When Amy Gledhill and Chris Cantrill received the life-changing news that they’d been nominated for the 2019 Edinburgh comedy awards – the Oscars of live comedy – they were hiding in a nearby field.
The comedy duo, also known as the Delightful Sausage, had been performing Ginster’s Paradise, a show set in a sinister Butlin’s-style holiday camp where their characters are working as “salmon coats” entertainers. It was their third time at the festival together and things were going better than ever, but they didn’t want to get ahead of themselves.
“We knew when the nominations were coming out, so we thought: ‘We’ll go be alone and be sad together for half an hour.’ But then we did get nominated. Amy didn’t believe me, [and] thought I was telling a lie to upset her!” Cantrill laughs. It took Gledhill a full 15 minutes before she accepted the news was true.
In conversation, Bradford-born Cantrill and Hull native Gledhill are quick to laugh, delighting each other with absurd turns of phrase and friendly roasting. They’re quick to deflect compliments, too.
“This is a bit, like, problems of the king,” continues Cantrill. “But I found [the nomination] very overwhelming.” At a party for nominees, the stream of compliments became too much. “We sort of had panic attacks and had to get out. So we went back to the field!”
Ginster’s Paradise was more than deserving of its nomination. The pair’s work is scattered with darkly nostalgic references to British eccentricities: working men’s clubs, variety shows, village life and, of course, meat. When they first started performing together in Manchester in 2016, the Delightful Sausage was the name of their comedy night. They donned hotdog and butcher outfits to stay on theme.
There’s a hint of the League of Gentlemen (a formative influence for Gledhill, in particular), plus flashes of comedy double acts through time: the Mighty Boosh, Vic and Bob, Morecambe and Wise, Abbott and Costello. They blend eerie horror with huge laughs and strong storytelling , and although the hotdog outfit is long gone, they’re never without a ridiculous prop. The pair met through Cantrill’s then girlfriend, now wife, Nicola. Cantrill had a digital marketing job in London and started performing standup as an escape. Gledhill was in Leeds working odd jobs and doing sketch comedy with Nicola who, one night, invited Cantrill to watch.
“I remember you looked like … ” Gledhill pauses to laugh, “ … like a young Conservative in a buttoned-up shirt. I remember thinking: ‘He seems nice, but I can’t imagine him being funny.’” Yet when Gledhill finally saw Cantrill perform, he was hilarious. “I had to tell Nicola: ‘I’m really sorry, I think your boyfriend is my favourite comedian.’” He was equally impressed with Gledhill’s comedy. “She used to do this mad stuff like the birth of a turnip Jesus,” he says.
They moved to Manchester around the same time, then Nicola became pregnant and quit comedy. “So me and Amy started something. Saying it out loud, it doesn’t sound great,” Cantrill says of their origin story. “I don’t think I come across well in this either, Chris,” adds Gledhill. “‘You’re pregnant? All right, what’s your husband doing?’”
Impending fatherhood forced Cantrill to get serious about his comedy career. The Delightful Sausage’s first show was a mock internet safety presentation that saw the pair get sucked into the dark web. But their comedy experiments were not always appreciated. At one gig in Cardiff, a crowd of lads turned on them. “We had to run out of the pub to my car and lock the doors,” says Gledhill. “I don’t think that was worth the £50!” At another, they performed for 30 minutes to a silent crowd. In desperation, Cantrill started doing press-ups. “Legend has it I did a thousand,” he says. “Write that down!”
They have now perfected their act: atmospheric, stylised comedy plays starring their onstage alter egos, who have a codependent but loving friendship. “We’ve very delicately found out exactly what each other’s flaws are, then turned them right up. Sometimes we’ll be writing and be like: ‘Chris will be really neurotic about this – sorry, the character Chris, the character,’” Gledhill says. “There’s no ego. I think that’s why our double act has lasted so long.”
Amy (the character) is “street-smart, emotionally intelligent, but chaotic, lazy and sexually driven. An absolute muck tub,” says Gledhill. Chris, meanwhile, is “uptight, ambitious, vain. We made a decision early on that Chris’s persona would be very centrist. We love the idea that his hero is Tony Blair. You don’t see many characters that are just right of centre, but it’s so ripe for comedy.” Chris drives the narrative with his schemes. “He’s a man of action, but all of his actions are stupid,” Cantrill says.
In their 2022 show, Nowt But Sea, Chris’s lust for fame sparks trouble when he drags Amy to an isolated island on the invitation of “an elite celebrity agent who’s promising to change our fortunes”, Cantrill explains. The hilariously creepy agent, played by comedian Paul Dunphy, attempts to drive a wedge between the friends. As with their past work, it draws on real-life events. Ginster’s Paradise explored the tension that arose when Gledhill began pursuing her solo career. This time, it was an existential question about the Delightful Sausage’s future.
During lockdown, Cantrill and his family moved to Hadrian’s Wall to support his in-laws, whose guest accommodation business was suffering under pandemic restrictions. Meanwhile, Amy had just begun a relationship with a London-based comedian and elected to move south. They feared the separation could undo the Sausage. In reality, they think it has made them more focused, and they carve out chunks of time to write and rehearse. But another problem remained.
“We never make any money from this and it takes up so much time that there was a point where it was like: are we doing the right thing?” Gledhill says. “You have to have confidence that it will all pay off. Neither of us have huge amounts of confidence in what we do.” An answer to that may have come when Nowt But Sea was nominated for this year’s Edinburgh comedy awards, along with Gledhill’s solo show.
This time, it was Cantrill’s turn to think he’d been tricked. “My friend’s very good and has a great show, so when she said: ‘We’ve been nominated,’ I went: ‘Brilliant love, you deserve that.’ And she said: ‘No! Well, I have yes, but we’ve been nominated!’ Then we had to keep it secret, but we were both crying in the street.”
People may be surprised, I suggest, to hear they are still blindsided by their own success. “I often say to Amy, it’s taken us being nominated for the highest award in the land to have the same level of confidence as a Cambridge Footlights first-year sketch troupe,” Cantrill says. “Anxiety and impostor syndrome have propelled us forward.”
Post-Ginster’s, they created the excellent podcast Tiredness Kills, appeared in Alma’s Not Normal and got their own BBC Radio special. Recently they’ve appeared in The Emily Atack Show, Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared and their own spin-off from Late Night Mash, a mini-series called Great Britain: Wide Open and Ready, described by Cantrill as “a round-the-country travelogue, through the prism of how shit and horrible and curdled a place Britain is”. Even more is happening behind the scenes: they’re planning their biggest live show yet – a comedy panto. “We’re thinking musicians, dancers, comedians, really go for it and see how much money we can lose!” Gledhill laughs.
Pre-pandemic, it sometimes felt that comedians in the north were neglected by TV gatekeepers. Now, virtual meetings and the rise of online comedy are changing things, says Gledhill, while Cantrill thinks shows such as Derry Girls have encouraged commissioners to look beyond London. “People now want ‘authentic voices from regional areas’. It shouldn’t feel risky to commission someone from a regional place. In fact,” he says, “it could be much more interesting.”
The big dream has always been a TV series – “the Sausage sitcom”, Gledhill says. “Because this is the thing we want the most, we have to be the most careful with it. We don’t want to rush. The next year will be us refining that idea, then hopefully selling it for millions. Or, if it’s true to us, we’ll make nothing out of it, but it’ll be a great time.”
Nowt But Sea is at Soho theatre, London, 21-26 November.
