Brick Wall Comedy

Chris Cantrill Cannot Escape Other People

Published September 09, 2026

Chris Cantrill Cannot Escape Other People

Chris Cantrill investigates his neighbours, Ian Stone lets spectators choose the material, and Sam Eley makes hostility the attraction.

The Countryside Has Its Own Difficult Colleagues

Chris Cantrill’s Rewilding turns a retreat to Northumberland into an obligation to investigate the neighbours. The 2026 Edinburgh Comedy Award winner begins with a modest plan: serene isolation and whittling wood. Then local vandalism supplies a mystery. Cantrill is a veteran northern comic, co-creator of BBC Radio 4’s Icklewick FM and a writer on Sky’s SNL UK, with a taste for building bizarre communities around an apparently ordinary bloke.

A whodunnit gives an audience a useful second reason to listen. Alongside waiting for the next laugh, you want to know what happened. Each new detail can advance the investigation, make the village stranger or expose the investigator’s own difficulties. Cantrill’s attempted retreat supplies the vulnerability underneath it. He wanted fewer complications. He has acquired a plot.

The television job follows him, too. His interview about the award and his writing work gets into the supposed happy family at SNL UK, complete with passive aggression and the private schoolboys he needles. The pleasure is conspiratorial. An employee is explaining what the cheerful workplace description leaves out. The detour also belongs to the larger story: country neighbours and television colleagues both require a man seeking peace to spend considerable time working out what other people’s problem is.

The Audience Has Chosen Another Subject

At the Edinburgh Fringe, Ian Stone hands spectators a numbered menu and control of the running order. His Pleb’s Pow Wow puts this arrangement into practice in a packed Free Fringe room at the Counting House. Audience members call out numbers and Stone moves to the corresponding material. A longtime London club headliner and broadcaster, he brings quick delivery and sharp political wit to the task of making jokes land while the subject keeps changing.

The attraction is easy to understand. Calling out a number gives a spectator a small piece of authorship, and everyone gets the feeling that tonight’s show belongs to this particular room. The difficulty arrives with the next selection. A comic normally places one routine after another because the first has established an attitude, supplied context or brought the audience to the right level of excitement. A number shouted from the seats has considered none of this.

Now explain everything again. Stone’s individual jokes land, but each abrupt turn asks him to establish a fresh subject just as the previous one has gathered momentum. Choosing a topic is easy. Choosing when a room is ready for it takes experience. The menu leaves Stone doing that harder job with fewer options, repeatedly rebuilding the attention that a planned running order would let him use.

Being Revolting Requires Excellent Room Manners

Basil Crumbwick, the repulsive host played by Sam Eley, has little interest in your comfort. Eley is an emerging clown and character performer whose grotesque British alter ego specialises in vile invective and unsettling physical comedy. In Basil Crumbwick: Soul Sewage, staged at 23:25 in Monkey Barrel’s basement, he subjects spectators to sustained hostility and uncomfortable attention. A relaxing end to the evening is plainly unavailable.

The basement matters. In a small room, a performer’s attention can feel difficult to escape, particularly when the character seems willing to behave worse than anyone expects. The comic task is to make that pressure absurd enough to release as laughter. Eley’s escalating villainy supplies the excess. Crumbwick becomes so comprehensively awful that his behaviour turns into a spectacle the audience can recognise together. The room gets a shared object of ridicule in the person supposedly tormenting it.

That takes close attention from the person playing the monster. A character can appear oblivious to discomfort while the performer must keep tracking it (someone has to be sensible). Eley finished the run with the ISH Sarah Millican Award for Best Newcomer, listed among the official winners, and NextUp’s Biggest Award in Comedy. The useful craft lesson concerns permission. Each laugh gives Eley evidence that the audience will follow him further, allowing the character to become more appalling while the performer remains responsive to the room.

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