Review by Corry Shaw

Never has a show with such potential been so irritatingly underdeveloped. Ashley Hames served five years as the presenter of Bravo’s Sin Cities, a late-night look at fetishes, porn and debauchery. With footage and anecdotes of some of the most bizarre practices, an obvious talent for presenting and a natural charm and likeability, this should have been a superb Fringe debut.

Alas Hames is not used to dealing with a live audience, nor is he a comedian, which he is swift to point out in the opening moments, apologising in advance for the lack of jokes. His constant referral to scripts and obvious issues with remembering his place in the tale screams ‘lack of rehearsal’. His distraction and fixation about the fact that there were people watching him leads me to believe that this was never previewed before debuting at Edinburgh. If it had been I’d have hoped that Hames would have realised he was missing two vital components to this project. A writer and a director.

The story is a good one, a young TV runner gets his break as the Live TV News Bunny and then progresses to presenting his own TV show which is pulled after a complaint is upheld by the Ofcom watchdogs, leaving the battered, whipped and burnt reporter out of a job and feeling unjustly treated. He seeks to find redemption by defending the accusations made against him in front of a jury, his audience.

The proof comes in the form of copious amounts of video footage from the debauched but entertaining cable show which led Hanes into the role of TV gimp, pushing his own boundaries of taste and decency to explore the extreme side of the sex industry. Hames shows footage of red wine enemas, piercings, burnings, spankings and even cock candling (I do not know the official term but I hope ‘candling’ paints the picture).

There is enough fodder here for a practised act to produce several Fringe triumphs. But Hames is not a practiced act and he stumbles through his clumsy script, missing the opportunity for jokes time and time again. When he eventually does see the comedy in a situation he hams the punchline up into farcical levels and seems genuinely bemused when it fails to get a laugh.

This is not to say there are no laughs, the extensive sections of footage from Sin Cities raises chuckles, groans, grimaces and applause but the mood is immediately lost as soon as the stuttering monologue recommences.

I have a real hope that Hames seeks help on this show, to lessen his reliance on the video and sharpen the script and delivery. Hames may be a man that has seen it all, but until he finds some direction he will find losing his Fringe cherry a very painful experience.

Review date: 8 Aug 2009
Reviewed by: Corry Shaw