For the last month, Chris Cantrill has been performing his fringe show Rewilding daily in a lunchtime slot. And yet, when we plan to speak about his victory in the Edinburgh comedy awards, the interview is arranged – on the festival’s penultimate day – for lunchtime. Can he really have won the fringe’s major prize, and – hell of a mic drop, this – immediately sacked off his last two shows?
But the cancellation, it transpires, is long-standing, because work starts immediately post-fringe on the new series of SNL UK, for which he writes. This year’s was his fourth nomination, twice as a solo act, and twice as part of his duo The Delightful Sausage, alongside 2024 winner Amy Gledhill. He is, as I tease him when we speak, a comparatively senior winner, the oldest since Bridget Christie, also 42, 13 years ago.
Cantrill didn’t take up comedy until he was 28, having “worked in an office as a marketing manager. I wasn’t a good fit for that.” He sidelined as a comedian, but was going nowhere fast when in 2016 his first child was born. By way of a last resort, he then asked Gledhill whether she fancied “trying something a little bit different” – and The Delightful Sausage came into being.
This raucous and surreal double act, a slacker northern Mighty Boosh, was Cantrill’s unlikely meal ticket, a mates-having-a-laugh confection that went unexpectedly mainstream. Then we started getting nominated [for the award] and found ourselves in the orbit of switched-on, ruthlessly ambitious, twentysomethings. I remember thinking, ‘oh God, that’s a bit intense, isn’t it?’” Cantrill has always styled himself an outsider, speaking (when the Guardian interviewed The Delightful Sausage in 2022) about his hard-to-shake impostor syndrome.
One might think winning the award, against fellow nominees including Lara Ricote and upcoming Last One Laughing star Harriet Dyer, would put paid to that self-image. But Cantrill doesn’t see it that way. Edinburgh’s comedy awards, he says, “have undoubtedly altered the trajectory of my life.
Being nominated took me from part-time while working in an office to doing comedy full-time.” But winning won’t be transformative. If I’m working on other stuff, it might move that stuff forward slightly more favourably.” The show for which Cantrill won the prize, meanwhile, seems designed to confirm the Yorkshireman as a fish out of water. Rewilding continues the story of his move to rural Northumberland, first related in 2024’s Easily Swayed.
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