Peacock and Gamble Don't Even Want To Be On Telly Anyway

If there is a genre of TV Ray Peacock and Ed Gamble are destined for, it’s children’s television. The best skits of Peacock and Gamble Don’t Even Want To Be On Telly Anyway are those involving toys. Muppets masquerading as Apprentice candidates, a duck wrongly blamed for domestic disasters and a snowman who raps Vanilla Ice songs when an ‘Audience Lull’ siren blares all show small-screen promise. Peacock and Gamble do not.

The pair have been producing a popular podcast since 2009. Though their second Fringe show is more tightly structured than these rambling radio affairs, few of its gags would you actually download to keep. Among them, the oddly pleasing compound “slut-vulture” and the degeneration of a list of facts into a slow-jammed ‘Partridge In A Pear Tree.’

Mostly, it's exhausting to watch the eternal Beckettian conflict between the two. Straight-man Gamble unflaggingly curates and controls the asinine antics of Peacock; the pun in whose name sets the tone for his crassness. Like actual Beckett characters, they could well be performing from empty bins.

The show’s defensive premise produces a repetitive attack on the same target; Peacock and Gamble’s self-consciously petulant desire to be on TV. This isn't helped by their frantically-paced sketches and breakneck banter sessions. Miranda Hart casually eating a banana in a mock Skype interview is the only performer who takes the time to fully engage the audience. She emits more charisma in her brief pre-recorded cameo than the starring pair combined.