Among past winners of the Edinburgh comedy award, few seemed less likely when the starter’s pistol fired than Ahir Shah in 2023. Not because Shah wasn’t a contender: he had been nominated twice before. But that year he arrived on the fringe with a mere work in progress, not even eligible for the award. Shah’s director, the great Adam Brace, had recently died and the comic had just returned to the stage after a break from comedy. But then Ends, a tribute to the performer’s late grandfather and a hymn to multicultural Britain, began gathering steam. Shah reclassified it as a work-now-finished and, to a chorus of rapturous acclaim, it bagged the biggest prize in world comedy.
Three years on, he is returning with the follow-up: less uncut diamond this time and more, he hopes, a polished gem. But didn’t the success of Ends prove polish was unnecessary? “You can get very in your head approaching the fringe, thinking: ‘Well, it has to be absolutely locked in by August because x thousand pounds are on the line,’” Shah admits. So doing a work in progress allowed him to “quiet some of those voices – and have less of a panic attack about what you’re going to say”.
