“If you want the dress, job for it,” advises Ellie White, with the confidence of someone who has successfully removed thought from the motivational speaking business. The podcasters in Ellie & Natasia dispense this sort of verbal rubble into their microphones while their headgear grows increasingly elaborate. The conversation barely develops; the costume department supplies the escalation. It is a useful division of labor for a podcast whose hosts have so little to contribute.
White and Natasia Demetriou resist the temptation to signal that they know how stupid this is. Their approval is earnest, their pronouncements treated as discoveries. That seriousness gives the hats something to work against: a visual development the speakers’ self-importance cannot accommodate. Recognizing the empty rituals of lifestyle podcasting gets the sketch started, but recognition would wear out quickly on its own. The growing headgear gives each return a fresh reason to look up from the nonsense.
The pair return after their 2022 first season with three half-hour episodes, replacing six installments of roughly fifteen minutes. The episode count looks stingy until you do the arithmetic. There is approximately as much show here, redistributed into longer sittings, and the distinction matters. The occasional sketch that runs short of invention is a local problem; three episodes are not evidence that half the comedy has gone missing.
Internet Nails remains particularly good at finding new applications for its founders’ spectacular lack of qualifications. Donna and Nikki now offer baby makeovers and luxury birthing facilities, extending their beauty enterprise into services where the consequences of incompetence sound considerably harder to rinse off. A lukewarm Jacuzzi is a lovely detail because it makes their imagined luxury so precisely inadequate. They can recognize the equipment associated with an expensive experience. Providing the experience remains somebody else’s department.
The cousins’ confidence connects these ventures to a sports-bar club night operated from their modest flat near the North Circular. Different businesses, same refusal to let the premises interfere with the advertising. White and Demetriou play that ambition with enough commitment to keep the characters active: each proposal feels like something they expect to sell.
Both performers were pregnant during production, and the maternity material turns that circumstance into an extension of an existing comic logic. Their linking conversations, including a discussion of being pregnant while making a sketch show, let the performers step outside the cousins’ salesmanship without making pregnancy the explanation for every joke.
The luxury-shop sketch has a less productive relationship with repetition. Two women linger over candles and other desirable little objects, fondling and cooing as though shopping requires a prolonged period of emotional consultation. The behavior is recognizable, and Sian Clifford’s exasperated shopkeeper supplies a useful opposing force. Her irritation gives the scene someone who would quite reasonably like this transaction to end. Yet the shoppers’ reverence becomes predictable before the sketch finds enough new business to sustain it.
That exposes the practical difference between this material and the podcasters. Both repeat a recognizable social performance, but the hats keep altering the podcast’s visual terms. The shopping sketch spends longer confirming what we already understand about its customers. Clifford provides friction; she cannot single-handedly make the premise expand.
A separate adult-content parody, involving grapes and mashed potato eaten from cleavages, has a related limitation. The food supplies an immediate collision between the supposedly erotic and the determinedly unappetizing, then leaves the performers with relatively little else to play. Vulgarity is perfectly serviceable comic material. Mashed potato needs assistance.
Elsewhere, Demetriou keeps appearing to claim that she made an assortment of unrelated things, from a plant to a high-rise building to a pen. The phrase stays fixed while the objects change the scale and plausibility of the boast. It is an economical recurring interruption, with no requirement that the show explain the claimant or supply her with a miniature biography. The confidence is the character. Each new object gives that confidence another ridiculous jurisdiction.
The Scottish miniature-shop segment works at a different pace and with a warmer relationship to its subjects. Presented in documentary style, it concerns two women whose enthusiasm for selling tiny objects is complicated by their enormous hands. The mismatch is immediately visible, but it also gives them an occupation full of potential difficulties. Their bodies and their chosen stock remain in practical disagreement, so the sketch has something for the characters to contend with beyond repeating an eccentric manner.
Their affection for the merchandise makes a difference. Unlike the podcasters, whose mutual approval keeps vacuity circulating, these women have an identifiable interest outside themselves. White and Demetriou allow that interest to remain sincere while making its physical expression ridiculous. The documentary format grants their little enterprise the attention its owners would want, leaving the size problem plainly available for inspection. You can understand why they love the shop and still have a fairly urgent question about how either woman manages to hand over the change.
Ellie & Natasia Season 2 premiered on BBC Two on October 21, 2026, with all episodes streaming on BBC iPlayer. Written by and starring double-act Ellie White and Natasia Demetriou, the surreal sketch comedy returns with guest stars including Steve Coogan and Sian Clifford to spoof modern social obsessions, beauty trends, and absurd everyday behaviors.
Full Credits
Title: Ellie & Natasia Season 2
Distributor: BBC Two, BBC iPlayer, CPL Productions, Nit Television
Release date: October 21, 2026
Rating: TV-MA
Running time: 30 minutes per episode (3 episodes)
Director: Simon Bird, Paul Taylor
Writers: Ellie White, Natasia Demetriou
Producers and Executive Producers: Olly Cambridge, Harry Hill, Danielle Lux, Mobashir Dar, Seb Barwell
Cast: Ellie White, Natasia Demetriou, Steve Coogan, Sian Clifford, Jamie Demetriou, Asim Chaudhry, Kiell Smith-Bynoe, Vikki Pepperdine
The Review
Ellie & Natasia Season 2
White and Demetriou give familiar targets enough strange detail to keep the jokes developing: podcast vanity grows a wardrobe, while Internet Nails discovers fresh services nobody should trust it to provide. Their committed performances make the absurdity convincing, and the miniature shop adds welcome affection. The luxury shoppers and food-based adult-content parody struggle to develop their premises, but the strongest sketches keep finding fresh complications inside apparently simple ideas. The cousins’ maternity business, for instance, makes a lukewarm Jacuzzi sound less reassuring with every promise.
PROS
- Visual escalation sustains the podcast parody.
- White and Demetriou’s earnestly committed performances.
- Inventive extensions of Internet Nails.
- Affectionate physical comedy in the miniature shop.
CONS
- Luxury-shop sketch becomes repetitive.
- Adult-content parody leans heavily on its food gag.
