So Amy Gledhill has won the Edinburgh comedy award, catapulting herself into an elite pantheon that includes Tim Key, Bridget Christie, Hannah Gadsby and more. Hers will be a popular win, nowhere more so than with her fellow nominee Chris Cantrill, the other half of sketch act The Delightful Sausage, whose camaraderie and mutual affection always leaps off the stage. By pipping Cantrill and five other acts to the post, Gledhill, from Hull, becomes the sixth solo female winner of the award – in a year when male comedians were in the minority for the first time. She’s also a rare example of an act who, like Sam Campbell two years ago, wins having only performed for half the duration of the festival.
I couldn’t be happier for Gledhill – even if I didn’t consider her winning show, Make Me Look Fit on the Poster, the best in town this year, or even the best on that shortlist. The awards producer Nica Burns’ comments on Gledhill’s win (“It is a show packed with jokes and so much heart that everyone in the audience falls utterly in love with her”) applied equally to Gledhill’s 2022 debut, which saw her shortlisted as best newcomer. This year’s offering splices a handful of self-deprecating set-pieces (a calamitous trip to an outdoor climbing centre; outre tales of sexual indignity) with a meditation – slightly underdeveloped, to my mind – on how Gledhill sees herself, and is seen by others. But I don’t demur from Burns’ enthusiastic endorsement of an act who absolutely has the chops to be a breakout popular star.
Is that what the award is looking for? I have no privileged insight into this, but it’s always interesting to gauge the degree to which the comedy award (which has struggled to survive and find sponsorship in recent years) identifies the best show in town, versus the act most likely to become a household name. And by doing so, reflect well on the Edinburgh comedy awards in years to come. As Burns commented on this year’s deserving winner of the best newcomer prize (like the main award, now sponsored by DLT Entertainment), Joe Kent-Walters, “everyone who has seen him this year will boast in future years that they saw Joe’s show the year that he won best newcomer”.
That impulse might be becoming more acute in light of persistent rumblings not only about the cost to artists of coming to the fringe, but about the diminished status of the festival in general, as TV comedy production falls off a cliff and social media (Edinburgh fringe sponsor TikTok in particular) picks up the star-making slack. In which context, the rocket to global stardom this year of Richard Gadd (of Baby Reindeer fame) will have done neither the fringe nor the comedy awards any harm. The presence in town of breakout comedy talent Rose Matafeo, with her first (excellent) show since winning the award, will have been equally welcome.
It’s more rare these days that award nominees one year return the following for another tilt at the main prize. Another sign, perhaps, that Edinburgh is less the be-all-and-end-all than it once was? Striking, then, that alongside Jordan Brookes, Matafeo was one of two former winners who might easily have fought it out at Fringe 24 for the title of best comedy show in town. Previous champions aren’t eligible, alas. Failing that, I’d have liked to see poor John Tothill in the running, to compensate for a festival beleaguered by a punctured appendix; or Flo & Joan’s once-seen, never-forgotten faux-Andrew Lloyd Webber musical.
Of the shortlisted acts, I loved Catherine Bohart’s neurotic set about early midlife angst when I saw it in March, and I would willingly have submitted to the steamroller talent of Natalie Palamides with her force-of-nature romcom spoof-cum-gender-splicing extravaganza Weer. Cantrill’s show was a cracker, too. But at the end of another fantastic festival – and you’d better believe that, on the ground, it never feels in anything other than the rudest health – I warmly congratulate Gledhill for her win. And can’t wait to see how she builds on it.