Shagged Married Annoyed, The O2, review: a not-very-good podcast that was even worse on stage

There are religions with fewer devotees than Shagged Married Annoyed. Launched in 2019, the unfathomably popular podcast - in which Chris Ramsey, that nice Geordie comedian you might remember from Strictly, bickers aimlessly but amiably with his wife, Rosie - has had 90 million downloads. A BBC TV series is in the works. A tie-in book became a number-one bestseller; the sheer volume of orders crashed its Amazon page.

And so, when a live tour was announced, it sold out in an hour. More and more shows have been added, culminating on Tuesday with (in Chris’s words) “the biggest live podcast event in the history of the world f---ing ever” at the erstwhile Millennium Dome in London, breaking a record the Ramseys themselves had set just weeks earlier, by selling out Wembley Arena.

So, it’s massive. The O2 was pretty much at its 20,000 capacity. But is it any good? If you’re one of SMA’s countless listeners, I’m sincerely happy that you’ve found something you enjoy, and can reassure you that this tour will offer roughly what you expect. If you’re not a fan and someone offers you a ticket, run for the hills.

The set for this show is a sofa. I spent a lot of Tuesday night looking at that sofa. It’s a nondescript grey-brown, cosy but overstuffed, the sort of thing you could sink into for an hour, turn your brain off and relax in. It’s generic enough to be almost comforting, but not quite; there’s an edge of something uncomfortably corporate about it. It was the perfect symbol for the show.

I did smile at a pair of video skits where Rosie (in pound-shop makeup) plays a sweary pair of characters called Belinda and Barry Beef, but I didn’t actually laugh out loud once in two hours. The couple beside me left at the interval, and oh, how I envied them.

Still, I’m sure Tuesday’s gig was fun if you were a Ramsey. Chris and Rosie chugged wine and shrieked with laughter throughout, while the half-dozen members of Rosie’s extended family in the crowd seemed to enjoy getting an occasional shout-out. (After a story about hirsute bottoms: “She loves it. She’s got arse hair, haven’t you, mum, you little slag?”)

What bothered me most wasn’t the uninspired crowd banter, the blandness of the observations, or the puerile obsession with farts and bogeys and things shoved up bums. It wasn’t the grating jingles, or the fact that the only memorable anecdotes were the ones sent in by the audience, read out from bits of paper by Rosie and unimproved by Chris’s attempts to riff on them with physical act-outs.

What bothered me most, thinking back over the show, was the five-minute “message from our sponsors” in the middle, where Rosie gives a long plug for an internet clothing company, with comic interruptions from Chris (and a slideshow of photoshopped pictures of himself naked) to sweeten the pill of soulless product placement. This kind of advertorial is just about justifiable in a free podcast, but there’s no reason a paying audience should have to sit through it.

Speaking of naff advertising: if there’s one place on Earth where O2's wifi ought to work, it’s in “The O2”, where every surface is bespattered with the company’s logo. But it didn’t, an irony I found more amusing than anything in the show.

Touring until Dec 21: shaggedmarriedannoyed.com