So Amy Gledhill has received the Edinburgh comedy award, catapulting herself into an elite pantheon that features Tim Key, Bridget Christie, Hannah Gadsby and extra. Hers shall be a well-liked win, nowhere extra so than together with her fellow nominee Chris Cantrill, the opposite half of sketch act The Pleasant Sausage, whose camaraderie and mutual affection at all times leaps off the stage. By pipping Cantrill and 5 different acts to the put up, Gledhill, from Hull, turns into the sixth solo feminine winner of the award – in a 12 months when male comedians have been within the minority for the primary time. She’s additionally a uncommon instance of an act who, like Sam Campbell two years in the past, wins having solely carried out for half the length of the pageant.
I couldn’t be happier for Gledhill – even when I didn’t think about her successful present, Make Me Look Match on the Poster, the perfect on the town this 12 months, and even the perfect on that shortlist. The awards producer Nica Burns’ feedback on Gledhill’s win (“It’s a present full of jokes and a lot coronary heart that everybody within the viewers falls completely in love together with her”) utilized equally to Gledhill’s 2022 debut, which noticed her shortlisted as greatest newcomer. This 12 months’s providing splices a handful of self-deprecating set-pieces (a calamitous journey to an out of doors climbing centre; outre tales of sexual indignity) with a meditation – barely underdeveloped, to my thoughts – on how Gledhill sees herself, and is seen by others. However I don’t demur from Burns’ enthusiastic endorsement of an act who completely has the chops to be a breakout widespread star.
Is that what the award is in search of? I’ve no privileged perception into this, but it surely’s at all times attention-grabbing to gauge the diploma to which the comedy award (which has struggled to outlive and discover sponsorship lately) identifies the perfect present on the town, versus the act more than likely to change into a family title. And by doing so, replicate properly on the Edinburgh comedy awards in years to return. As Burns commented on this 12 months’s deserving winner of the perfect newcomer prize (like the primary award, now sponsored by DLT Leisure), Joe Kent-Walters, “everybody who has seen him this 12 months will boast in future years that they noticed Joe’s present the 12 months that he received greatest newcomer”.
That impulse could be changing into extra acute in gentle of persistent rumblings not solely about the associated fee to artists of coming to the perimeter, however concerning the diminished standing of the pageant typically, as TV comedy manufacturing falls off a cliff and social media (Edinburgh fringe sponsor TikTok specifically) picks up the star-making slack. Through which context, the rocket to world stardom this 12 months of Richard Gadd (of Child Reindeer fame) may have executed neither the perimeter nor the comedy awards any hurt. The presence on the town of breakout comedy expertise Rose Matafeo, together with her first (glorious) present since successful the award, may have been equally welcome.
It’s extra uncommon today that award nominees one 12 months return the next for an additional tilt on the essential prize. One other signal, maybe, that Edinburgh is much less the be-all-and-end-all than it as soon as was? Placing, then, that alongside Jordan Brookes, Matafeo was one among two former winners who would possibly simply have fought it out at Fringe 24 for the title of greatest comedy present on the town. Earlier champions aren’t eligible, alas. Failing that, I’d have favored to see poor John Tothill within the working, to compensate for a pageant beleaguered by a punctured appendix; or Flo & Joan’s once-seen, never-forgotten faux-Andrew Lloyd Webber musical.
Of the shortlisted acts, I cherished Catherine Bohart’s neurotic set about early midlife angst once I noticed it in March, and I’d willingly have submitted to the steamroller expertise of Natalie Palamides together with her force-of-nature romcom spoof-cum-gender-splicing extravaganza Weer. Cantrill’s present was a cracker, too. However on the finish of one other improbable pageant – and also you’d higher consider that, on the bottom, it by no means feels in something apart from the rudest well being – I warmly congratulate Gledhill for her win. And may’t wait to see how she builds on it.
