Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

There will be no issues with advertising standards for Rory Cargill On TV! - we spend as much time watching him on screen as we do in the flesh. Or at least trying to, some seats (mine included) have terrible sightlines for the elaborate wall of LEDs.

While a necessary evil to cover costume changes, to have so many pre-recorded seems a waste of a theatrical experience. We could watch comedy sketches on video at home – with the added advantage of being able to swipe past the ones we don't like.

This show is presented as a retrospective of TV history through the career of Beau Crème, a character with a Noel Edmonds beard, Noel Edmonds Paisley shirt, Noel Edmonds vocal style, and Noel Edmonds belief in cosmic woo-woo. Who it’s based on is never revealed…

He was the sparkly suited presenter of a game show called Crème Delight, with incomprehensible rules that leave the audience member standing baffled as Cargill dances manically around him. It’s irritatingly overdone – how apt that a character called Crème milks every gag relentlessly.

This is followed by a sluggish parody of Blue Peter called Red Paul - the title shows the level of invention that's gone into this. Cargill’s joke is 1970s TV predicting the futuristic lifestyle everybody will be living in 2010 – where are our shiny space vests? –  and the wheels coming off a live broadcast. As with everything it’s executed with overblown mugging rather than anything more nuanced.

Unfunny double acts of the era have been mocked plenty of times and Cargill's version, Pots and Pans, demonstrates how unfunny they were by being very unfunny in another overlong scene. The corny recreations eventually yield to a nice bit of surrealism and then an astute parody of 1980s TV trying to ride an urban vibe – a rare diversion into something genuinely unexpected, then satirical. 

His parody of Celebrity Big Brother, called Celebrity Animal Farm, to give Crème a hoped-for late-career revival seems no more weird than the real thing, including directly referencing George Galloway pretending to be a cat. And the Gok Wan-style makeover parody is one decent gag stretched out.

After writing the above, I read some old reviews of Cargill’s 2024 Fringe offering, Television 1, and it seems many of these sketches, or versions of them, were in that show. That suggests a huge creative inertia, especially as critics highlighted similar issues with sluggish pacing two years ago. Time to tune into something else, perhaps?

Review date: 10 Aug 2026
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Assembly George Square