The Unexpected Items scored a YouTube hit earlier this year with one of their skits, Gap Yah, which has been watched by 1.7m people to date. The six-member sketch group are now building on that success with dates at Glastonbury and the Edinburgh Festival booked into their summer diary.

First up though, they’ve got two sold out performances at the Bedford Park Festival on Sunday and the group’s director, Chiswick resident Charlie Henniker, 25, says they are looking forward to road- testing their new show.

“We cover everything from music hall comedy to silly one-liners and there will be some bigger group pieces too,” he says.

“The Bedford Park Festival performances are a showcase for what we will be doing for our debut run at the Edinburgh Festival in August, and as the first show sold out in about five days we decided to do another one.

“We’ve never done the back-to back approach before, and we’ll only have a 10-minute break between performances, but it should be fun.”

Henniker and five of The Unexpected Items met during their university days as members of the Oxford Revue comedy show. Although the director says it was “essentially a less famous version of the Cambridge Footlights”, the experience inspired the aspiring comedians, aged between 21 and 26, to put The Unexpected Items together.

Their new show will feature an appearance from Orlando, performer Matt Lacey’s public school twit of a character who starred in the phenomenally successful Gap Yah film.

In that sketch, Orlando recounts his gap year exploits over the phone to his pal Tarquin, which amount to little more than a series of “chundering” incidents in a range of exotic countries.

Gap Yah was filmed at the home of Henniker’s parents, with the greenery of a Chiswick garden standing in for a jungle.

Although the success appears to be an overnight one, as Henniker explains, the Orlando character has been part of The Unexpected Items’ armoury for a while.

“Matt has been doing that character live in shows for four years and it has been refined through these performances,” he says.

“We like to think we were extremely lucky with its success, but I guess a downside would be that people tend to know about the sketch before they know that we are connected to it.

“There is a danger people might only be interested in Gap Yah, but generally when they come to see one of our shows and realise we have a range of characters and sketches which are just as funny, they tend to come back for more.”

The Unexpected Items, The Tabard Theatre, June 20, 7.30pm/9.15pm, returns only, smaaa.org.uk/festival