Chris Cantrill just won the ‘Oscars of live comedy’ for his Edinburgh Fringe show Rewildling, and he’s spending the £10,000 prize money on a new chimney. (He’d already booked the holiday, don’t worry.)
‘More of it than you would think is going to go to [the chimney],’ the SNL UK writer, 42, tells Metro shortly after winning the award.
Given his busy schedule, what with long days in the writers’ room and his Fringe run, Chris had already booked a long-overdue trip abroad with his wife and 10-year-old son.
‘It’s been a bit intense, so we’ve booked a nice holiday. We haven’t been abroad since our son was very little, but we’re going in mid-October. We’ve paid for that; we were scraping the inside of a barrel, but with the prize money now, we definitely have a project called our Chimney Needs Fixing.’
It was no rest for the wicked(ly funny), as Chris just had 24 hours to decompress from his Edinburgh Fringe run before he was back in the SNL writers’ room.
‘Tomorrow I’m just sitting with my son, because I won’t get to see him for a little bit just because SNL is very intensive,’ Chris says.
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This season though, Chris is going to try and get his son into one of the SNL recordings.
‘He loves it, and he loves Jack Shep,’ Chris says. ‘My son’s really got into Warhammer little models and stuff like that. He sent me a picture of this Warhammer he painted. He said, “Can you show Jack Shep?” I showed it to Jack, and he just burst into tears.’
Bradford-born Chris, a Fringe performer of nine runs, hopes winning the Edinburgh Comedy Award (formerly the Perrier Award) for best show will help get bums on seats next year. He’s seeing it as a tool, rather than an everlasting guarantee of success.
The award is often coined a ‘star maker’ for British comedy, having launched the careers of the likes of Frank Skinner, Steve Coogan and Bridget Christie. The newcomer award, introduced in 1992 – won this year by Irish comic Marty Gleeson – discovered Harry Hill and Sarah Millican.
‘What it means is that when you send an email, you’ve got more chances of people coming back to you. That’s all it is. It’s a tool,’ says Chris, who has been nominated for the gong three times before; twice in his double act The Delightful Sausage with Amy Gledhill, and once for a solo show, Easily Swayed, in 2024. This year, it was fourth time lucky, as he swiped the top prize over 500-plus eligible acts.
‘I’m so thrilled with this, and I know it will translate into some stuff, but also I know I need to work for it as well. Hopefully it just means that the great benefit in this is that I get to take risks and try things,’ Chris says.
Just 10 minutes after receiving the award, Chris had to perform his daily scheduled show in Edinburgh.
‘I powered through it,’ Chris laughs. ‘But when I won, I gave a speech, but I forgot to thank some people, and my mum and dad were in the room. So when I did the show, I said thank you to them. I burst into tears. Everyone was very nice about it, but it did get to the point where, you know, I was like, I need to go home.’
Rewilding is a spoof whodunnit, all about Chris’ move to the Northumberland countryside and the tragedy of the felling of the famed Sycamore Gap tree. While it won Chris the biggest award in live comedy, he also got a three-star review for it just that morning. How does he reconcile this?
‘I didn’t know about that, so thank you for the information,’ he says, before breaking into a deflated chuckle. Eek. ‘Reviews are important. But it’s essentially one person’s opinion. I tell new acts, they’re a tool to be used; use them as they are useful to you and discard them too.’
What matters most is not one person’s opinion, but that Chris didn’t have to ring anyone after he’d scooped the award. Everyone he loved was by his side in Edinburgh already.
Best pal Gledhill travelled up after he was nominated, cried, and was with him to celebrate. His mum and dad were there. His wife and son camped outside of Edinburgh for the week, preferring a break from the city in the evenings.
‘This festival is beautiful and monstrous and insane,’ Chris reflects. ‘It’s been intense but magical.’