Review by Paul Fleckney

A mini-conference suite is a hard place to crack a smile, but those who made it to the eighth floor of the Jurys Inn hotel were rewarded with an entertaining hour by sketch duo Jiggle and Hyde.

Jen and Vicki specialise in pop culture parodies, particularly of TV shows. Property programmes and Supernanny get the treatment, though really their targets are the cosy middle-class morons who are fat of wallet and woolly of politics.

There’s blasé Cressida, who finds £800k to buy a place in Islington thanks to Daddy, but quickly runs into trouble; and Zoe the freelance photographer who’s living in a tent in the East End but can’t bring herself to get a part-time job or countenance the idea of moving out of London.

In Superfanny – yep, we’re talking more about playground piss-taking here than sophisticated satire – we see a single mum who’s been 'let down by society' and lets her son run riot, and an over-bearing Indian mum who’s raised a spoilt brat. Enter Superfanny to sort them out.

Another of the stronger sketches was the Girls on Grime YouTube video, which gives sage advice to any young women who fancy a crack at grime as a career. Not many sketches at the Edinburgh Fringe about grime, but then everything Jiggle and Hyde do is in stark contrast to the red-brick revue acts that come through.

There is a lot of hip-hop dancing, and skits on pulling, sex and clubbing – the best scene probably being the wet, earnest bloke who tries to chat up Vicky by earnestly displaying his feminist, eco-warrior principles. The show has a distinctly red-top flavour to it.

While their performances were sharp and energised, the LOLs didn’t follow very often. Jen and Vicki drew attention to the fact their lack of punchlines on occasions, which is entirely true, as there weren’t any especially great lines to speak of.

The ideas they came up with made life hard too. Their very direct piss-takes could have done with a twist more often, to give them another angle to work with – like the hip-hop nativity play, which could have been mined for laughs far more than it was, or the department store selling perfumes of male rejection, which was probably the most fully formed sketch of the show. In the end, most of the humour came from their ballsy, kind of rebellious performances.

A few of the ideas were plain unoriginal, like the unhinged girl waiting for a guy to message her, and I was pretty baffled by the skit about a Blind Date featuring an old guy in a flat cap being a magician.

What drives the show along is the fun that Jen and Vicki are having, and their boundless energy. There’s plenty of room for them to up their game in the sketch writing, but they know how to entertain.

Review date: 18 Aug 2016
Reviewed by: Paul Fleckney
Reviewed at: TheSpace @ Jury's Inn