Opening the first night of his tour with a two-day stint at Norwich Playhouse, Ed Gamble explains his show’s title is influenced by an incident last January when he and three other comics got stranded in New York because of heavy snow.
This setup takes a long time, but doesn’t really go anywhere: we don’t find out much about the trip, what happened, or why it was worthy of remembering – only that it led to him being labelled a “diabetic comic”, a concept he rings dry.
Gamble – or Big Daddy Gamble as he says he wants to be known – is funny and likeable. He interacts easily with the audience, dealing confidently with truck driver Ian who booms out from the back of the room. The room clearly liked him.
His stories of his luckless visit to the Edinburgh Dungeon, his retired dad’s idiosyncratic approach to vet appointments, and the duplicity of a guide dog charity mix easy chuckles with more nuanced clever lines, but overall the show feels a little stretched: for two hours there should be more material, more structure, and more purpose, not just so much pretty white noise.
