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? “I couldn’t be happier not to be at the festival today,” he says, on video call from his Northumberland home. 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.
“But I’m absolutely over the moon not to be doing my show right now,” he admits. “I’ve got a lot of adrenaline in my body slowly seeping out, and I feel like I’ve been hit by a train.” The Edinburgh comedy award (it used to be the Perrier, and was won in the past by Steve Coogan, The League of Gentlemen and Frank Skinner) has been a long time coming for Bradford-born Cantrill. 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. “Finally, a victory for the middle-aged white man!,” he retorts, then bursts into laughter. “Common sense at last!”
“But in my head, I’m a plucky young upstart still.” And you can see why. 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. “We used to come to Edinburgh and hang out with comics we knew from Glasgow, Newcastle, the regions. 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. “What this means is that when I send an email, there’s 30% more chance someone will respond to it. 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 . In this year’s show, we meet fellow residents of the fictionalised “Gaskill village” as an act of vandalism is perpetrated on a local landmark. The tale, a thinly veiled take on the global outrage caused by the felling of the Sycamore Gap tree , becomes a spoof whodunnit, in which Cantrill, a city boy still adapting to countryside life – not to mention a child trapped in a grown man’s body – plays a key role.
Rewilding is about “how I observed that [Sycamore Gap story] at a grassroots WhatsApp level,” says Cantrill. “I just thought it was fascinating.” How do such incidents affect communities – and why do we care so much about trees? “One of them [ie the two men convicted of the crime] was obsessed with it. From when he was a kid, he had a string that measured the circumference of it. Then when he got arrested, he said, ‘it’s just a tree’. And I was like, you wouldn’t have driven through the night in a storm to cut it down if you thought it was just a tree that had a no effect on anyone.”
Cantrill trialled the show in front of his fellow villagers, many of them depicted in it. “They like laughing at themselves,” he reports. “Hopefully the comedy award doesn’t change their perspective on it, and I’ll be hearing from their lawyers soon.” Taken as a pair, the two city-boy-in-the-country shows feel like a sitcom in utero – but Cantrill is cautious of that thinking. (A long-planned Delightful Sausage sitcom has yet to come to fruition.) One benefit of being older when success comes your way, he says, is that you enjoy the moment rather than fret about next steps. “There’s this award. There’s me and Amy working on a show for BBC Radio 4 [ Icklewick FM ] and it’s the most joy of my life. So I’m just trying to be like: this is happening now for a bit, let’s savour it.”
There’s also SNL UK, whose success has been a huge boon to British comedy – and to which Sky TV recently committed long-term. When the creative team was first assembled, Cantrill recalls, “I went in for a casting, I went in as a writer, I submitted a tape. Then I did a showcase in Soho theatre, then several screen tests. And they kept going, ‘Can you come back and do it again?’ Eventually I said to the producer, ‘it’s been lovely seeing you every three weeks for the last six months. But this needs to end, whatever the decision.’” It ended with a writing job that he now describes as “great”, but also “the hardest of my life”.
“They started by giving us ‘corporate resilience training’,” says Cantrill, wrinkling his nose: “about how to stay resilient in a pressured environment. And I remember saying to Jonno [head writer Daran Johnson] , ‘I’m a veteran performer. I do not need resilience training.’ And then we did the first read-through, and my sketch either was cut or completely died. I’ve had both happen to me. And I turned to Jonno and said, ‘Please, can I have a top-up of the resilience training?’” It’s a competitive environment, in short, with no guarantee your work will ever make it to the screen.
“I’ve always been hard on myself. At no point do Amy and I ever think we’re good and comfortable with our comedy. So SNL has been challenging.” But it’s also been “the closest thing I’ve done to what you think in your head the job [of comedy writing] will be. It’s sort of magical.” And off he goes on a rhapsody about filming SNL, the glamour of “storming around Television Centre, dressed as Victorians”, changing Riz Ahmed’s lines at the last minute, arranging cue cards, conferring with the director. “It feels like you’re in a film. It’s a rush.”
SNL also changed his experience of the fringe – in ways that surely spell the end for his outsider self-image. “I was part of a two-person team for years, and it was a closed shop. We’d work relentlessly and never see anyone else’s shows. But suddenly because of SNL, I’ve got all these wayward children all over the city. I’m going to see [SNL co-writers] Bella [Hull] and Ayo [Adenekan] and Omar [Badawy] , and I’m so invested in their success. It’s a really nice feeling.”
In one of the funniest sections of Rewilding, Cantrill makes indiscreet jokes about SNL, teasing that its cast may not be “one big happy family”, and that his relationship is strained with the “private schoolboys” who run the show. But that’s just him being “a little cheeky boy”, he now tells me. “I do still feel on the outside of things. When I meet the upper echelons of the taste-makers, to those people, with my accent, I do sound basically like Kes.”
“But I’m old enough to know what an opportunity looks like. So, when something like this pops up, it’s time to knuckle down and make the most of it.” That knuckling down, on season two of SNL, begins the day after we speak – leaving just 24 hours more to process the dream-come-true of winning the Edinburgh comedy award. “On no level have I processed it yet. It just happened yesterday. My phone has melted. My wife is keeping an eye on all the messages. I completely lost it on stage at my last performance and it all caught up with me. It was just surreal.” But Cantrill has been round the block too many times to get carried away. “I’ll be back in SNL dying on my arse on Wednesday, having a script read to silence,” he says. “And I can’t wait.”
• This article was amended on 3 September. A caption wrongly described Chris Cantrill’s comedy partner Amy Gledhill as his wife.
“But I’m absolutely over the moon not to be doing my show right now,” he admits. “I’ve got a lot of adrenaline in my body slowly seeping out, and I feel like I’ve been hit by a train.” The Edinburgh comedy award (it used to be the Perrier, and was won in the past by Steve Coogan, The League of Gentlemen and Frank Skinner) has been a long time coming for Bradford-born Cantrill. 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. “Finally, a victory for the middle-aged white man!,” he retorts, then bursts into laughter. “Common sense at last!”
This report is published with credit to theguardian.com. Full available text from the wire is above. Read on theguardian.com →
Source: theguardian.com · Brian Logan. Published 3 Sept 2026, 11:00 am.
