Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

At a time when television's stock as a showcase for comedy is in marked decline, character comic Tilly Fletcher is evidence of the medium's enduring cultural grip, an idiot who you can't prise from the idiot box.

Pretty much from her rampaging introduction, wilfully impinging upon the intellectual property of one of the BBC's most beloved children's characters, the wild-eyed and expressive Fletcher establishes a trifecta between her neurodiversity, drug consumption and unchecked television absorption as a child, with the latter highest in the mix.

As recreated in her adolescent bedroom, her parents weren't merely comfortable with her viewing day and night. But they nurtured what the comic implies was an addiction, buying her successive, more sophisticated sets, defining her capacity to watch as a 'gift'.

That's a bizarrely active spin on her passive intake, which is brutally exposed when an adult Fletcher finds herself in the court of Simon Cowell. And you can practically see her youthful lobes rewiring as a heavily edited Derren Brown bends her mind in a hallucinatory sequence.

In between her memories, she jumps in and out of character into the fantasy world of the screen. Teresa, a young, blue-haired floor manager, herds her studio audience with upfront admission of the commercial and exploitative aspects of the recording, readying the next participant to be 'gunged'.

She's positively down-to-earth though, compared to Julie, a stereotypically posh, flighty executive producer and social gadabout, pinging from one audience member to the next in a riot of networking, connecting wannabe performers to her drug dealer, making absolutely nothing happen beneath the charlatan's blustering appearance of industry.

As to the onscreen talent, with his Aladdin Sane wig, Super Sam is a vaguely unsettling children's television presenter. And it soon emerges why, with some vaguely alluded-to skeletons in his closet and his working conditions revealed to be less than compliant with employment law.

Elsewhere, a ludicrously bequiffed, narcissistically preening shopping channel presenter flamboyantly flogs his tat, his escalating cocaine consumption reflected in his increasingly unhinged presentation and furious tirades at the crew.

All a bit chaotic and performed with the skittishness of someone feverishly switching channels, Television nevertheless raises questions about the insidiously seductive nature of the medium. Even without its nostalgic framing, however, the show would still feel rather quaint, TV's mind-altering capacity surely long ago surpassed by the internet.

Fletcher is a constant, demonic focus with more than an element of danger and the unhinged about her. Yet there's nothing unique enough in her creations to suggest her own graduation to the small screen is imminent.

Review date: 25 Aug 2026
Reviewed by: Jay Richardson
Reviewed at: Underbelly George Square