An ambitious, eye-watering blend of art, music and comedy, Noel Fielding's Luxury Comedy is just a bit light on laughs.

So what of Noel Fielding's Luxury Comedy? The idiosyncratic Boosh man's new E4 vehicle is certainly divisive, the first episodes of the series drawing praise and confused scorn in roughly equal measure.

Your tolerance for, or enjoyment of, the show will likely depend on how much you enjoy Fielding's rambling solo work and the self-conscious hipstery of his material; all faux-naif, comedy montage tales of animals doing things which would not normally be in their nature, told in the comedian's repertoire of four or five quasi-ironic funny voices. Capes! Badgers! Imagine that!

This is though, as E4 are at pains to point out, the world as Fielding, Dali-loving Duke of Camden, sees it; sometimes explicitly a madcap rendering of his daydreaming and imaginative noodling. You have to watch on those terms.

Happily Fielding's world view seems to be one observed through a kaleidoscope filled with Smarties and thriftshop leather jackets. Luxury Comedy is, regardless of your take on Fielding's Beat poet clash of the surreal with the mundane, like nothing else on TV at the moment, a welcome splash of lurid colour and half-baked ideas followed through to point where unreason has superseded logic.

Notionally a sketch show, conducted by a fictionalised version of Fielding, from a BBC broom-cupboard style central hub, Luxury Comedy blends crinkly animation and live action and sees it's star playing an array of one-shot oddball characters that defy description. A depressive PE-teaching chocolate finger in a Beefeater hat, a auto-delusional, glass-half-full zoo lion called David Lee Roth, the Ghost of a Flea summoned by William Blake to help him celebrate his 100th birthday; it doesn't make a lot more sense in the context of the show. This is more of a ride than a journey, and one with very pretty scenery

Luxury Comedy does look amazing, a glossy synthesis of found art, art-deco and pre-school fridge paintings recalling Fielding's felt tip flourishes over three series of The Mighty Boosh.

It also sounds terrific. The soundtrack provided by Kasabian's Serge Pizzorno is a mix of electro fizz, dumb-glam stomp, and dark Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster motorboogie, and the catchy, lyrical stream of consciousness, musical interludes, as in episodes of The Mighty Boosh, are always welcome.

Looking for antecedents beyond Noel Fielding's own CV, you could point, inevitably, to the sillier end of the Monty Python spectrum, and to Terry Gilliam's cut-and-paste animations from that show. Luxury Comedy also take some cues from Chris Morris' queasy, often disturbing assault on the sketch show format Jam, another bold venture out of the Channel 4 stable.

Morris' show dropped you, bewildered, into the middle of Kafkaesque nightmares, evoking the paranoia of skewed perceptions of malevolent altered states. Fielding's take on this model is similarly untethered and unsettling, but here but Fielding's hallucinations seem sweeter and less overtly nightmarish. The drug of choice is Prozac, rather than Ketamine, say.

Mood-elevating, Everyman upper Prozac is a felicitous choice actually as, beneath the technicolour sunshine finish, there is underlying malaise at play here, a depressive, fitful restlessness in Fielding's goonish, grotesque characters.

Jam often felt like a transliteration of ambient music into comedy, atmospheric and icy. Luxury Comedy has the crack-maddened skronk and honk of jazz. It is wilfully, almost forcedly eccentric, free-form and uncompromising, with long, long tangential sketches, whole episode of chaos even, balanced on a pin head of a throwaway punchline delivered winking to the audience.

Fielding should be applauded, you think, for making a show so distinctive, playful and indulgent, so unapologetically strange and unpalatable. His Luxury Comedy is an absorbing, lavish and fascinating piece of work, but only occasionally funny.

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