Shows (T)
Take The Red Pill
Taking The Piff
Talking To You Is Cheaper Than Therapy
Tara Flynn: Big Noise [Edinburgh 2011]
Tartan Ribbon Comedy Benefit 2011
Terry Alderton [2011]
Test Tube Comedy 2011
They Came With Outer Script
The Thinking Drinker's Guide To Alcohol
Thirty-Seven Ways Of Deceiving You, The Audience, Into Believing I Have Written A New One-Man Show For 2011 Even Though I Probably Haven't, Or Something
This Arthur's Seat belongs To Lionel Richie
This Is Soap [2011]
This Next One Is About Putting Salt In Your Tea
This Show Left Intentionally Blank
Thom Tuck Goes Straight To DVD
Thomas Hardie & Co
Those Two
Three Blokes Tell Jokes
Three Comics to Midnight
The Three Englishmen: Optimists
Three Man Roast
Tiernan Douieb Vs The World
Tiffany Stevenson: Cavewoman
The Tim Bat Trick Show
Tim Clare: How To Be A Leader
Tim Fitzhigham: Gambler
Tim Key: Masterslut
The Tim Vine Chat Show [2011]
A Timetraveller's Guide To Surviving Childhood
To Be Or Not to Be ... Or Whatever it Will Be?
Tobias Persson: Sitting On A Cornflake
Toby: Lucky
Todd Barry: American Hot
Tokyo Game: The Body Tights Man Show
Tom Allen's Afternoon Tea
Tom Bell Begins
Tom Binns as Ian D Montfort: Spirit Comedium
Tom Deacon: Can I Be Honest?
Tom Goodliffe: The Good Liffe
Tom Green: World Comedy Tour
Tom Lenk: Nerdgasm
Tom Price: Say When
Tom Rosenthal: Child Of Privilege
Tom Stade: What Year Was That?
Tom Toal and Joe Wells: Rom-Coms and Revolutions
Tom Webb Fixes 2012
Tomorrow's Stand-Up Today
Tony Law: Go Mr Tony Go!
Tony Littler: Middle Aged Punk Rides Again
Top Secret Comedy Club
Totally Tom
The Tourists
Toybox
Transformer
Trevor Browne: Greaterness
The Truth (Explained In Doodles)
Tweeting Beauty (And Other Stories)
Twenty-Five Things To Do Before You Die
Two Comedians, One Bucket
The Two Wrongies
Twonkeys Castle
Show Details
Totally Tom
Show type: Edinburgh Fringe 2011
Starring Comic:
Totally Tom

Totally Tom


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Description

Were you to mix the friendship of Harry Potter and Ron Weasley and the sexual tension of Harry Potter and Ron Weasley you’d get something close to Totally Tom. Since exploding onto the comedy scene with their youTube hit ‘High renaissance Man’ this young comedy duo have wowed critics and audiences with their live show.

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Reviews

Totally Tom
Live Review

Totally Tom rated 3/5
Totally Tom

Standing out is the most difficult thing for any show on this overcrowded fringe; and gimmick-free sketch shows probably have it the hardest.

That is probably the fate of Totally Tom, a solid, unashamedly posh duo (they both went to Eton at the same time as Prince Harry) with something of the Armstrong & Miller about them. They are a strong couple of performers with some good ideas and funny lines, as well as being charismatic and likeable. In many ways you can see why Channel 4 have awarded them a Comedy Lab in the next series, but they are also just not quite different enough to stand out in a crowded field.

Yet they do strive to be different. The 'gap yah' students with their lazy vowels and weary entitlement have been totes done to death. But the Toms make them gay and give them a coke habit Kerry Katona would envy, and the cliche is sidestepped.

There's a slight over-dependence on comedy accents for laughs, whether it's the raucous Nordic Club Med tour guides, the sternly unforgiving German father pushing his son at the piano, or the high-pitched Glaswegian schemies. But more pressing is the undercurrent of inappropriate sexual advances beneath too many sketches, offering an easy get-out if the script runs out of steam.

Those are the negative points, but there's plenty in the credit side to offset them. There are some bright ideas here, especially the Shakespearean sidekick who struggles for metaphors. Skits often take genuinely unexpected directions, if only for a moment in some cases, to keep things interesting. And some scenes are just plain hilarious without any such gimmicks: embarrassing 'best man' speeches have been a staple of comedy for as long as people have been getting married, but Totally Tom's variation on the old theme is simply very funny indeed.

This is a deft debut from two skilled comedians - Palmer especially has some well-developed physical skills though Stouton is a fine foil. It may take them a few more Edinburghs to get notice, if the Channel 4 pilot doesn’t do it for them, but this is a firm foothold.

Date of live review: Thursday 11th Aug, '11
Review by Steve Bennett
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Related News

C4 announces its Comedy Labs

Shows for Pappy's and Anna & Katy

Channel 4 has announced its line-up for the next series of Comedy Lab pilots.

The roster includes shows from sketch groups Pappy’s, Totally Tom and Anna Crilly and Katy Wix. Wix also features in three of the seven Comedy Showcases C4 announced last week  – the higher-profile strand of comedy pilots.

The shows, which will air this summer, are:

Anna and Katy: From sketch double act Anna Crilly and Katy Wix and featuring guest appearances from Lee Mack, among others. Sketches include the biggest soap opera in Germany, daytime TV show Congratulation! and Eamonn Holmes's game show Pointer. The executive producer is Ash Atalla through his company Roughcut.

Totally Tom: A sketch show, written and performed by Tom Palmer and Tom Stourton, set in a macabre after-dark world of grotesque characters, including a bitchy pair of cocaine-fuelled ‘posh girls', a cop with an over-imaginative sense of drama, a pair of Scottish brothers locked in a cycle of poverty, and an edgy new teen-drama set in the Hitler Youth. The show is made by Baby Cow .

Kabadasses: is a sitcom based around the Asian sport of kabaddi, written by newcomer Nikesh Shukla, directed by Goodness Gracious Me’s Anil Gupta and made by Objective. It’s about Bobby, a slacker who finds himself living back with his disapproving dad. He and his best mate Vin, ‘a thug with a heart’, decide that their best shot at redemption is to set up the world's first all-white English kabaddi, despite not knowing the rules

Mr & Mrs Hotty Hott Hot Show: A comedy game show from sketch group Pappy’s - Matthew Crosby, Tom Parry and Ben Clark –in which anyone in the audience can win if they succeed in obscure games, having weird skills or ‘generally looking a bit odd’. This is the second Comedy Lab from the team, who made a studio-based sketch show in 2008.

The Warm Up Guy stars Tom Davis as Ian Bodkin, a loveable but deluded studio warm-up comedian who thinks he is a superstar in the making. It also features stand-upWill Smith as a rival warm-up, and George Lamb as the host of a new panel show Ian is trying to appear on. Davis wrote the show with James De Frond.

Rick and Peter: Written by Tom Basden, this stars T4‘s Rick Edwards and paraplegic Cast Offs star Peter Mitchell as caricatures of themselves, thrown together after Rick makes a regrettable gag on T4, and is put on a crash course in how to be more politically correct.

Comedy Labs have helped launch the careers of Peter Kay, Russell Brand, Jimmy Carr and Fonejacker

Channel 4’s comedy commissioning editor Nerys Evans said: ‘Comedy labs are an amazing spawning ground for future household names, giving their first TV breaks to a host of exciting new talent, both performers and writers. This year's alumni is a fantastically diverse collection of comedy talent.’

21/07/2011 Permanent link