I think the phrase goes something like, “You have to have the bad to appreciate the good.” If that is true, then we are due something truly amazing to appreciate after this show.

The premise is simple, playful and, frankly, perfectly suited to some truly juvenile humour. We have two comedians chatting about their school days and bantering with a crowd on a subject that pretty much everyone can relate to, and is easy to expand on.

All you need are a few good stories and a couple of well-crafted, laddish jokes to keep things rolling.

Sadly, that is where everything falls down.

These two guys have no stories to tell, nothing is well crafted and there are pretty much no actual jokes, leaving us with just one thing: laddish.

And what makes this even more frustrating is that both of them have lived lives that, in the right hands, should be a rich mine of comedy gold.

One has successfully published a children’s book whilst working with children with special educational needs. The other finished third in a series of Big Brother and, at one point, dated an Inbetweeners actress.

After 3 years on the circuit how they could not find any material in all of that to fall back on when the show is bombing is honestly mind-blowing.

Unless they just can’t write?

In the build-up to the Fringe, our Big Brother bronze medallist told The Sun:

“What’s different about this show is: one, I’m working class. Less than 10 per cent of performers are, and two, I’m trying to make people laugh, not advise them who they should vote for.”

It’s a naive take that assumes too much about the importance of class and status when it comes to good comedy, while completely ignoring the levels of hard work, pressure and stress that performers from all walks of life go through to hone their craft and succeed.

He continued:

“My hope is that people will come and see that the show, like me, is smarter than it sounds.”

During the show, he asked the audience for a word from which to craft a pun. He was then unable to properly identify the meaning of the word “parallelogram”, let alone create any kind of pun from it.

That moment probably says more about the gap between the promise and the reality of the show than we ever could.

It’s worth noting that we knew nothing about the performers’ backgrounds when we bought our tickets. We found it all out afterwards, whilst looking them up in an attempt to understand where their blind confidence came from.

Sadly, this was one of the weakest shows we have ever seen at the Fringe.

We genuinely wish them both good luck for the future, but they may, ironically, be better served by going back to school.

Clown Stars: *

@Just The Tonic, Mash House, Edinburgh