Peacock and Gamble Emergency Broadcast

A chilling portent of this show’s intellectual rigor dawns as soon as you spot the unpleasant (but supposedly unwitting) pun in one of the participants’ names.

Ian Boldsworth has been working under the pseudonym Ray Peacock for several years, sometimes in cahoots with fine comics like Rob Rouse and Andrew Lawrence, and now with Ed Gamble. The duo have garnered quite a following via their regular podcast, also a show at this year’s Fringe, but for their late-night effort they really push the envelope and take shameless mugging and general puerility to bold new depths.

The Emergency Broadcast has a decent conceit—that Peacock and Gamble have been employed by the Fringe as last-minute replacements for any shows that are cancelled—but rather than attempt, say, a Reduced Shakespeare Company-style amalgam of the other offerings on the programme, they put on what is essentially a kids' show, albeit one no kids should ever see.

Their double act is actually fairly traditional—Gamble acting as straight man, Peacock as feral bear-child—and the material chiefly consists of silly games, songs and costumes. Peacock is oddly watchable, in a look-at-that-weirdo sort of way, but any likeability rapidly deteriorates as the material turns from slapstick to stupidly offensive late on. Fat jokes (aimed at themselves) and you’re-a-sexual-deviant jibes (at the audience) are hardly rare, but some casual racism and a sight gag involving contentious ethnic headwear beggars belief. Even the guffawing drunks fall eerily silent.

Peacock and Gable are both big, but they definitely aren’t clever.