Rarely has such time and effort been applied to something so utterly silly. Will BF’s ‘Moon Team IIIV’, has existed in some form or other since 2024, with Will and collaborators tinkering under the hood for the last two years, winning Best Comedy Show at Buxton Fringe in 2025 along the way. Don’t, however, let this fool you into thinking you’re in for something slick. Ingenious? Yes. Impressive? For sure. Hilarious? Absolutely. But ‘Moon Team IIIV’ is a deliberately ramshackle chimera, Macguyvered together with spit and duct tape. Pure fringe, in other words.

Taking the form of a mockumentary about the, ‘worst film you’ve never seen’, Will performs Moon Team IIIV, along with multimedia inserts of DVD extra-style talking heads, all played by him, reminiscing about the making of the film. A belated prequel made 20 years after a beloved original, and based around an intergalactic tax dispute, Will’s inspiration is obvious. The execution of this loving pastiche is anything but.

There is little Will doesn’t throw at the audience during a frantic hour. Outrageous acting, brilliantly edited multimedia interludes, voiceovers, quick changes, audience interaction, and even playable video games are utilised. It is chaotic, with allowances for things to go a wee bit awry built in, but look beneath the churning surface and you’ll see the care and precision that has gone into its structure, and its madcap characters.

Onstage, besides Will as narcisissistic ‘Prince Apollo Moon’, there’s a continually-growing fish sidekick called Swimothy (the kind of wordplay you can expect from the 2025 British Pun Champion, where a groan is as good as a guffaw); a robot called WD40, voiced using a chopped up advert for wine by veteran thesp and notorious lush ‘Orson Carte’; and a bad guy with the head of a stuffed giraffe. On screen, there’s the director of the piece, a Hollywood actress, and a film critic, the majestically-named Alvin Anderchip-Munx, who foolishly wore a blue top to blue-screen filming and appears as a floating head and limbs on a generic backdrop of cinema seats.

There are some lulls – for all of their technical prowess some of the gameplay sections could be trimmed – and some of it is so ephemeral and throwaway that it flies almost unimpeded through the memory; a shame given the sheer labour of love that’s gone into every single joke. But any show this dense with jokes and with enough daft ideas to sustain some entire careers is going to miss on occasion, and ‘Moon Team IIIV’ has more than enough that at least something will appeal to most audiences, and who knows if this is even the show’s final form? Besides, it’s played with such careworn charm and demented energy that it would take the most miserable of punters to take against it. That still seems a surprise to Will BF however, who seems delighted but baffled that his meticulous buffoonery is getting such a great response.

‘Moon Team IIIV‘ is at Jelly Belly at Underbelly, Cowgate until Sun 30 Aug 2026