Comic used to collect salt and pepper pots

Ed Gamble has confessed to a bizarre childhood obsession: collecting salt and pepper pots.

The comic says he has no idea why he developed such a strange habit, saying: ‘I dunno why. I think I decided I needed to have a collection of something.’

He made the revelation on Kathy Burke’s podcast Where There's A Will, There's A Wake – prompting much mockery from the host. 

‘Gee whizz. Why don't you get obsessed with stuff you can actually use?’ she teased. ‘Like trainers that you can actually walk in.’

And she suggested he may have chosen the condiment dispensers when he was an overweight child because ‘all that fucking food you were shoving into your fat little body needed some flavour to it.’

‘Yeah. I needed so many salt and pepper pots,’ Gamble responded wryly. ‘Cause I was just seasoning meal after meal.  So I just decided it'd be salt and pepper pots for me. They're all still at my Mum's house.’

Nowadays, the comedian – who co-hosts the Off Menu food podcast with James Acaster – collects something a little more sophisticated, wine. And given the theme of Burke’s podcast is planning for your own death, Gamble suggested he might bequeath his ‘cellar’ to a children's charity.

‘Oh, nice. For the kids to get pissed,’ Burke suggested.

‘Yeah. Why not? Gotta learn about this stuff early,’ Gamble replied. ‘They can do tastings.

Burke wondered if the wine might be worth something, with Gamble conceding: ‘It wasn’t expensive when I bought it, but I think the idea is that it's a bit of an investment as well. 

‘I don't think we should be encouraging this, children drinking alcohol,’ Burke said. ‘Especially wine, cos it's so expensive and such an acquired taste. You should just give kids meth.’

Gamble predicted his cause of death might be from eating too much stuffed crust pizza: a combination of heart attack, constipation and diarrhoea (‘if that's possible’) and the sheer depression he feels at eating bad food. 

Of his funeral, Gamble said: ‘I like the idea of having a horse. But I don't want to be on the carriage, because that just feels a bit, you know, done. 

‘So you know, in cowboy films where they get attached to the horse by a rope – if they get arrested or whatever – and just get dragged by a horse.  I think that'd be quite a gnarly way to arrive at at a funeral.’

But rather than the black stallion that ‘people would be expecting’, he said: ‘I'm more represented by a tiny little cute horse’ like a   Shetland pony ‘just clip clopping along with me, dragging me behind me.’

As for the casket itself, he wanted ‘the most heavy metal coffin that I could possibly have’ to reflect his love of the music, and landed on the idea od one made from his own bones.

Talking through the idea, he and Burke decided that meant his body would be stripped of ifs flesh and its innards, which could then be stuffed into a pizza box, which would then be put inside his skeleton.

• Where There’s A Will There’s A Wake is available from all podcast providers.

Published: 11 Jul 2023