Merseyside comic wins Best Show at Fringe
Jordan Brookes has won the Best Comedy Show award at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
The Merseyside-born comedian received £10,000 yesterday, while Catherine Cohen was awarded the £5,000 Best Newcomer prize at Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh.
Brookes’s show I’ve Got Nothing combines stand-up, physical comedy and crowd-work. In a five-star review, The Telegraph’s Tristram Fane Saunders said it was “deceptively well-written”.
The Edinburgh Comedy Awards, formerly known as the Perriers, include the £5,000 Panel Prize. It was won by Jessica Brough and the Fringe of Colour initiative, which supports BAME acts.
The Edinburgh Comedy Awards are a strange beast. Formerly the Perrier, now sponsored by TV channel Dave, the world’s most prestigious comedy prize sometimes gives an early leg-up to mainstream stars – Lee Evans, Frank Skinner – but just as often it celebrates those oddball geniuses who would never find an audience without it. One thinks of Tim Key with his surreal poems, John Kearns and his wobbly plastic teeth, or cult favourite Daniel Kitson, who beat Jimmy Carr, Adam Hills and Omid Djalili to the main prize in 2002.
As part of this year’s judging panel I have watched almost 100 hours of comedy in the past two and a half weeks, buoyed up only by bad coffee and worse kebabs. I couldn’t watch all 759 eligible shows – it would be physically impossible – but I’ve seen enough to get a sense of the Fringe overall, and I can safely say that 2019
has been a good year for the weirdos. The awards reflect that: the main prize winner, announced yesterday, is the kind of bizarre, one-off talent who could only have come out of the fringiest corners of the Fringe.
Jordan Brookes’s brilliant show, I’ve Got Nothing, is an hour of silly faffingabout at its finest. Off-mic and off the leash, he prowls the theatre pulling faces, chatting to the crowd, popping up behind curtains and dancing like a possessed puppet. There are dozens of rug-pulling false endings; one broadsheet critic missed the last 15 minutes because he thought it was over, and walked out. The 33-year-old comic from Merseyside (who describes himself as a “hipster Nosferatu”), was first nominated for this prize in 2017, returning last year with a hi-tech, meticulous multimedia show that was the opposite of this year’s loose-limbed, lo-fi hour. It’s thrilling to say I have absolutely no idea what he’ll do next.
Brookes’s victory will probably come as a surprise to the pundits. When this year’s shortlist was announced, most of the headlines were about diversity. More than a third of the nominated acts for Best Show and Best Newcomer were from ethnic minorities, including the first black British women in the prizes’ 39-year-history. The Panel Prize (a separate award for anything that sums up the spirit of the Fringe) went to Fringe of Colour, an admirable initiative that supports BAME performers and gives free tickets to young BAME audience members. Given this, the award going to a white stand-up might look a bit off-message.
But the awards also represent another kind of diversity: the shortlisted acts are the most varied assortment of comic styles in years. Every imaginable genre is represented except mime (though, in my opinion, mime act Tom Walker would have been a welcome addition). Sketch comedy is out in force, from the smoothly polished Good-bear, the nightmarish, League of Gentlemen- esque Yorkshire duo The Delightful Sausage, and Australia’s surreal one-woman sketch tornado, Demi Lardner.
Stand-up Darren Harriott offers straightforward, club-friendly comedy, while lovable clown Spencer Jones sings scat-songs and creates playful sight-gags from recycled rubbish. There’s even a straitlaced Etonian, Ivo Graham, whose winningly pedantic stage persona put me in mind of a young Miles Jupp.
There’s only one name on the list likely to become a household name, however: London Hughes. Her uproariously filthy show To Catch a D--- would be more at home in the Apollo than in her 50-seat attic venue. A former presenter for both adult channel Babestation and CBBC (yes, really), the 30-year-old is a million-watt megastar-in-waiting, and bound to become the biggest comic name ever to come from Croydon, though the squeamish may struggle with her 18-rated subject matter. Fight for a ticket. She would have been a popular winner, but I’m sure being pipped to the post by Brookes won’t stop her from achieving mainstream success.
There’s a similar dazzling quality to the winner of the Best Newcomer award – a prize that’s previously introduced the world to Harry Hill, Tim Minchin and The Mighty Boosh. Young New York cabaret act Catherine Cohen sings about very modern, millennial worries with the polish and sheen of a Seventies lounge star – and her audience interaction is pure dynamite. In my eyes, she was the obvious winner from the start, but that’s not to dismiss a strong field that included powerhouse stand-up Sophie Duker, moving storyteller Janine Harouni, and plucky sketch troupe Crybabies, whose madcap Second World War-set adventure Danger Squad harks back to the heyday of the Goon Show.
Plucking a pair of winners from this eclectic bunch was an agonising process. There were, of course, the usual outbursts of tears, profanity and physical violence one associates with making any such decision, though we stopped short of the naked mud-wrestling that’s usually used to settle the Booker Prize. I’m joking, of course. My fellow judges were unfailingly polite, united by an earnest desire to celebrate the funniest shows in town. Take note of the names in this article: each of these acts, in their own very different ways, represents the most exciting comedy of today.
Giving the award to a white stand-up might look offmessage but the shortlist has a diversity of comic styles