REVIEW: Ed Gamble - Blizzard, The Lights, Andover

RETURNING to Andover after last performing in the foyer of The Lights, Ed Gamble brought his latest tour to the theatre and was upgraded to the main stage.

The middle-class comedian certainly was at the top of his game last Friday and was toe-to-toe with the audience as soon as we took our seats.

Of course, like any comedy show, you did not want to be in the front row, as first Gamble (pictured) spotted a lift engineer and then moved onto a school admin officer, though this did not go down as well he would have liked, with a laborious but funny exchange between the two.

But that was all forgotten when he spotted an audience member wearing a Frosties t-shirt and throughout the night he was the butt of some accidentally risque jokes.

Referring to the tour name, Blizzard, it was coined after a trip to New York with a group of fellow comedians including podcast partner James Acaster ,where Gamble became stranded. He talks about a newspaper report of his trip in which he was described as a “diabetic comedian”. This led to a long riff about the condition, and he found a fellow sufferer in the audience.

But his quips about sponsoring a guide dog puppy for the blind - insisting he had been lied to when just a month after he was sent a picture of a clearly elderly dog - got the audience howling.

Even funnier was his tale of a solo trip to the Edinburgh Dungeons while performing at the Festival Fringe, and his guts to take a photo of his own while holding a fake axe.

The show was topped off with his routine about his retired dad taking in a pet cat. His sensible, former lawyer father has taken, we were told, to emailing the vet as the cat.