ED GAMBLE – BLIZZARD

A review by Tanya Howard

Ed Gamble, who you may recognise from comedy panel shows like Mock The Week, is currently touring the UK with his latest hour-long stand-up show Blizzard.

After getting stranded in New York with three fellow comics due to bad weather, a trip which made the news, Ed aptly named the show Blizzard. Despite Ed himself declaring this was a news worthy story the four of them were quite excited to have been reported now only by Chortle but also the BBC, that was until he read both stories.

Ed thought he would score with the title piece on Chortle, a site that love a pun in their titles, what with the surname Gamble but was instead robbed by the use of Robins Can’t Fly, which is not scientifically try because they can. As Ed announces to us in a rather angry manner, as stays his mood throughout most of the show, but this just made me laugh even more.

Scooped out of the Chortle title he could at least fall back onto the fact he’d made it onto the BBC website or did. In the “Who Are They?” blurb Ed was listed as a diabetic comedian, making it sounds as if he does sketches on the life of a diabetic and jokes about insulin, which is not a thing thankfully as Ed tells us about the ridiculousness he has encountered when people observe the action, he takes to keep himself alive. Like the time a stranger confused a blood sugar monitor with a mobile phone, because you’d obviously need a blood sacrifice to send a text.

Ed loves interacting with the audience and after a quick one or two liners and a bit of teasing he uses it to slide into his next routine. However, our audience seemed to be up for quite the conversation at times, but Ed went with the flow and still managed to bring it back on topic despite us finding out the family history of father and son Gary and Pete who have both worked in Sainsburys but not at the same time.

Talking of father and son Ed has a unique relationship with his own father who was given the job of selecting the middle names of his two eldest before being banned by the time the youngest brother came along. Whilst Ed may say that his full name is just Edward Gamble, it’s actually Edward Stephenson Gamble, yes, his Dad chose a surname as his middle name.

However, it wasn’t Ed that got the shortest straw in that situation because his sister, Katherine Gamble, was saddled with the middle name of Montgomery. Named after a war hero that his Dad had been reading the autobiography of just before she was born. Strangely enough this was the point that the ban came into play, but this is not the strangest story that he told us in regards to his Dad.

Upon his retirement he decided that he was going to get a cat despite having never shown any interest in animals prior to this point. To the outside world he told everyone that he hated the cat but after a conversation with his sister Ed found that his Dad has registered the cat with the vet and had started emailing the surgery as the cat and closed the show reading the email chain between said cat and the vets.

Ed comes across as a very angry but passionate comedian and the way he showcases his joke really entertained me. The audience was in hysterics for pretty much the entire routine, although I sadly ended up just two seats away from one of those over the top laughers who clap away at random points that make no sense.

You could literally sense the jubilant and entertained feeling amongst the audience as we left the venue to the sound of Mary Poppins A Spoonful of Sugar, bit of diabetic comedy for us all.