Latest news with #BestNewcomerAward
Evening Standard
08-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Evening Standard
Edinburgh Fringe Round Up
Sometimes the stories come completely out of the blue. New Yorker Cat Cohen, winner of the 2019 Best Newcomer Award here, had a major tour planned for 2023 which she abruptly cancelled. In her latest show Broad Strokes – don't call it a comeback – Cohen (Pleasance, five stars) reveals how she had a stroke at the age of 30. It was totally unexpected, though looking back there may have been a link to the migraines that she had suffered from since childhood. She thought she was a hypochondriac but an MRI scan revealed a hole in her heart. Though of course she could still be a hypochondriac.
Scotsman
28-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Star of Live at the Apollo and 8 Out of 10 Cats comes to Edinburgh this September
Comedian Dane Baptiste – as seen on TV shows including Live at the Apollo, Mock the Week, and 8 Out of 10 Cats – brings his new tour show to Edinburgh on September 17 with a gig at Dreghorn Loan Hall. Sign up to our daily newsletter Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to Edinburgh News, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... The show is part of a ten-date tour of Scotland, organised by Aberdeen-based promoters Breakneck Comedy, which starts in Aberdeen on Friday, September 12 and finishes in Banchory on Sunday, September 21. Dane started out in comedy in 2012, and just two years later in 2014, he was nominated for the Best Newcomer Award at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe – the first Black British comic to be nominated for the award. After his success in Edinburgh, Dane went on to create, write, and star in Sunny D (BBC Three, 2015 - 2016), and has appeared on radio shows including Just a Minute and The News Quiz on Radio 4. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Breakneck Comedy founder, Naz Hussain, says: 'I'm so excited to be working with Dane on his tour of Scotland. As anyone who's seen him on shows like Live at the Apollo will know, audiences can expect non-stop laughs and a great night of comedy'. Dane has appeared on numerous TV shows including Live at the Apollo Naz explains that he believes comedy tours don't have to be confined to big towns and venues, 'at Breakneck Comedy we're all about bringing big names to smaller places, so as well as cities such as Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen, we make sure that our schedules include smaller towns and venues, that don't normally get included in tours. 'I'm delighted that we've been able to add some new venues and locations to our list with Dane's tour. For us it's all about bringing comedy to as many people as possible and finding new venues and spaces that we can bring the laughter to' says Naz.
Scotsman
17-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Edinburgh comedy award winner Joe Kent-Walters returns to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe with more Frankie Monroe
Award winning comedian Joe Kent-Walters is set to return to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe this year with a brand new hour, 'Joe Kent Walters is Frankie Monroe: DEAD!!! (good fun time)'. Sign up to our daily newsletter Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to Edinburgh News, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... This follows a triumphant debut run at the Fringe last year which saw Joe sell out his entire month-long run as well as extra shows added to keep up with demand. The end of last year's festival also saw Joe take home the award for Best Newcomer at the Edinburgh Comedy Awards. As well as the Best Newcomer Award, Joe also received nominations for NextUp's Biggest Award in Comedy, the 2024 ISH Comedy Awards' Best Newcomer and Best Newcomer in the Comedian's Choice Awards 2024. He has since been performing the show across the UK including three sold out runs at London's Soho Theatre. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Last year, Joe delighted Fringe audiences with his devilish comedic creation Frankie Monroe (the MC of Rotherham's working men's club – The Misty Moon). In his debut show, we witnessed Frankie lose his club as he got dragged by his balls into the pits of hell. This year, we pick up where we left off, Frankie is down in hell and working as an Entertainments Officer. But while Frankie is thrilling hell dwellers like a Butlins Redcoat in the land of the dead, he hears whispers that back upstairs his club has been taken over by his old rival Vegas Dave, who is trying to gentrify the club for cash. Can Frankie get out from hell and save his club from a fate of IPAs and overpriced shite? Expect this show to be bigger and better with even more characters, even catchier songs, and even more trickier tricks. 'Joe Kent-Walters is Frankie Monroe: DEAD!!! (good fun time)' is directed by Jonathan Oldfield and written by Joe Kent-Walters with Molly McGuinness. Joe Kent-Walters as Frankie Monroe As well as Best Newcomer, Joe is also the winner of the BBC New Comedy Award 2023 and winner of the Best Show award at the Leicester Comedy Festival 2024 with this debut hour as well as a past winner of the Chortle Student Comedy Award 2021.
