Brick Wall Comedy

Chris Cantrill’s Quiet Life Requires an Investigation

Published September 16, 2026

Chris Cantrill’s Quiet Life Requires an Investigation

Chris Cantrill moves to the country for peace, then builds an acclaimed comedy hour around his failure to leave the village alone.

The Village Requires Your Full Attention

Moving to the country is supposed to give you fewer things to worry about. In Rewilding, Chris Cantrill relocates to rural Northumberland with a modest ambition to spend some time whittling wood, then gets drawn into investigating local vandalism. He has escaped urban stress and found a community investigation to supervise.

Cantrill is half of the Yorkshire sketch duo The Delightful Sausage, alongside fellow comedian Amy Gledhill, and his rural storytelling retains that partnership’s appetite for escalating absurdity. The whittling gives him a small, comprehensible ambition to abandon. Once he starts investigating, every additional concern takes him further from the quiet domestic life he came for. His Edinburgh run turns that widening gap into the engine of the hour. There goes the quiet afternoon.

The psychedelic mushroom sequence makes his attempt to understand village life considerably less manageable. Local wrongdoing expands into questions of justice and responsibility for the natural world. Cantrill’s problem keeps growing while his qualifications for handling it remain roughly those of a man who recently took up whittling. The pleasure is in following that escalation closely enough that his increasingly unreasonable involvement still feels like the next available step (although going home remains an option).

Now the 2026 Edinburgh Comedy Award winner is taking Rewilding into a winter residency of eleven nights at Soho Theatre and a 2027 UK tour. The award is an encouraging verdict on an hour that asks audiences to follow an increasingly distracted investigator. For the new rooms, Cantrill has a useful organising choice: however large the moral questions become, we can still measure his predicament against the man who arrived hoping to whittle some wood.

Who Finds the Unfamous Funny People

An unknown Fringe comedian needs someone to enter the room before word of mouth can leave it. Radge Media CIC’s closure of The Skinny and Fest after the September 2026 issue removes two publications that spent twenty years doing precisely that kind of looking. Emerging acts will still be able to perform. Finding their first audience gets harder.

The Edinburgh publications gave small shows something a poster cannot supply: an account of what actually happened inside. Imagine a debutant in a Free Fringe room whose peculiar opening only makes sense when it returns forty minutes later. A critic who stays for the hour can explain why the wait pays off without giving away the ending. The poster has a photograph of the comedian looking peculiar. The photo explains very little.

For that hypothetical debutant, losing independent cultural journalism means losing one route from an unfamiliar premise to an occupied chair. An established act can bring followers to an experiment. Someone starting out needs a stranger to take the initial chance. The Skinny and Fest helped make that possible by sending writers into rooms where recognition was hardly guaranteed. Their disappearance leaves fewer opportunities for a difficult opening to be judged alongside the ending it was written to serve.

Radge’s stated difficulties include the cost of producing the publications amid wider pressure on Scottish arts. There is nothing mysterious about that explanation, which makes the result especially dispiriting. After this year’s Fringe, the debutant can shorten that opening, improve the return and arrive with a better hour. The Skinny and Fest will still be gone. Rewriting the show cannot replace the people who might have persuaded someone to see it.

The Future Owes Paul Foot a Bidet

The future used to arrive in pictures of machines doing our chores. Paul Foot’s The Future revisits those promises from the middle of the last century through polite personal robots, consumer jetpacks and solar powered bidets, then confronts the exhausting present. It is a large historical disappointment with unusually specific bathroom requirements.

Foot is a veteran of the British alternative circuit, familiar from 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown and Never Mind the Buzzcocks, whose eccentric cadence and restless pacing make ordinary logic sound increasingly suspect. Here, the promised gadgets give his anger somewhere concrete to begin. A solar powered bidet is already an absurdly elaborate answer to a small domestic problem. Place it beside modern civic deterioration and the old confidence that technology would sort everything out starts to look wonderfully misplaced.

Foot then moves abruptly from mechanical whimsy into furious passages about contemporary life. The change in speed matters. Having invited the audience to picture a courteous robot, he can carry them into disillusionment with that ridiculous image still in mind. His complaint arrives through a peculiar personal imagination, giving the room something to laugh at beyond agreement with his politics. The robot seemed so promising.

Following the Edinburgh run and a September 13 launch in Bristol, Foot has added nationwide dates, with a Birmingham tour stop among the opportunities to see the hour. The expanded run gives him fresh rooms in which to make that abrupt journey from gadgets to fury. Keeping those promised inventions so physically ridiculous gives The Future a dependable place to return when the present gets exhausting. Foot can be furious about society and still have a bidet to explain.

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