In a cruel world where friends can be fickle and enemies can be monstrous and potential tragedy lies around every corner, it's important to have a stronghold of some kind. Some find this peace of mind in knitting, origami or country dancing; I myself have a much treasured collection of comedy DVDs to see me through the dark days – and the cream of the crop is Black Books.

Such is an everyday occurrence in the eponymous Black Books, the bookstore run by Bernard Black (Dylan Moran). Bernard is an alcoholic, a chainsmoker, and a an unruly, abrasive misanthrope who divides his time between reading, verbally abusing customers and having lunch (ie: bottles and bottles of wine) with Fran (Tamsin Greig), his oldest friend who runs the gift shop next door. This first series of the comedy brings Manny (Bill Bailey), a bearded, childlike former accountant, into Bernard's world when he employs him in the shop, and charts the crackpot antics of the trio over six episodes.

The other writer is Dylan Moran himself, whose previous career roles have been as a nihilistic newspaper columnist, a sardonic stand-up comedian and, um, a silver screen actor – 'Rufus the Thief' in Notting Hill. Moran himself claims he is a lazy writer and that what we see of the three main characters on screen is merely the slightest exaggeration of how each behaves in real life. It's hard to imagine Moran urinating into a toilet from a chair in the doorway because he's too engrossed in a book to stand up or entertaining Jehovah's Witnesses in a bid to avoid filling in his tax return, but there are some similarities between art and life in the three protagonists and in him in particular. Bill Bailey and Manny are both goggle-eyed, often bewildered souls with seemingly infinite patience; Tamsin Greig plays the dizzily eccentric and often desperate Fran with all the zeal for men, celeb goss and Chardonnay of a thousand Bridget Joneses; and Dylan Moran's own particular penchant for literature and wordplay finds its way into Bernard's off-the-wall observations.

The DVD itself is a nice enough set-up (especially since we got our copy in the HMV sale ages ago for just £9.99 - check places like Play.com for a cut-price bargain copy). We have the six episodes (with that all-important 'Play All' feature as well as the individual episode and chapter index) of course, plus an unusually entertaining commentary by the three. We have a trailer and a photo gallery, both of which I suppose are fairly pointless but hey, at least they tried. What's best about it is the out-takes reel – absolutely fantastic stuff, which in places is as laugh-out-loud funny as anything in the series and which, like the commentary banter, demonstrates the ease of the working relationship between the three and the fact that even unscripted, they are genuinely funny people.