Scotsman
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Lorna Rose Treen: 24 Hour Diner People
Award-winning character comedian Lorna Rose Treen is back at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe this August with her hotly tipped second hour, 24 Hour Diner People – a nonsense-soaked, joy-fuelled, character comedy love letter to the gloriously ridiculous. Sign up to our daily newsletter – Regular news stories and round-ups from around Scotland direct to your inbox Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Following the sell-out success of her debut Skin Pigeon, which earned her Chortle's Best Newcomer Award and saw The Guardian hail her as "a major new voice in character comedy," Lorna returns with an even more ambitious and imaginative show, set in a liminal American diner where logic is left at the door and absurdity rules the menu. A second love letter to the ridiculous ('I'm so in love I can't stop writing letters,' she says), 24 Hour Diner People offers up a full-fat collection of eccentric, escapist, and delightfully silly characters – all served with a side of proper jokes. Expect to meet a waitress who dreams of flying, a trucker with unusually long arms, a woman who's kept her umbilical cord, a 1960s spy on a caffeine high, and a teenager giddy from her first kiss – all somehow coexisting in a strange, time-warped roadside diner. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'I wanted to build the nonsense into a world,' says Treen. 'The diner is a place out of time – a fantasy Americana seen through the eyes of a Midlands-bred woman raised on Mean Girls and telly, not travel. It's the perfect stage for messing about with identity, nostalgia, and reality, especially in an age where everything feels online, uncanny and just a little too curated.' Lorna Rose Treen The show is directed by long-time collaborator Jonathan Oldfield (BBC New Comedian Finalist 2024, Frankie Monroe, Lucy Pearman), and features a set designed by Jimmy Slim – whose surreal visual work previously brought life to Skin Pigeon and has worked with Jazz Emu, Sam Campbell, and Channel 4's Don't Hug Me I'm Scared. Treen's passion for creating 'weird women' is front and centre, continuing her mission to give under-heard female tropes their comic due. Every character she plays is a woman – sometimes subversive, sometimes chaotic, always funny. 'I like taking a woman who might traditionally be voiceless in a story – 'the wife', for example – and giving her a stupid voice, and a ridiculous monologue, and letting her be the funniest thing on stage.' Alongside the show, Treen has been working on series two of her acclaimed parody radio programme Time of the Week for BBC Radio 4 – co-created with Jonathan Oldfield and starring Sian Clifford (Fleabag) – which recently won British Comedy Guide's Best Radio Sketch Show 2024 and has been nominated for the ARIA's Best Comedy Award 2025. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Lorna Rose Treen is an award-winning comedian, actor, improviser and writer from Redditch, West Midlands, now based in London. Her 2023 debut character comedy show Skin Pigeon sold out in a week, received 8+ five-star reviews, two sell-out transfers to Soho Theatre, a second sell-out Fringe run in 2024, and won Dave's Best Joke of the Fringe. It was named one of The Telegraph's Top 5 Comedy Shows of 2023. She has a thriving online following with over 165,000 Instagram followers and 141,000 TikTok followers, where her viral parody street interviews and sketch content regularly reach millions. She is co-creator and star of the surreal parody woman's radio show Time of the Week (BBC R4), recently awarded Best Radio Sketch Show 2024 by British Comedy Guide. Her voice can also be heard in The Sound of Us (Jazz Emu, BBC R4), Nora Meadows' Week of Wellness (Katy Wix, BBC R4), and on-screen appearances include Goblin Solutions (Channel 4), The Emily Atack Show (ITV), and BBC Three's New Comedy Awards. Lorna is also a founding member of the hit improvised true crime mockumentary show Criminally Untrue.
