of personality I am, a dinner for me, it's a lovely time to spend with friends and family and whoever you are hanging out with, but there's always a thing going on of, like, I have just seen the elephant in the room, I know what it is now," Carrey says.

"I know what's in everybody's mind this very moment and I can galvanise it in some sort of joke or some sort of line," Carrey adds. "I can make the toast that no one else is going to make, but it's a bit like being a cliff diver, you have that moment and it's presented to you, and you're either going to say something or you aren't."

That moment, he adds, comes invariably once a day. "Basically that's where I live," he says. "It's either people are really going to admire what I just said or I'm done."

WHAT Kidding

WHEN On Stan