Nish Kumar and Ed Gamble on their new escape-room show The Way Out

Nish Kumar and Ed Gamble – long-time friends who have known each other since being at Durham university together – are the team captains in the new escape room-based show, The Way Out, hosted by Mel Giedroyc and starting on U&Dave next week. Here they talk about the show, their teammates, and how they both get ‘stress gas’…

Tell us about who you chose as your teammates 

Ed: We've got pretty crack teams haven't we? I have personally selected Chloe Petts - they are one of my favourite comedians and dearest friends - and very good at escape rooms! They’re escape room partner to myself on a regular basis. I also chose Lou Sanders - amazing comedian, dear friend of mine. What will Lou be like in escape rooms? Well, we sort of know, but it's going to be a disaster. 

Nish: Lou's going to be putting the Lou into the phrase loose cannon! As for my team, I've selected my life partner, Amy Annette - stand-up comedian, and crucially she lives with me. And our friend David O’Doherty, who we also occasionally have lived with in the past. So, I've not ventured very far out of my house.

 Ed: I feel like when David gets in there, they're gonna have to change the phrase ‘bull in a China shop’ to ‘David O’Doherty in an escape room’. 

Nish: He has repeated the phrase ‘what is an escape room’ a few times. 

Which escape room are you most excited about taking part in? 

Ed: Probably the art heist ‘cause I've always wanted to be a robber, but morality wise, I can't quite bring myself to do it properly. So, this will be a lovely roleplaying thing of finally being a heist mobster. 

Nish: And I like the phrase ‘fart heist’.

Do you feel more pressure knowing that it's a race against each other's teams? 

Ed: Definitely. I’ve done an escape room with Nish before, he did not care for it, and he wasn't very good at it. So, if we lose to Nish, I feel like I'm gonna have to retire from escape rooms and indeed life. 

Nish: I'm excited to show everyone what I've got - and what I've got is a big brain, and a couple of big, round cojones - I'm smart and I'm brave. 

Ed: And Nish will also be showing the top of his bum, repeatedly. 

Can you tell us a bit about the strengths and weaknesses of each of your team members? 

Ed: Ok, Chloe Petts… they're a brilliant escape room player, they’re a good leader, even though I'm the captain, they don't need stuff delegating, they'll just get on with it. They're a good problem-solver too. The weakness might be that we're both quite eager to do the escape room properly. So, there might be some butting heads.

Then Lou Sanders is a free spirit, so the weakness might be that she doesn't really care about getting out of the room, she just wants to enjoy herself, so we'll see how that goes. But her strength is fresh pair of eyes who doesn't normally do escape rooms so maybe won't be too set in our ways like me and Chloe are. Perhaps we'll even get out quicker because we have the Tasmanian devil known as Lou Sanders. 

Nish: Amy Annette’s strengths are escape room experience and critical thinking. Weaknesses are that she’s scared of mice and she’s gluten intolerant. David O’Doherty... weaknesses are easily distracted, frequently messes around with one of his friends. Strength is jazz!

 Ed: The problem with Nish’s team is that one member of his team, he's gonna want to kiss all of the time… and Amy might see.

Nish: Yeah, get ready to see me and David O’Doherty bang.

Nish, what’s it like having Amy as your teammate?

Nish: Amy Annette is my escape room teammate in escape rooms and also in the escape room of life. And what is life if not an escape room? And by escape, I mean one day we're all gonna die… I wonder if this will be a real consolidation of our relationship or if we're gonna have a Kramer versus Kramer situation on our hands… Kumar versus Kumar. 

What do you think of each other's teams? 

 Ed: I think we've actually got quite evenly balanced teams… we've both got a loose cannon in David and Lou. We've both got a very good escape room player in Amy and Chloe and then Ed and Nish are cool. We're the cool guys. 

Nish: Anybody got a cigarette? I wanna smoke it while listening to rock and roll. Anybody got some cocaine?

What happened in the first escape room – Gone Fishing? 

Nish: I was upside down at one point. Didn't know what was going on. David was covered in lubricant, there seemed to be quite a lot of lubricant left about the place. 

Ed: That's because we did it first. 

Nish: Yeah, clearly Lou and Ed left lube everywhere. Lube Sanders really oiled up the place and David couldn't stand up, I was upside down, it wasn't our finest hour. It wasn't our lowest point, but that's only because none of you know that David and I have separately soiled ourselves as adults. 

Ed: There’s a lot of talk about me being quite angry and stroppy during it. I actually don't think I was… That was me being quite fun, I thought, so I dunno how it's gonna come across on the screen. 

Nish: Also, as soon as we got into the room, I farted. 

Ed: And I burped, it turns out I have stress burps. 

Nish: We got the stress gas. 

Ed: Have that as a headline in your press. 

If you guys could design your own escape room, what would it look like? 

