Cardinal Burns

Interview: Cardinal Burns

Seb Cardinal and Dustin Demri-Burns are two halves of Cardinal Burns. Prior to their screen debut on E4 last year, the pair toured Cardinal Burns as a live show and they're bring it back this summer for spots at Latitude Festival and the Edinburgh Fringe. Since everyone at Giggle Beats HQ was so impressed with the show, we sent James Harle to talk to the duo about the success of Cardinal Burns, their inspiration and their motivation. Enjoy.

Cardinal Burns interview

Hot on the heels of Watson & Oliver, the latest comedy duo to get their self-titled sketch show on the screen are Seb Cardinal and Dustin Demri-Burns. Known collectively as Cardinal Burns, the pair's first series aired this spring on E4, and the DVD is on sale now.

Last in the series for this frequently brilliant sketch show. Tonight, street poet Switch laments his friends all going to university, the Young Dreams girls are going to celebrate their friendship at Honky Tonks nightclub and new guy flirts his way out of the office for the last time. Plus, in the sketch of the series, two cafe managers take a job interview roleplay too far. There's no question their clever brains should get a second series. And on Channel 4 this time.

I'm not really sure about Cardinal Burns, E4's new sketch show, but I think it's a good sign that it had turned me from bemusement to gentle chuckling in the course of a single episode. And, thinking about it further, bemusement isn't the worst state a comedy show can leave you in. Belly laughs are fine, but there's something about a sketch that leaves you wondering exactly why you're smiling, particularly when they're as well performed as this.

The second episode of sketch duo Cardinal Burns' E4 series is just as good as the first: odd, awkward, stylishly shot and frequently hysterical. This week, 'Real Banksy' tries to get his stepson excited about street art, Rachel and her friends visit the countryside in a well-observed spoof of Made in Chelsea and spoken-word poet Switch rhymes about being denied access to his parents' house while they're on holiday. Many sketches focus on the often-bizarre characters and monotonous conversations of the working day - including a sleazy office flirt and a colleague who laughs at absolutely anything - and Seb Cardinal and Dustin Demri-Burns's subtle performances give the characters an absurd believability. Finally, a modern TV sketch show that's actually funny.

Seb Cardinal and Dustin Demri-Burns's sketch show already seems gentler and perhaps funnier after the first week's crude attempts at attention grabbing. This time we get a great take on a scripted reality show, and an urban poet who rhymes about the most mundane problems. The latter sits well with their (intentionally) boring, suburban take on Banksy, who is "up at silly o'clock" to do one of his street paintings. Other welcome returnees include the office flirt whose routine is thrown by the arrival of a new receptionist.

Gigglebox weekly #48 - Cardinal Burns

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.

Cardinal Burns is off to a good start with such characters as a surprisingly successful office flirt and a spoken-word poet who's less street than mews; as well as the outstanding revelation that Banksy is in fact a dull bloke who lives in Hadley Wood, gets his supplies from Homebase, and replaced the petrol bomb in his "Flower Power" protester graffiti with a bouquet "more to amuse myself than anything".

There were some duff notes, but far more hits than misses. It's sharply written, nicely paced, it feels fresh and it made me snort - and that's more than can be said for Episodes.

Tell me if you find this funny: murder squad detectives make a grisly find and can't stop vomiting: on the corpse, everywhere. The crime scene is a mess and still one of them says: "We'll need blood and hair samples." Then his buddy says: "Breakfast?" I didn't find it funny, not during the first of the new sketch show Cardinal Burns, but now I'm less inclined to call for the return of Horne & Corden which, let's face it, would have been disastrous. There was one genius skit: radical street-artist Banksy as a suburban drongo who buys his spray-paint from Homebase and gets stuck on tiny ladders. But the funniest sketch show on the box isn't a show at all: it's those insurance ads featuring the many faces of Paul Whitehouse.

Not much to say about E4's new 'if you can't be funny just be gross instead' sketch show Cardinal Burns. But the truth is, half an hour of Chinese burns from an angry gorilla would've been less painful.