Gigglebox Weekly #48 – Cardinal Burns

Gigglebox Weekly With Ian Wolf

This week a new sketch was launched on E4. This isn’t usually something to be hopeful about, but Cardinal Burns certainly seems to have potential.

The show, featuring double act Seb Cardinal and Dustin Demri-Burns, includes sketches mixing the dark, the disgusting and for most of the time the humorous.

The first sketch sort of sets up the show’s content. A man is chased, killed and eaten by zombies, so as you would expect the sketch is gory and gruesome. Then comes the punch-line – a zombie likes eating the corpse’s penis. Puerile, and yet I liked it a lot.

Other sketches include a parody of scripted reality TV shows, a Frenchman training a fly for a film, a pair of office flirts, a rubbish urban performance poet and a documentary about graffiti artist Banksy, which reveals that he is surprisingly tame and an ordinary bloke who gets all his tools from Homebase.

However, of all the sketches on the show the one that stuck in my mind the most features some policemen arriving at the scene of a murder. It wasn’t so much the sight of the body, but more the sight of the policemen being so disgusted at the scene that the cops all began vomiting…non-stop. There’s more vomit in this single sketch than in a Roman vomitorium. Although given that a vomitorium is a form of shaft leading onto a stage rather than what’s commonly believed to be a room set aside for people to vomit in after eating too much, this sketch features more vomit than any vomitorium, unless Roman actors got very nervous before performing.

I must admit that I do have a slight fondness for this rather disgusting sketch due to it pushing the extremes of what you could show in terms of stomach contents. After a while you can’t help but laugh at the sheer over-the-top-ness of it all. Forget Little Britain, this takes it to a totally new level.

Cardinal Burns has its moments. It isn’t to everyone’s taste by any means, but it has all the makings of a cult hit…