Podcast / Cheap Show

"I hate you and your fucking noodle posse." ^note The show's hosts: Paul Gannon and Eli Silverman, respectively.

"The Economy Comedy Podcast."

—The show's oft-misquoted tagline

CheapShow is a British comedy podcast starring Eli Silverman and Paul Gannon. While ostensibly an "economy comedy podcast", with features focusing on cheap or low quality goods (hence the name), in reality this is a hook on which to hang the main draw of the show - scatological humour and the love-hate relationship between the two hosts, with the love usually expressed grudgingly and the hate expressed freely and profanely.

Chunky Segments

• Ask Cheapshow: Paul and Eli read out listeners' questions and attempt to answer them honestly. Formerly known as Ask Silverman. Despite the name change, most of the questions are aimed at Eli anyway.
• Cheap Eats: Paul and Eli sample some cheap food and drink acquired from pound shops (or discount supermarkets like Aldi and Lidl) around the world, some of which is sent in by listeners.
• Don't Get Mad: One of the show's most popular segments; Paul creates a frustrating fictional situation in which Eli must refrain from expressing his anger. He usually fails^note Primarily not because of actual frustration, but because he consistently interprets the aim of them game to be to ''get'' mad, and the scene usually ends with Eli defecating everywhere.
• Eli's Country Urban Noodle Testlab Kitchen: Eli cooks some noodles either bought or sent in by a listener. He and Paul then review them. Formerly known as Eli's Country Noodle Kitchen and Eli's City Noodle Kitchen.
• Eli's Life Hacks: Eli comes up with his own (often useless, irrelevant or only self-applicable) life hacks, which are then berated by Paul. Occasionally, viewer-submitted life hacks are discussed, with the same outcome.
• The Froth Shop: Paul and Eli sample various sweets from across the world or from the local pound shop, with Paul playing the shopkeeper. Occasionally becomes The Spoff Shop when Eli plays the shopkeeper.
• Gannon's Golden Games: Paul plays a board game with Eli he'd recently acquired in a charity shop.
• The Hot Sauce Experience: Paul and Eli sample and review various hot sauces. This segment usually ends when Paul rubs his eyes and gets hot sauce in them.
• League of Snacks (and Crisps): Paul and Eli review a traditional savoury snack (such as Monster Munch, Doritos or Space Raiders) and rate it out of ten in the categories of Flavour, Texture, Value for Money and Nostalgia, coming up with a score out of forty, in a bid to find Britain's all-time best snack.
• Mi Casa, Su Casa: Paul and Eli gift each other an item purchased from a charity shop. Inverted with Pee Casa, Poo Casa, where the boys instead exchange purposefully terrible products in hopes of eliciting disgust.
• Off-Brand Brand-Off: Paul blindfolds Eli to taste test two identical items - one is a name brand, the other is a supermarket's own brand. Eli then discusses whether or not the off-brand item would be an acceptable substitute for the on-brand item.
• Paul's Page Turners: Paul reads a book, which he found in a charity shop, to Eli. They then comment on what they have read or heard. Also known as Biffo's Bibliography when guest host Mr. Biffo brings a book in.
• The Price of Shite: Paul acquires three cheap items for Eli to guess the prices. Eli gets two points per item if he is spot on, and one point if he is up to twenty-five pence out either way.
  • A variant of the above is occasionally played called Bought, Found, Given, where Eli has to guess which item Paul has bought, been gifted, or found at random.
• Sauce Report: Eli gives an update on the sauces he currently owns. As of yet, there has been very little to report.
• Silverman's Platters: Eli plays three records he has acquired from charity shops; after which the pair pass judgment on what they have heard, and rate each record out of five Platters. Occasionally becomes Gannon's Gramophone when Paul brings the records in.
• Tales from the Dance Floor: Eli recalls an incident that occurred while he was DJ-ing.
• Tales from the Shop Floor: A letter (or email) is read out of a listener's story about working in a shop, cafe or restaurant. The stories usually involve faeces, urine, vomit, masturbation or dead animals (or in one case, an old man who had died in the shop's changing room)

Oh, it's the fucking List of Tropes! AND THAT'S RIGHT!:

