Chris Cantrill: Bradford-born SNL UK writer takes Rewilding to Edinburgh Fringe

“It's the only job in the world where the Foo Fighters are doing sound checks and stuff like that, and you don't pay them any attention at all because you're rushing around trying to solve, trying to fix this thing, so it's been wildly surreal,” he says. “I got to work with all these famous people, and that was not intimidating, but (it’s) definitely going through your head that you're talking to Tina Fey, who is one of the people who's not just a celebrity, but she’s also one of the people who has done your job to the very highest standard.”

Chris grew up near the former Richard Dunn Sports Centre in Odsal, south Bradford, going to school at what is now Dixons City Academy before moving down to London, then back up north to Manchester and is now settled near Hadrian's Wall, a move which has “got the whiff of a lockdown breakdown about it,” he admits. “Annoyingly, career-wise things have got better the further I’ve moved away from London.”

His latest show, Rewilding, explores his village’s response to the felling of the tree at Sycamore Gap.

Chris started comedy in his late 20s while living in the capital and working what he describes as a toxic job in restaurant industry marketing.

It’s not the funniest tale, he says. “I think I would have been clinically depressed at the time and also I remember being lonely, and it was an all-consuming sort of thing,” he says.

Comedy had always been a balm. “As a little kid, my mum and dad got this Jasper Carrott stand-up cassette. I think it came free with PG Tips and we had it in the car relentlessly. So I have loved comedy since I was little and I just thought I'd give it a go.”

He went down to a comedy night and was “very bad at it” but crucially met “a fraternity of people who think a bit differently,” he says. “Basically, this mad mess of neurodivergent oddballs, and it was brilliant.”

In Manchester, he formed a double act, The Delightful Sausage, with Hull-born Amy Gledhill and, professionally, the pair “got enough stuff to justify not stopping, and I think that's a good metaphor,” says Chris.

Of course, a double act from Bradford and Hull have an uphill battle in an industry which generally favours talent from wealthier backgrounds.

“We would never say, ‘This is working class comedy’, but we'd always show stuff through the references that we had,” says Chris.

It brought them recognition and they were twice in the running for 'Best Show' at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2019 and 2022.

“When we got nominated for the Edinburgh comedy award, we'd joke that being nominated for the highest award in the land is what finally gave us the confidence that was on the same level as a Cambridge University Footlights first-year sketch group.”

After a long application process, Chris was given the Saturday Night Live (SNL) job and in January temporarily moved back down to London before the show premiered on Sky in March.

SNL has been a staple of USA’s late night television culture since the mid-70s and has made the name of stars like Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy, Will Ferrell, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, Amy Poehler and Fey, who was the show's first female head writer before joining the cast.

Chris says: “The reality of writing for TV and stuff like that is, it tends to be hunched over computer, it's quite solitary, a lot of it's done remotely, whereas this (SNL) is: you're in a room with like 20, 30-odd people with the cast and you're just making each other laugh and saying mental things and stuff like that. You've never laughed as much,” he says.

“I had to give notes to Riz Ahmed and change a sketch between the dress (rehearsal) and the air. I was an extra in a sketch, I was dressed as a Victorian gentleman, and you’re walking around desperately, you've got like half an hour to fix something before it goes out live on telly, so you’re like shouting down the corridor, ‘I need another word for this! What about this?’ And it's really cool.”

People wondered whether cynical Brits would take to format from the US - a notion referenced in the UK show itself - but it was commissioned for a second season, coming in September.

Those pre-premiere nerves didn’t affect Chris too much because, as a stand-up, “I've gone to rooms and not been liked by upwards of 200 people”.

It all puts him in a good position for taking Rewilding to the Edinburgh Fringe.

“Since 2020 I've more or less been living on Hadrian's Wall, and I live about 10 minutes away from Sycamore Gap, which was cut down, as we all know, in the middle of the night by two idiots. It's basically a show about how my community processed that and processed the grief,” says Chris.

There was a time when the culprits were not known and he would see how accusations and suspicions about people, with no truth behind them, could get out of hand and “quickly enter people's consciousness”.

It is a defence of the work that goes on to maintain communities and their traditions, he says, and about a scenerio in which “I basically step into a position of community leadership, even though no one really wants it, and vast swathes of the village do not care for me at all”.

It sounds like the opposite of his career in comedy.

Chris Cantrill: Rewilding is at Monkey Barrel Comedy @ The Tron at Edinburgh Fringe from August 3 to 30.