Ray Peacock Podcast – Series 1
August 15, 2007 – 12:35 pm | by Peekay
Like many things, it’s all Ricky Gervais’ fault. If he hadn’t tried his hand at podcasting, and then made a stack of money out of it, we wouldn’t have everyone jumping on the bandwagon with their poorly produced ramblings and rantings.
Luckily this description doesn’t (entirely) cover the Ray Peacock Podcasts. The ten shows do vary wildly in quality of sound, and quality of content. But at least they have improved.
Ray Peacock (a character from Ian Boldsworth) is joined by his friends Ed Gamble and Raji James. And they talk, and fight, and argue, and occasionally take their clothes off. This isn’t the usual recipe for a successful podcast, but it does contain the nucleus of three friends that Gervais pioneered, with the Karl Pilkington role of the receiver of abuse taken on by ex-Eastender Raji. James is regularly named as “Raji James, who ruined EastEnders” referring to his stint on the soap which was cut short when he and the rest of his characters family left the square at the same time, apparently to the relief of the viewers.
Having never seen Peacock live it is difficult to work out whether this characterization is the one that appears on the podcast, but it seems unlikely given the fluidity of the conversations and arguing, that this could be anything other than just a slight exaggeration of himself.
Over the ten episodes all three characters find their feet, Peacock and James in particular. The strength of the Ray Peacock character and his friendly, yet argumentative and occasionally abusive interactions with the other two, particularly James, can be extremely funny.
Each podcast generally consists of each of the trio going over what they did in the previous week, with the banter following on from this, filling up about an hour an episode. As the series has gone on various themes have emerged. They include Peacock getting into numerous fights, Gamble going to Edinburgh for the festival, and James (inexplicably) having lots of sex.
The comedy is adult, though occasionally puerile, and even these early episodes hint at better things to come. At over ten hours of podcasts, and all for free, I can highly recommend digging out the old episodes, and subscribing to the iTunes feed.
But it’s not worth sleeping with Raji James for…..
