The Edinburgh Comedy Award winner Amy Gledhill has rare star quality

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Amy Gledhill has been named this year’s winner of the Edinburgh Comedy Awards. She only began her run partway through the Fringe — starting a tour that is already booked for the autumn — but the Yorkshire comic’s combination of luminous performance skills and deceptively breezy writing won her the top prize.
She beat fellow nominees Catherine Bohart, Chris Cantrill (who is also Gledhill’s partner in the double act The Delightful Sausage, previously nominated twice for the award), Josh Glanc, Natalie Palamides, Reuben Kaye and Sarah Keyworth to the £10,000 top prize.
It was the first shortlist since the awards began (as the Perrier Awards) in 1981 in which male nominees were a minority.
Joe Kent-Walters, also from Yorkshire, won the best newcomer award in the guise of his white-faced old-school entertainer Frankie Monroe. The panel prize, awarded at the ten-strong panel’s discretion for a show or initiative deemed to best represent the spirit of the Fringe, went to Rob Copland for a constantly experimental stand-up show that ended with a ten-minute silent routine. Each receives £5,000.
As the Times’s comedy critic I was one of this year’s panel, and confess that on first visit I found Gledhill’s show diverting and ingenious but not gobsmacking. I admired her propulsive use of words, her artful physicality, but found it slighter than her delightful 2022 debut. On second visit — judges go a second time where possible between the shortlist being announced and the winner being voted on — I got the appeal far more. She is a serious talent; all the more serious for ostensibly taking so little seriously.
Gledhill appears to be just telling funny stories about a series of indignities that have happened to her: hanging suspended from a wire on a trip to Go Ape; a bad relationship at university; a failed recent relationship; a hungover train trip in which she gets sexually harassed on the way to and from the buffet car. She toys with how she is seen physically: jokingly dares a male member of the audience to describe her; doesn’t want to use words like “plus size”, and certainly not words like “bubbly”.
Yet though she doesn’t lack self-confidence, there is a thread of body image, of self-esteem issues that run through her radiantly jokey stories. Undearneath her jaunty delivery is a memorably poetic turn of phrase. And, though she does pause to advertise her theme at the end, she then turns that, like everything else here, into a pithy gag. Yes, maybe in the panel room I argued harder for the hard-clowning rom-com spoof by Palamides. That one is a strong flavour: not for everyone. Gledhill, though, has a rare star quality. She lights up a room. She will go far.Amy Gledhill is touring to November, amygledhill.co.uk/live-dates
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