Peacock and Gamble Podcast

""I think I've been playing Top Trumps wrong.""

- Ray Peacock

A spiritual sequel to the immensely popular Ray Peacock Podcast, the Peacock and Gamble Podcast is the pet project of British comedy duo Ray Peacock and Ed Gamble. Audacious and frequently offensive, the podcasts run for about half an hour each (edited from a whopping 3 hours of recorded material), and began as a way to get the creative juices going before writing their sitcom. Has since been nominated for Chortle Awards, and expanded into a series of live shows - most recently the upcoming Peacock and Gamble Emergency Broadcast.


 * Acceptable Targets: Peter Kay.
 * Backstory: Given that it thrives on the Rule of Funny, the Complaint Letters feature is surprisingly consistent in its continuity, with Fraser seldom recovering from any of the maladies he's given.
 * Also overlaps with Brick Joke and Continuity Nod, when some of the most implausible inflictions will be referenced again a couple of weeks later. One week, Fraser's eyes leak out of his head after eating some sour candy. Two weeks later, they end up being reeled back in again as a side-effect in a completely different letter.
 * Blatant Lies: "Dear Vimto. My son Fraser loves your drink and drinks it up every day between his treatment. Imagine his and my horror, then, when he opened up the bottle of his daily Vimto today only to find there was a bomb in it."
 * "Brought back memories of the war, for me, that." "Were you in the war?" "Yep." "How old are you?" "Seventy-one."
 * Catch Phrase: "Dirty fucking cow." It only lasted about one episode, but they encouraged the fans to use it as often as possible. Ray has since claimed to regret that they invented this. A more straight-up example would be "Dirty boy, naughty now."
 * Completely Missing the Point: Ray's attempts to understand Top Trumps.
 * "Why is having a 100 wingspan such a good thing? If anything, a 100 wingspan is cumbersome. What if you're walking around Marks & Spencers?"
 * Crosses the Line Twice: Heck, Complaint Letters and Ed's Amazing Births must have racked up at least fifty line-crossings between them by now.
 * Driven to Madness: Ray Says A Food (OR Drink!) was always a pretty weird feature, but he cites this as the reason that he abandoned simple suggestions such as "Having some lettuce as a snack" and eventually moved on to telling the listeners to "Eat a tractor. Eat it all up!"
 * From there on out it only gets weirder. "This week - and you'll be surprised I haven't done it already - religion! Eat some religion. Have any one of 'em you want. Put a bit of Christanity on your toast!"
 * Made funnier by Ed's constant criticisms. "Even in the world you're living in where you can eat religion, you still can't use the phrase 'suck Jesus like a lolly'."
 * Heterosexual Life Partners: Ray and Ed, unsurprisingly.
 * In Memoriam: For such a glib podcast, Ray and Ed pay some truly heartwarming tributes to their departed friends Frank Sidebottom and Molly Robbins. The tribute to the latter, in particular, manages to be one of the most touching moments ever in the podcast.
 * Jerkass: Mrs. Fraser, big time. "That pink thing attached to my insides turned out to be called Fraser, and he's okay for a dickhead."
 * "Basically, we bought a dog for the family, called Fraser One. Our son-bloke is now called Fraser Three, because Fraser Two is a massive log that my husband did in the toilet, of which we were all very proud and clapped."
 * Kick the Dog: Fraser. Repeatedly. In the face.
 * Played for Laughs: Almost everything - particularly things that absolutely shouldn't be.
 * Refuge in Audacity: So, SO many of their features - but the complaint letters, in which they invent a terminally ill boy in order to get free stuff from companies, is probably the most outrageous example. Yet they totally get away with it.
 * Running Gag: Fraser's dad has had a LOT of jobs.
 * Selective Obliviousness: Ed's Amazing Births, particularly "Baby born without a head."
 * "Now, hang on, before you said all that, you said 'I think the baby's still alive'."
 * "Well, it doesn't say it's dead. I'm not sure whether, 'cause they said the head was born at the hospital, whether they either sewed it back on and it was alright, or if they live as two separate things, with the body walking around and the head living in a jar."
 * Sitcom Arch Nemesis: The budgie who lives upstairs - and, eventually, its owner.
 * Straight Man and Wise Guy: Since the departure of Little Raji James Who Ruined EastEnders, Ray and Ed take it in turn to play the Straight Man. As a rule of thumb, the Straight Man will be the one who isn't in charge of the feature - which makes Ray the straight man for Ed's Amazing Births, Ed's Amazing Deaths, and occasionally the Complaint Letters, and Ed very much the Straight Man for features such as Ray Says A Food.