Comedy Feeds: Pumped

Note: This review is from 2016

iPlayer review by Steve Bennett

Another BBC Comedy Feed, more wank jokes… although Pumped makes a virtue of its puerility, thoroughly embracing its frat-boy humour like a live-action South Park, though with none of the satirical edge.

Set in the small, fictional Scottish town of Bonnybrigg, it revolves around three young men, working in a service station (although that’s a very incidental fact) and wasting their lives away. With limited horizons, the trio continue schoolday rivalries into young adulthood, their existence defined by scoring pranks against their nemeses.

The sitcom thus boils down to a 24-minute pissing contest between the tribes – very laddish and often gross (think beer-spiked-with-laxative gags) – but done with unwavering conviction to the tone. ‘This isn’t Sparta,’ says Jen (Lindsey Campbell), the only significant female character. ‘This is Bonnybrigg and it’s way more mental.’

She has had a taste of the outside world, and returned with a smart, buff boyfriend James, played by Crims star Kadiff Kirwan, considered by the local boys as such a perfect specimen of humanity he could have been ‘grown in a Nazi test tube’, rather missing a significant feature that might preclude a black man being part of Hitler’s Aryan ideal.

But Jen used to go out with one of the threesome, Fletch (Daniel Cahill). And he’s keen to show her what she’s missed with the aid of his crew Wendy (Gary:Tank Commander’s James Allenby-Kirk) and Spunk (yep), played by stand-up and voice of Love Island, Iain Stirling. How do they do that? With a typically cockeyed plot to humiliate James at Jen’s ‘welcome home’ barbecue, which becomes a twisted mating ritual of male superiority.

Pumped’s comedy is crude, and the script by Stewart Thomson writer heavy with double entendres, but it’s infantile fun, if you’re not after sophistication. And who knows, if it gets picked up for a series, it could make the slang word ‘doof’ enter the national vocabulary. What an achievement that would be…

• Pumped is one of the BBC Three Comedy Feeds released on iPlayer as part of the BBC’s Landmark Sitcom season. Click here to view.