Curb Your Enthusiasm: Larry David’s award-winning comedy

Pick of the day: Curb Your Enthusiasm, 7.30pm, Box Sets.

Comedian Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm, 7.30pm, Box Sets.

Pick of the day: Curb Your Enthusiasm, 7.30pm, Box Sets.

A week or so ago it was announced that this award-winning comedy series was returning for a ninth season, to the delight of its millions of fans.

Created by and starring Larry David, the series is HBO’s longest running scripted comedy or drama series. Its seasons have been somewhat intermittent since it premiered in 2000, presenting 80 episodes across eight seasons, but in 2011, when season eight finished, the show went into an indefinite hiatus.

A courting ritual occurred at the end of each season between the network and David, with HBO always “cautiously ambitious” that he would do more episodes, the star doubtful.

Now Foxtel’s Box Sets channel airs the entire first season tonight in preparation for his comeback.

Asked why he decided to revive the show, David said: “In the immortal words of Julius Caesar, I left, I did nothing, I returned.”

David, also the writer, co-creator and executive producer of Seinfeld, stars as a fictional version of himself, a bald, abrasive and self-absorbed Hollywood writer whose best efforts in life comically backfire.

The TV Larry is the embodiment of all the things we detest in ourselves. You can’t help but blush as you watch him, seeing yourself.

He preens with self-importance, especially when Seinfeld is mentioned or someone recognises him in the street; he’s stubborn, petulant, ignorant and suspicious. He says or does whatever he thinks.

He’ll use the death of his mother to get out of boring social obligations or get into a shouting match in a public toilet with a man in a wheelchair after using the disabled facility.

As with another comedian, Britain’s Tony Hancock, there is a melancholy air about TV Larry that always follows the desperate buoyancy with which he fills his days. It was Hancock who said great comedy could arise from “frustration, misery, boredom, worry and insomnia”, and all of them are suffered by TV Larry.