It’s Ed Gamble! Gone are the days of seeing him at ARG, here are the days of seeing him at the Hippodrome for christ’s sake.
What do you go to an Ed Gamble show for? It’s good, proper, if slightly shouty observational. And he is very good at it, even for the things you have not yourself also directly experienced. There is a lovely routine at the top about the street WhatsApp group chat which captures that nicely.
There’s at least two incidents where I was thinking “oh, that would be a lovely point to call back to that earlier thing” and he didn’t call back to it, but then did something 30 seconds later which was a callback to it. I’d love to know how… deliberate that was? How well considered was the use of the exact hooks for it rather than other potentials?
He’s clearly having fun touring, and enjoying the material, but I do wonder if there’s an increasing disconnect between what he’s doing and what he wants to do.
Chloe Petts, a wonderful comedian who is a friend of Party and so is a friend of mine, does a genuinely smashing job of being the support act - she easily overcomes the obvious trap of “I just want to see Ed Gamble” and unites the audience. It’s a barnstormer.