Cardinal Burns Presents Dean and Murf is a spinoff from their Channel 4 comedy series. Dean and Murf are two superannuated ravers who live on a houseboat on the Regent's Canal and are trying to keep their heads above water without doing anything much like work. The show's targets include Loaded magazine and a splendidly sinister Ken Loach. If this turned up late at night on Radio 4 you wouldn't be surprised. To have the world of Withnail And I colliding with the comfy world of Radio 2 is more surprising.

The best shows at the 2016 Edinburgh Fringe

The magic is about to start again and it's time for your annual menu of events from Punchline. It includes some discoveries since last year as well as some classics. No doubt this year's discoveries will become classics by next year...

Latitude 2016: Cardinal Burns and guests review

Sketch based comedy is a dying breed on television, but still an ever popular form on the cabaret scene. The one group that has breached beyond the fringe and into the nation's consciousness over the past couple of years is Cardinal Burns, the brainchild of Seb Cardinal and Dustin Demri-Burns.

Review: Cardinal Burns at Bristol Comedy Garden

Cardinal Burns are professional comedians at the top of their game.

Review: Cardinal Burns/Tony Law

Cardinal Burns are an incredible force on stage, wielding their talent for acting and characterisation alongside well-scripted lazy human interaction. Focusing on hypocrisy, power struggles and the complexities of male relationships and sexuality, it's simple sketch comedy at its best.

Cardinal Burns delve into the realms of ridiculousness

Cardinal Burns are pushing sketch comedy into the realms of the absurd whilst staying true to careful, truthful and strikingly accurate observations of human behaviour.

Radio Times review

This BBC Four comedy just gets better. After the introductory episode, things are heating up for our embassy-bound duo Ludo Backslash (Dustin Demri-Burns) and Dan Hern (Ben Miller), with MI6 and the CIA pulling out all the stops to tempt them out of the embassy.

Their plans include playing an ice-cream truck jingle outside the window ("It worked for Uday Hussein!"), catfishing and revealing that there's a mole in the embassy - surely it couldn't be the 50-year-old unpaid intern with a suspicious American accent (an excellent guest role from Arrested Development's David Cross)?

As Dan and Ludo's position becomes less certain, the show seems to become more confident, with gags and topical references coming thick and fast.

Asylum, despite Ben Miller, isn't (yet) funny. The premise is fine, the Julian Assange story played for laughs (not that the real-life tale involves any less bathos, hubris and other words the Greeks did best). Miller plays it for high-minded pompous, as a GCHQ whistleblower holed up for 14 months in the London embassy of "El Rico", a banana republic which purely wants to stick a finger up to America but finds Dan Hern (Miller) an increasingly ungrateful and unwelcome guest, simply bored and boring and having lost his media cachet. So El Rico - look at the funny banana republic, welcoming to an embassy ball the funny North Koreans! - also brings to shelter one Ludo Backslash, a mittel-European wanted by urgent Hollywood dollars for having streamed for fun every major film for years.

Much of the conception is by Kayvan Novak, who also appears as the "herpes in a suit" ambassador's plotting son, and Dustin Demri-Burns is the amiable Backslash, and these two alone, never mind Miller, should have guaranteed laughs. But it was written by none of them, and that shows: it has too few quirks, a too-obvious incompetent lawyer, one plot device (a misheard word) so old it's got rust on its moss, and too many stereotypes which were old in the 70s. Come out of the 70s! With your hands UP.