one4review | On 14, Aug 2024

On the face of it, the pitch for this show is both incredibly simple and very appealing. It contains 69 sketches pushed into the normal fringe running time of 60 minutes. This is the fourth time the sketch group Biscuit Barrel have brought this show to the Fringe for a full 26 day run and honestly, I was looking forward to seeing some quick fire sketches from seasoned performers. Unfortunately, I left feeling very disappointed and not a little ripped-off.

I’m going to have to be blunt here. While the performances from the cast are all good – and certainly good enough to do well in this type of show – the level of writing in the sketches is just touching the level of a sketch show produced by first year drama students. And you know what? That’s actually fine, in the correct context. If this was a Free Fringe show by an amdram student society I would have found the entire thing charming. But this is a show with giant posters on Princes’ Street. They have four and five star reviews from Broadway Baby and the Scottish Daily Mail on their flyers. They are charging almost £14 a ticket. One of the performers is a youtuber with literally millions of views on his content. They are clearly not aiming to be or selling themselves as an amateur show and thus do not deserve the leniency they’d be afforded if they were. And in that case, there is only one word to describe the quality of writing in this show – unacceptable.

To get the obvious out of the way, when seeing a show that advertises more than a sketch a minute, you can reasonably expect not all of the sketches to be winners and that’s ok, because you know the next sketch is coming shortly. And to be clear, this show is not without a few funny ideas, well executed. But they are lost in a sea of jokes that don’t land, or are over-explained, or dated, or go on too long or just simply and plainly aren’t funny. I can appreciate that after doing this type of show for literal years, writing dozens and dozens of sketches is no easy feat but it honestly just comes off as lazy, like no workshopping or rewriting was ever done. Which is a shame because, again, the performers are good – really good at points. They have charisma, they seem like genuinely fun people doing their best. But that’s not what people are paying to see.

**
Reviewed by Tom
Gilded Balloon – Patter House – Dram
15.40 (1hr)
Until 26th August