The Peacock and Gamble Podcast was a weekly podcast hosted by British comedians Ray Peacock and Ed Gamble. Hosted on Chortle.co.uk and accessible via iTunes and RSS, the show started in 2009 as a spiritual sequel to the Ray Peacock Podcast. A live show spawned from the podcast, the Peacock and Gamble Emergency Broadcast, which was performed at the Edinburgh Fringe as part of a tour. They also performed a live show in the winter of 2009, which has not been released for download. The podcast is well-acclaimed, having been nominated for numerous Chortle awards.
Podcast history
The Ray Peacock Podcast
Ray Peacock (real name Ian Boldsworth) met Ed Gamble at a revue at Durham University. Their first podcast work together was the Ray Peacock Podcast, which was co-hosted with "Little Raji James who used to be in EastEnders but ruined it" - Peacock's actor friend, Raji James. Ed Gamble first joined the cast in episode 4 of the first series, and became a permanent host from series 2 onwards. Raji's role in the show was mainly as the butt of the jokes, with features such as "Raji's Autobiography" and "Letters for Raji" being written by Peacock and Gamble on his behalf, exaggerating traits such as his poor grammar and his floundering career. The Ray Peacock Podcast was successful, spawning live shows (attended by special guests such as Harry Hill and The Office actor Ewen MacIntosh), but ended after four series, as the presenters felt they were spending too much time making fun of Raji.
Only forty-nine episodes of the Ray Peacock Podcast were recorded in its original run, and only forty-eight of them were released. However, a final fiftieth show was recorded in September 2010, and released in conjunction with the fiftieth episode of Peacock and Gamble.
Peacock and Gamble Podcast
The first episode of the Peacock and Gamble Podcast was released in the spring of 2009, a brand new show following in the wake of The Ray Peacock Podcast. No longer presented by Raji James, the show was slightly more freeform than the previous podcast, with fewer recurring features - the humour being more autobiographical and anecdotal than its predecessor. The podcast was released weekly on Tuesdays, through Chortle.co.uk. The Peacock and Gamble Podcast featured more fan interaction than the Ray Peacock Podcast before it, with many features - such as "Fan of the Week" - being based around the show's official Facebook group, or since the website went live the Peacock and Gamble Forum.
The show was devised in part by agent James Taylor, who suggested that Peacock and Gamble should establish an online presence in connection with a television show they were then writing. The television programme was occasionally mentioned in the show, which then progressed to the pilot stage. The pilot was shown to test audiences at the Peacock and Gamble Emergency Broadcast.
Features / sections
Complaint Letters
The complaint letters feature was a double-headed feature produced by both presenters. The concept was that they would send complaint letters to big businesses in order to trick them into giving them free merchandise as compensation, the joke being that the complaints were incredibly unrealistic and often badly-written. The complaints would invariably report the mishaps befalling an eight-year-old boy Fraser, the letters written from the perspective of his mother, Mrs. Fraser. Although some details of the letters were inconsistent - with Mrs. Fraser's husband's backstory in particular changing from week to week - Fraser's maladies remained remarkably constant with ailments from previous weeks being insistently referenced. At the beginning of the show's run, Fraser was a perfectly healthy - if somewhat dim - child, but by the feature's end he was terminally ill and the character was officially killed off at the 2009 live shows.
Ed's Amazing Births
This feature, ostensibly a celebration of the miracle of birth, was hosted by Ed Gamble throughout much of 2010. Ed would research interesting births - usually urban legends or children with tragic deformities - and report them back to Peacock, who would usually criticise Gamble for believing some of the more ridiculous ones to be true, or for referring to some of the more tragic ones as "amazing." Peacock would also bemoan Gamble's lack of research, and it eventually became apparent that Gamble tended to simply type non-sequiturs into Google and report back if he found any relevant results. This method did however often result in stories that were actually true, such as the one about a baby being born on a train in India and falling onto the tracks through the toilet.