Review: Chris Cantrill: The Bad Boy

Given that he's best known as half of the inventively daft double act The Delightful Sausage, Chris Cantrill's first stand-up show at the Fringe is, somewhat surprisingly, an endearingly heartfelt dispatch about his life emerging from the pandemic. True, all this is relative. He opens with some rascally, rather dark gags about his family tree, anti-Royal views and why he doesn't touch on politics, segueing into the battle of the sexes he long ago surrendered to his wife. But when he tells you he has “a hive of bees in my head”, it's without the processed analysis of many comics talking about their mental health, more an inadvertent blurt of something he's very much still grappling with.

Alongside the pressures of taking over a bed and breakfast business on Hadrian's Wall, with a healthy influx of guests having affairs, not a Sausage setup it transpires, Cantrill is struggling to bond with his six-year-old son. The boy is running slightly wild. And the comic worries that his imaginative approach to discipline has spectacularly backfired. While stressing about his own example as his son's role model, his WhatsApp group with friends is a damning indictment of middle-aged men with arrested development or spiralling psychosis. Structurally, The Bad Boy is a little haphazard and would benefit from a good edit. But Cantrill, who has naturally funny bones, has some tremendous, self-mocking lines and a relatable, everyman style, so it's to be hoped that he continues with stand-up.