Ashley Hames is not a comedian - something he's keen to point out, quite a few times during his show. Comedians don't read from scripts, for one.

Nor do they rely heavily on video clips, segmented by almost pointless elaboration - we are watching a naked man have his scrotum nailed to a block of wood, after all. In instances like these, elaboration isn't always required.

For those of you piqued by the possibility of watching a grown man's nutsack forcibly attached to a wooden slab, I'll explain. A long time runner in the famously fickle TV industry, a few years ago Hames finally gets his big break landing the presenter role on a late night Bravo sex-shocker show "Sin Cities", travelling the world, watching men dressed as pigs get beer enemas, old men paying get their cocks stamped on, that kind of thing.

Anyway, the shows went on, Hames observing and documenting the planet's dirty underbelly, until someone complained and he got fired. It was specifically the nut nailing that pushed Mr Middle England over the edge, forcing him to pick up his quill of disgust and write to Ofcom, much to Ashley's pain.

Now, 15 months later, cast aside and out of work, Ashley borrows some money from his mum and gets the train up to perform a frankly unimpressive, unprepared and thoroughly awkward Edinburgh show.

Presented with a barrage of filth and perversion, you might laugh in that "I'm trying not to vomit way" - the way that Sasha Baron Cohen perfected in Bruno, and Ashley Hames didn't here.

In fact, what you get out of watching the show is the anecdotes of what you saw in the clips - but if you wanted that, you could just watch late night Bravo.

So many chances for jokes were squandered by Hames, wasting what would have been a huge resource for humour if delivered verbally, shooting his comedic load in showing the actual clips.

On the other hand, you've got to admire his balls (pun intended), not only having these acts performed on him (enemas, scrotum-nailing, body-piercings and so on) but to have them shown on TV... and in his own show.

It's even more of a shame as there's a definite potential for a "sexual deviancy expert" stand-up, and if the humour was delivered in a Louis Theroux deadpan way, it might just have worked. But, alas, it didn't.

Ali Plumb

Ashley Hames is appearing at 11 pm at the Pleasance Upstairs Courtyard until 31st August

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