• Alternate Universe: Invoked when Eli was unable to attend a recording, so Mr. Biffo guest hosted alongside Paul as if he'd been there since the beginning.
• Artifact Title: The show is theoretically about cheap things, but these are mostly incidental to the main point of the show, i.e. Paul and Eli talking shit and insulting each other.
• Audience-Alienating Premise: Directly invoked by Paul, who complains on many occasions that he wants to try to pitch Cheap Show as an enjoyable professional comedy show but runs up against the cold reality that not an insignificant portion of it is Eli talking about shitting and spunk.
• Bad Impressionists: Paul regularly lapses, as part of his rants against Eli, into an impression of the latter where he apparently sounds like Zippy from Rainbow.
• Berserk Button: Whatever you do, never ask Eli if you can make a request if he's DJ-ing (rather than just asking for the song), or ask if he can play Magic Mike, otherwise you'll draw his ire in Tales from the Dance Floor.
  • Finding these is the point of the Don't Get Mad game, which Eli consistently plays to lose.
• The Board Game:
  • The show will infrequently have special episodes where Paul and Eli play board games based on TV shows (usually framed between fake TV programmes and parody continuity announcements provided by Pat Sharp).
    • Episode 20 with Paul and Eli playing Blankety Blank, Play Your Cards Right and The Price Is Right.
    • Episode 40, with Paul and Eli playing Bullseye, Family Feud and Deal or No Deal.
    • Episode 80, with Paul, Eli and Ash Frith playing Blockbusters, The Million Pound Drop and Britain's Got Talent.
    • Episodes 171 and 172, with Paul, Eli and Mr. Biffo playing Wheel of Fortune, Just a Minute, Strike It Lucky and Britain's Got Talent.
    • Episodes 272 and 273, with Paul, Eli, Mr. Biffo, Octavius King and Ethan Lawrence playing Pointless, The Generation Game and Family Fortunes.
  • In Episode 150, Paul, Eli, Ash Frith and Mr. Biffo play a role-playing board game inspired by the show which was created by a listener.
• Continuity Creep: Slowly happened over the first seven years of the podcast, with an established and continually-growing array of Recurring Characters played by Paul and Eli, and the series later including numerous episodes which deviated totally from the usual format of the show into self-contained semi-improvised narrative stories wholly based around these characters. As per the Continuity Reboot entry, this was later completely abandoned in 2023 with the show returning to its original format.
• Continuity Reboot: Explicitly happens in episode 351, after episode 350 features the podcast's accumulated seven or so years of Recurring Characters all being concentrated in one place and getting violently murdered, spirited up to heaven and consequently completely erased from the show's timeline, so as to return the show to its format of simple games and segments from the more convoluted Kudzu Plot it had become.
• Country Matters: Frequently and freely.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Before establishing itself as a pre-recorded podcast, Cheap Show was originally a live performance held in a series of comedy venues, conventions, and festivals around the London area, stemming from Paul and Eli's previous work as stand-up comedians. The earliest episodes featured frequent guest hosts, live audience participation, and often had much poorer sound quality and (by the hosts' admission) comedy, as well as lacking many of the gags and segments that would later become series staples. Recurring guest Ash Frith was also considered one of the main hosts of the show, appearing and participating equivalent to Paul and Eli.
• Inherently Funny Words: "Amplitude", "Modular" and "Poultice" all crop up frequently.
• Rambling Old Man Monologue: Some episodes have Paul and Eli commenting on the bizarre (and often quite disturbing) stories told by "Uncle Derek", sent in to the show by Video Game Basement.
• Recurring Character: By 2023, many, to the hosts' ire. Notable examples include:
  • Richard Brandoff, a misogynistic businessman who frequently interrupts the "Off-Brand Brand-Off" segment, and who has an assistant called Carol who he freely and profanely abuses constantly.
  • Jimmy Biscuits, an American cop and talent agent who acts as Paul's go-to impression in pretty much every situation.
  • Teen Yeti, a Sasquatch pop singer and rap poet, as well as his rival, Adolescent Sasquatch who was killed by Richard Brandoff on the Cheap Eats Express.
  • Uncle Grumbly, an elderly gentleman who makes condiments and preserves out of his own bodily excretions and who was also killed by Richard Brandoff on the Cheap Eats Express.
  • There are now none at all, after every single character ever featured in the show was violently and permanently killed off in episode 350.
• Ret-Gone: Uncle Grumbly died in a cutaway gag taking place in the past, removing him from the show's timeline and reuniting Madame Lady Plops and Squishy Jim. He later died, apparently for good this time, on the Cheap Eats Express.
  • Later happens to every single character who has ever existed in the podcast, as part of a violently-enforced Reboot in episode 350.
• Running Gag:
  • The 2017 Christmas Special saw the boys whisked away to another world. Towards the end of their quest to gather keys required to return to the real world, they were forced by a dragon to eat Samyang Hot Chicken Ramen noodles in a short time limit. In later episodes during Eli's Country Noodle Kitchen, Eli would allude to this while Paul would claim to have no knowledge of this happening.
    • The running gag culminated in Episode 114 ("Winkie") with Paul having a flashback to the incident.
  • The hosts have heavily latched on to the phrase "step outside the podcast" and its permutations as a way to comment on the other's poor performance on-air.
• Sitcom Arch-Nemesis: British TV personality Noel Edmonds, to the point where two separate episodes have been dedicated to mocking the man's career, beliefs, and life in general. Both Paul and Eli agree that Edmonds ripped off Cheap Show's "Price of Shite" segment with his program Cheap Cheap Cheap, and have taken great glee in celebrating the show's failure, as well as frequently deriding Edmond's spirituality and persona.
  • In more recent episodes, YouTubers Rhett & Link have overtaken Edmonds as Cheap Show's perceived rivals.
• Sound-Effect Bleep: Some insults/arguments are occasionally edited out and replaced with sound effects (e.g. an explosion, cartoon fighting noises or the Family Fortunes "wrong answer" buzzer), because they somehow managed to go too far even for this podcast. On at least one occasion, the show bleeped out one of Eli's insults towards Paul to cut back to Paul's stunned reaction at just how far over the line he'd gone.
• Spiritual Successor: To The Uncliqueables, Paul and Eli's first podcast. Cheap Show is basically the same thing, but with a better name.
• Toilet Humour: Examples aplenty on the show, now personified as Paul's character of Madame Lady Plops (and her accomplice in Eli's Squishy Jim).
• Trademark Favorite Food: Eli's is noodles, to the point it's referenced in the show's opening theme.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: AND HOW. Paul and Eli are obviously friends, but spend around half of each show insulting each other, mocking each other's mannerisms (and in Eli's case particularly, his physical appearance), complaining that the other person does nothing towards the show, and so on and so forth.
• Voice Clip Song: The show's theme tunes (multiple over the years) remix the two's arguments and segment titles.

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Paul, can I just say? Dubby-dubby-dubby dot.