Ben Bailey Smith, AKA Doc Brown, is a rapper, comedian, actor, screenwriter, and younger sibling of Zadie Smith. He began his career in 2000, competing in London rap battles and hosting an open mic platform at his friend’s record shop, where he was spotted by Mark Ronson. He started releasing solo material and after competing in a comedy competition he launched his career in standup, performing all over the UK and touring with Ricky Gervais. He then moved on to acting, starring in Law & Order: UK, The Inbetweeners and Derek, and co-writing CBBC’s 4 O’Clock Club. His standup tour The Weird Way Round starts on Thursday. docbrown.co.uk

1 | Film
Slow West

This is a brilliantly simple tale about a bounty hunter chasing what he thinks is a huge reward and a kid chasing what he thinks is love. When they both realise they’re chasing the same person, an unlikely friendship arises. It’s so tight, there’s no flab on it at all; just 88 minutes of crystal-clear storytelling, which, when you watch this you realise, is seriously lacking from most other movies today. It’s got a bit of everything and does it really quietly and intelligently, without any bluster or showboating, and with no scenes that don’t need to be there.

2 | Book
The Axeman’s Jazz by Ray Celestin

Living in mixed-race London, I was always drawn to New Orleans, more as a concept than anything else. There’s the music and culture obviously, but beyond that it’s the spiritual birthplace of the fight against slavery. It’s got this incredible history and mixture of races, everyone living cheek by jowl, white, black and Creole. This book combines the true story of a serial killer who plagued downtown New Orleans for a few years and reimagines the story with facts and fiction. One of the characters who gets caught up in investigating is a young Louis Armstrong. Celestin includes so many facts about Louis and his life to make it as realistic as possible, and yet manages to pack in plenty of action, dark humour and mystery.

3 | TV
People Just Do Nothing

It’s hard to express how brilliant I think this series is, [a mockumenatry set in Brentford]. It has been underrated massively, possibly because it appears on the surface to be some kind of chavvy, lowest-common-denominator comedy for kids. Watch one episode and you realise what you’re actually watching is the closest reinvigoration of what The Office brought to comedy in 2001. It’s brilliantly written. The characters are so believable and yet so absurd, and that’s a really difficult tightrope to walk from a creative writing point of view. It’s strange, it’s different, the timing is not like anything else out there and it really believes in itself. In the future people will realise just how important a show it was.

4 | Album
The Waters by Mick Jenkins

The Waters is an album that celebrates water in various different shapes and forms and from various different angles. It sounds high-concept and annoying, but really isn’t. You realise when Mick Jenkins gets deeper into his own stories that he has that hard-edge, street side to him as well. It’s a brilliant combination of high intelligence and street aggression, mixed with this beautiful idea that there’s nothing more important than water. It’s actually almost like an essay, in the realm of Wordsworth or Coleridge when they get carried away with the beauty of nature and you see that love in their writing. There’s something of that in this.

5 | Documentary
The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst, directed by Andrew Jarecki

I’ve not had a viewing experience as lingering as The Jinx. The story begins with Durst arrested on suspicion of murdering his neighbour and, as the case begins to develop, you realise he has links to a number of murders, spanning potentially 30 years. It’s an incredible story, stranger than fiction, and the most riveting six hours of television I think I’ve ever seen. In terms of pure, old-fashioned, dramatic storytelling within a documentary format, it’s very hard to rival. It makes you think about parenthood, and what you hand down to your kids through your mistakes or behaviour. That’s where the name of the series comes from. Robert said he didn’t want to have children because he didn’t want to be a jinx.

6 | Comedy
Rhys James

Rhys is well known for being the funniest man on Twitter, but that sells short the fact that he is a frighteningly good standup comedian, at a frighteningly young age. He’s just genuinely in his own little category. He doesn’t sound like other standups, he doesn’t have the same cliched delivery. He’s a guy who just doesn’t get involved in the ins and outs of how you’re supposed to do standup. He just gets on with it his way, unafraid. I think he could be really huge.

7 | Podcast
Kermode and Mayo: Wittertainment

There’s just something about these two curmudgeons bickering with each other over the silliest of things, while simultaneously delivering mostly faultless critiques of the movie world. Mark Kermode seems to nail it in terms of films I would want to see and is obviously an intensely intelligent man as well. They work so well together because Mayo is the man of the people, and he will undercut Mark whenever it goes too far into the mise-en-scène world of film. As with all the best podcasts, it has created a cult following and I am an absolute card-carrying member of their church of Wittertainment.

Doc Brown’s Weird Way Round tour starts on Thursday and his album Empty Threats is available on docbrown.co.uk