Show Rating:

Some double acts that surface at Edinburgh seem to have been concocted for the expediency of sharing the cost - and the stage time - of a full-length show.

Not so for Lynn Chambers and Sally Nettleton, one of the few partnerships to have been peddling their wares on the stand-up circuit for a year or so.

And with that experience comes an ease of performing together, making them relaxed enough to banter with each other yet still keep the show bounding along.

It all creates an amiable, easy-going atmosphere in which to enjoy the show.
However, the double act dynamic effortlessly created between surly Chambers and daffy Nettleton is continually interrupted by songs and sketches.

Whenever Morecambe and Wise or French and Saunders - who have to be mentioned, by law, in any review of a female double act - launch into an ambitious set piece, they always maintain the same personas and relationship as they do when supposedly being 'themselves'

Not for Chambers and Nettleton, though, who change their characters to what the sketch requires, rather than changing the sketches what their characters require.

The material, also, is none too inspired with such old chestnuts as Star Wars voices and Supergirly-style pop covers (including the ancient trick of ending one half a rhyming couplet with something like 'cluck' and then - surprise! - not using the expected expletive at the end of the next).

There's even a wholesale reworking of the Woody Allen sketch supposing tiny people operate the penis during sex, only with nothing like the wit of the well-known, quarter-century-old original.

But the Northern lasses' infectious good-humoured manner rescues the show, even though you still leave feeling short-changed when it comes in a good 25 minutes below its advertised 75-minute slot.

And it's these performances that raise the rating at least one star above what their distinctly unexceptional material would suggest.