Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Last year’s Sketch-Off winners James Trickey and Ted Milligan, aka Burger And A Pint, have gone their separate ways for now and are both bringing solo debuts to the Fringe. 

Milligan, the floppy-haired blond one with golden retriever energy, has come up with a pretty good premise for his. Taking inspiration from the ongoing rash of Netflix sports documentaries, as well as from character-based narrative sketch acts such as Max & Ivan, this show documents a season in the lower leagues for Crubchester United, a team from some indeterminately located town that fell into economic depression after the collapse of the cash register industry. Which origin story, by the way, explains the script’s unrewarding running gag about cash being better than card.

Milligan’s approach is uneven and conceptually a little wobbly – what begins as a streaming documentary in which he provides the talking heads eventually morphs into more of a Ted Talk as the video material runs out and he has to take over as narrator. 

There’s also a huge number of characters to remember, and while they have broadly distinctive voices, more work could have been done on differentiating their mannerisms or appearances. In terms of creating these presences and bringing them to life, Milligan is no Peter Sellers, but it just about hangs together.

With all that being said, it certainly has enough going for it to be worth the trip, primarily a script that throws out a new gag with every line. Not all of them land, sure, but you love to see attention like this being paid to make every corner of a show spick and span. 

Given the overwhelming number of characters, he’s gone to some lengths to ensure that they all have some kind of comedy hook to hang their hat on. The southern dandy deputy business manager serves absolutely no purpose in the plot, but he’s at least got a voice and a fun gimmick of dispensing gnomic anecdotes in place of business advice. 

Generally, the fewer miles a character has on them, the more effectively Milligan is able to embody them: his posh nepo baby DJ character is superbly observed with some cracking lines, as is his naïve teenage prospect, but the elderly pub owner feels like a kid playing dress-up as an old man (but without the costume).

It's nice to see something unabashedly silly and cheerful in tone, even if Milligan never quite finds a way to imbue his underdog tale with real stakes or narrative intrigue. Instead, to provide pace, each football match montage is accompanied by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score for Challengers, which frankly I’ll take over a compelling story any day.

• Chortle’s coverage of sketch and multi-character acts at the Edinburgh Fringe is supported by (but not influenced by) the Seven Dials Playhouse, which is launching a sketch comedy collective in the autumn.

Review date: 1 Aug 2025
Reviewed by: Tim Harding
Reviewed at: Pleasance Courtyard