Ed: I've often thought about designing my own escape room. This is a serious answer, there's no jokes here. You go in, they welcome you into the reception of the escape room area - it looks like any other escape room reception. You sit down, they come out to introduce it and they go, ‘we are really sorry, it's actually not gonna work today because a lot of the things are broken in there’ and then they’re like ‘just wait here and we're gonna go and get you a refund voucher’. They leave, all the doors lock and that's the escape room. 

Nish: Wow. That’s showmanship! 

Ed: Or, the other one I have is - you start doing an escape room, which just looks like a detective-style one, the fire alarm goes off, they clear you out into a stairwell and you're like, okay, what's happening here? Then all the doors lock and that's the real escape room! Then, water starts filling up from the bottom and you've gotta get out before the water drowns you, 

Nish: The first one I'm on board with. And in fact, the theatre of the second one, I'm on board with. I think the end of that one feels a bit Guantanamo. 

Ed: It never does drown you. Actually, Guantanamo is a good theme! 

Nish: A lot of people trying to escape that room to be absolutely fair. My ideal escape room, we get a small box and we put Nigel Farage in it, and we just lock the box and that's the end of the escape room. And the UK escapes him being our prime minister. That's my idea for an escape room. We'll give him food, but just he can't leave the box. 

How did you two meet? 

Ed: Nish and I have been friends since university. We met in the year 2005. Probably fast friends since 2006. So, we've known each other for 20 years. 

Nish: We were in sketch group together. We did student sketch comedy because we were really trying not to lose our virginities. And we didn't for ages so the joke’s on everyone. Then we did shows at the Edinburgh Fringe and we've lived together as well. 

Ed: Nish was the best man at my wedding. We’re great buddies so to be clashing head to head…

 Nish: We're not normally on the opposite side like this - it's quite tense. 

Ed: It's like a Marvel film

Nish: Captain America Civil War! 

Can you guys describe your friendship to us?

Ed: We’re just great buds. We're the ‘one more’ brothers. 

Nish: Yeah, that's actually true - that's what our friend Tom calls us. 

Ed: Basically, don't come out for a drink with me and Nish unless you're happy with having one more. 

Nish: He always says ‘there is an extra hour that you two have on every night out’. This was actually when we were at university. It was ‘an extra hour on every one of our nights out because you two decide you're gonna have one more.’ … The great thing about one more, is that it’s actually three more. 

Ed: And then it's one more. 

Who's more competitive? 

Nish: Ooh, ooh, ooh. me!

 Ed: I'm definitely more competitive, Nish is just having fun but I’m genuinely more competitive

Nish: Yeah, he is. I don't have the attention span to fully see through a full competition so I’m competitive for about two thirds of the way and then I start thinking about what I'm gonna eat for dinner. 

How is this competition going to affect your friendship?

Nish: I’t’s probably going to have negligible impact. If anything, it’s enhancing our friendship because we’re getting paid to hang out.

Ed: Yeah, we're just hanging out. And you know what, it's a pleasure to watch Nish work. 

Nish: And it's a pleasure to watch Ed manage his emotions, especially around Lou Sanders in an escape room. 

Ed: Manage them poorly... 

Can you describe your approaches to being team captains? 

Ed: I'm running my team with an iron fist. 

Nish: I'm running my team with a jelly fist. It's going everywhere. No one's paying attention to anything. It's carnage. 

You’ve curated your own teams. How did you select your teammates? 

Nish: ‘Amy, wanna come Belgium and do an escape room show… Get O’Doherty on the blower’ - done. 

Ed: I was obviously gonna pick Chloe… Chloe supported me on two national tours, and we've done a lot of escape rooms together while on tour - along with our tour manager, Paul Brown. So, we got Lou Sanders who I just thought would be a laugh because I like hanging out with Lou. Sort of not thinking about the fact that she's chaos. 

Did you want anyone who was on the other team? 

Ed: If I had to recruit someone from the other team, it would be Amy Annette. She is fantastic in escape rooms. Also, a calming presence but also an incisive and clever presence. 

Nish: If I had to recruit someone for the other team, it'd probably be Ed and I'd replace myself.

Why do you think that escape rooms are so popular? 

Nish: I think as we move into an increasingly fragmented online world, there is more of a market for live experience stuff. Right? People are going to gigs, people are coming out to watch comedy shows and also people want to do socialised things that are not just getting hammered at the pub basically. There’s a renewed emphasis on group activities that don't just revolve around drinking. 

Ed: Also, it's real-ass nerd shit. It's proper nerd stuff. 

Nish: But in my experience, you can go to an escape room and then get hammered afterwards. Actually, in my experience, you can get hammered and then go to the escape room. But in that experience a lot of your friends will say, ‘why do you stink of liquor.’ 

What did you guys learn about yourselves during this experience? 

Ed: I learned that everything bad I've ever thought about myself is true. 

Nish: Well, that's the difference between us 'cause I already knew everything bad I think about myself is true. I learned that if I'm shaken too violently, I will immediately guff. 

Ed: I knew that.

• The Way Out will be on U and U&Dave from May 12.

Published: 5 May 2026