@ Gilded Balloon, Edinburgh, until Mon 31 Aug 2015 @ 18:45

In 2014, award-winning broke comedian Diane Spencer, needed to stop renting from a private landlord who lived in Dubai, at around the same time as she met media celebrity Nancy Dell’Olio, who wanted to pay a writer to create a Fringe show.

This is Spencer’s story of possibly one of the strangest years in her life, dealing with hazardous estate agents, language barriers, airplane turbulence, the housing crisis and diva Dell’Olio, in order to achieve her dream: to find a place to call home with her comedian boyfriend Kev.

Diane’s inimitable storytelling is hilarious, and has both a certain honesty and vulnerability. This isn’t clean humour. Rather, the script is littered with profanities and references to bodily fluids, a style that runs throughout quite a few of her shows. Delivered at pace, Spencer sometimes oversteps the mark, but she tells us it’s okay to laugh, as no-one will know we’re here.

Her storytelling has fabulous punchlines and her interaction with donkey (Dell’Olio) and pig (“Swine” Göran Eriksson) puppets, which play out some of Dell’Olio’s classic free-forming one liners (cheese fire for seize fire), is  just “pure dead brilliant”.

This is a show that will have you laughing in your seats with its memorable anecdotes, as Spencer takes you on her personal journey, mocking her year of hell. This is deeply amusing and wryly funny stuff.