Ed Gamble

Sometimes it's good to test your prejudices. Imagine the hagiographies that would emerge if you only went to see things that you knew you were going to enjoy. Hal Cruttenden, Paul Sinha and John Robins all confounded my pre-conceived notions of what they would be like, so why not Ed Ģamble? After all, I'd only previously seen him once, and the circumstances had been inauspicious. Last year, he appeared at Latitude in the festival's huge and acoustically unforgiving tent. It's not where I saw him, however. I was out and about, getting supplies from a pop up Co-op, when I noticed a modest crowd building around the Barclays stand. There was Ed Gamble, performing a mini set in front of a Barclaycard livery, regaling a handful of bewildered shoppers with his adventures at the Download Festival. He looked as if a small part of his soul was dying. Much of his current show revolves around what he fears is a genetic predisposition towards middle-class values and sensibilities, yet strangely he didn't mention the day he became a pimp for a high street bank. Maybe the scars still haven't healed.

In any event, before he had the chance to recant his sins, support for the evening was provided by Chloe Petts, who introduced herself as a butch lesbian. There were fun references to Lewis Capaldi, oversized children and vegans, but for the most part her set revolved around her sexuality. Fingering, and toeing, was comprehensively discussed, as was salivating over women footballers, with a special emphasis placed on her blokishness that I found oddly regressive. It was all harmless fun but I do wonder how much mileage a comic can get out of a topic that, in this day and age, is neither thought transgressive, shocking or (dare I say it) very remarkable. Petts is obviously a talented performer - I thought it a pity she defined herself so narrowly.

Ed Gamble would probably define himself a hopeless male, forever messing up and then fessing up to his long-suffering wife. Given his recent meteoric rise it's becoming a stretch that his set revolves around mishap and misunderstanding - sorry, Ed, you're not a failure anymore and it's no good pretending. Nevertheless, his ascendancy is recent. Having come on stage to intro music of a mashed up Lemmy very nearly singing "if you like Ed Gamble, I’ll tell you I’m your man" he explained that after ten years at the Playhouse he was delighted to have finally sold out Norwich's "big room".

You have to wonder how much of his success is due to Taskmaster, the golden egg of a show that gives comics the chance to flex their interpersonal skills. Presumably unscripted, he came across as a thoroughly decent, self-effacing gent on that show, and in the opening moments if the evening we saw that side of him again, amiably chatting to a chap that drove lorry loads of dead chickens, while his partner focused on chemicals. He wisely steered a wide birth when confronted by a work's outing for Child Protection, but wasn't above taking the micky out of a brazen trip to the loo by a brave soul on the front row.

Inspired moments like these aside, Gamble's set was a well-oiled machine, pumping out crowd pleasing, if undemanding, routines on topics as diverse as positivity, bran flakes, neighbourhood what's up groups and vaping. Not everything hit home - one bizarre section posited that men don't complain about IBS because they enjoy having diarrhoea. It's not a sentiment I can go with, nor indeed ever expected to write down, but it’s early in the run. I'll be surprised if it survives as far as the Hackney Empire. It also, ironically, illustrates the template Gamble usually employs so effectively. Whether it's a kitchen equipment crisis, a ill-judged holiday destination or simply owning a cat, he takes small scale disasters his audience can empathise with, and then has them spiral out of control. You're unlikely to learn much, or have your mind changed, but he's the first to admit - and did so on the night - that he doesn’t do that sort of comedy.

It got me thinking about that set at Latitude, and why it didn't work for me. It revolved around heavy metal music and how terrifying fans of the genre are. Whatever you think of heavy rock, if you've been to a gig you'll know the crowd is populated by some of the friendliest, unassuming people on the planet. Ed loves heavy metal, so he knows this too. I don’t think he believed in the routine, and so neither did I, and perhaps that's why it’s no longer in the set. For all his ribald profanity, Gamble is an unusually old fashioned comic, building up mental pictures in the mind of an audience from a grain of truth, who then laugh loudest at situations that, but for the grace of God, go I.