Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

It’s always nice when a comic gets a few miles on them before turning to stand-up, and with three decades as an accountant and a single mum, Samantha Day had certainly built up the relevant life experience before switching into comedy six years ago.

Her new show – her fourth in Edinburgh – is a celebration of British whinging built on a homemade gameshow that can’t really take the weight.

With her blonde dreadlocks, multiple Just Stop Oil badges and West Country drawl, she presents as a bit of a crusty, but quickly shows that she has the classic comedian’s ambivalence towards moral authority as she takes some time at the top of the hour to slag off the Welsh, the French and a few other nationalities. In a tongue-in-cheek way, this show is about patriotism, and what’s more patriotic than unnecessarily trash talking other countries?

Showcasing a sleepy energy on stage and a lot of very timeworn gear about her sexless marriage and dopy husband, she gets intermittent laughs of recognition but struggles to generate a self-sustaining energy in the room.

A lot hangs on the game she’s designed, which tonight pitches men against women. She’s genuinely managed to get the show sponsored by the card game Top Trumps, but as the game unfolds it becomes more and more baffling as to why this is the case. 

Top Trumps is a game where you have cards that hold various properties and stats, and play them against one another. Day’s game is more like a reverse Pointless, where you have to guess what the most popular answer to a given survey prompt will be. Unless I’m missing something, the two have almost no similarity. Not that that’s a complaint about Day’s show exactly, I just wonder if Top Trumps knew what they were signing up for.

In any case, it’s not an especially compelling game. Day asks a question like ‘what do British people find most irritating about their partners?’ someone in the audience shouts out ‘snoring’ and then Day does a short routine about something that annoys her about her husband. If she’s created anything she’s created a mechanism for drunk punters to shout out their own jokes which, predictably, don’t make sense.

There’s certainly nothing mean-spirited about the show, and there’s pleasure to be found in a bit of good natured griping. Over the course of an hour though, it feels misconceived.

Review date: 10 Aug 2025
Reviewed by: Tim Harding
Reviewed at: PBH's Free Fringe @ Voodoo Rooms