Rory Cargill @ Assembly George Square

Rory Cargill is Beau Creme, a washed-up 80s TV star with a Noel Edmonds bouffant and the voice of Jeremy Clarkson. Though bitter about his decline in bookability, he’s here for a Channel 5-style ‘history of TV’ retrospective that covers both the early history of the medium and his own career. That history includes Red Paul, a Blue Peter spoof; Pots and Pans, a gurning sitcom duo; his own game show, Creme Delights; and Big Brother send-up Celebrity Animal Farm.

In each of these, there’s plenty of nostalgia-dripped fun-poking in the performance to entertain. But Cargill’s performance doesn’t have the stage to itself: it shares a good portion of the runtime with an array of TVs showing clips from those shows. The TV array is perhaps both the show’s biggest strength and its biggest weakness. The set itself is a delight to look at, and often incorporated neatly into the more interactive elements of the show – as an X-ray machine, for example, or a contraption that makes custard. The sketches it shows and high-production interstitials between sections are impressively (and seemingly expensively) done.

But it’s hard not to feel that the set and pre-filmed elements, as nice to look at as they are, hold Cargill back as a live performer. An unencumbered sketch comedian can use a Fringe run to cut what doesn’t work and hone what does; here, filmed portions that fall flat remain baked into the output, making them both a crutch and a hurdle. On TV! is a development on Cargill’s 2024 debut, Television 1. In both, he shares an infectious love for television and a laudable drive toward fusing TV and live comedy. This year, the result is often funny and nice to look at, even if he hasn’t yet cracked that fusion.

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Rory Cargill: On TV!, Assembly George Square (The Crate), until 30 Aug, 6.55pm, £13.50-£16.50