Chris Rock was paid $20 million for his 70-minute Netflix special, so by my reckoning his riff on whether or not the royal family are racist must have made him more than a million quid. Was it worth the money? Well, I enjoyed it but I’m not sure how well it will translate here, in precis, with all the swearing removed.

Rock begins by pointing up the absurdity of Meghan Markle (winner of the ‘lightskin lottery’, he says) complaining to Oprah: ‘I didn’t know how racist they were.’ ‘It’s the royal family!’ expostulates Rock. ‘They’re the OGs [Original Gangstas] of racism. They’re the Sugarnill Gang of racism.’ (The 1980s cultural references give you an idea of the age of Rock’s mostly black audience at the live recording in Baltimore.)

He then goes on to point out what nonsense it is for Markle to have taken offence when her in-laws speculated on the skin colour of her offspring. ‘That’s not racist. Because even black people wanna know how brown the baby gonna be.’ This is plain common sense and also the essence of lucrative comedy: you state the bleeding obvious but in such a way as to make out you are voicing daring home truths that no one, until now, has had the outrageous courage to venture.

I personally don’t begrudge Rock the gazillions he earns from this shtick. But as with fellow masters of the art – Ricky Gervais, Dave Chappelle – you cannot help but think: what a gloriously easy way to earn a living! You just walk out on to a stage, on a cloud of audience approbation, and feed on their belief that whatever comes out of your mouth, even though it’s exactly what they say and think themselves all the time, is the funniest, wittiest most insightful thing on Earth.

My favourite bit is his assault on the bane of modern capitalism, environmental and social governance (ESG). He doesn’t actually mention those initials, but he nails the problem perfectly when he laments the proliferation of manufacturers that ‘don’t tell you about the product any more, they just tell you about the charity work they do’.

This leads him into a glorious riff about ‘hundred-dollar yoga pants’. ‘I don’t need your politics,’ he tells the $100 yoga pants. ‘Just tell me how you work on ball sweat.’ He then gets his audience to agree that, given the choice, they would all much prefer to spend just $20 on their yoga pants – and that they’d still do so even if they were racist yoga pants that squelched out the N-word every step they took…Well, it’s the way he tells them, clearly – which is why he earns $250,000 a minute and I don’t, quite, unfortunately.

Still, if you want to make serious money, you don’t want the gift of the gab like Rock, you need to be a socially maladjusted geek like Daniel Ek, the programmer currently worth in excess of $2 billion having developed the streaming service Spotify. The Playlist sets up his story as a classic underdog revenge fantasy come true. It begins with Ek being rejected by Google because he has no academic qualifications. By the end, he has transformed the business model of the music industry, revolutionised the way we listen to music, and owns the first of many Ferraris.

But the story would pall pretty quickly if that were all there is to it. What makes The Playlist so much more involving than the usual tech hagiography is that it explores the Spotify saga from six different perspectives, not all favourable – from the in-house lawyer who finally worked out how to monetise the app and the Sony Sweden music exec, Per Sundin, who was initially fiercely resistant to the concept of ‘free’ music, to the long-haired entrepreneur who gambled everything to back the demanding, uncompromising Ek, and the idealistic programmer who felt that Spotify betrayed its original vision by selling out to The Man.

Mount Everest is littered with the dead bodies of the one in seven climbers who never make it back from the infamous death zone. One of them belongs to the brother of Made in Chelsea star Spencer Matthews. In 1999, Michael Matthews became the youngest Englishman to reach the summit but he died on the way down aged just 22. Finding Michael is a documentary on Disney+ about Spencer’s expedition to try to find and retrieve the body. It is by turns exhilarating, moving and macabre. Among the many problems of removing corpses from such altitude (where it’s too dangerous for helicopters, and all but impossible to survive without oxygen), you learn, is that they get frozen to almost three times their normal weight. If climbing Everest is on your bucket list, it probably won’t be once you’ve watched this.