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‘In retrospect, I should have gone to the doctors much, much earlier.” John Tothill is talking about his 2024 Edinburgh fringe. You’ll have heard some hair-raising fringe stories in your time. I doubt you’ve heard – until now! – of a performer who contrived almost to die, twice, in the delivery of consecutive fringe shows.
In order to fund his first set The Last Living Libertine, Tothill volunteered on a drugs trial: he was paid £2,000 to be infected with a deadly strain of malaria, a wheeze that went badly wrong when he began suffering from a bout of the disease greatly in excess of doctors’ expectations.
Thankfully, Tothill recovered. Then, while telling this story on stage last summer at the Pleasance, the Essex man started to experience sudden and severe stomach pain. He soldiered on, delaying a trip to hospital until his day off midway through the festival. This was unwise.
“When people talk about an exploded appendix, what they mean is, it’s started to leak. But my appendix had, in my doctor’s terms, obliterated. It had fully fallen apart and was floating around inside me. I’d gone into intra-abdominal sepsis, which is obviously a very high-risk state.” This Edinburgh fringe-lover, so desperate not to miss a show he’d performed through acute pain until a break in his schedule, ended up cancelling nine performances. “They cut through my stomach muscles so I couldn’t sit up. I couldn’t eat. But obviously it was less painful than what I’d been going through previously.” He pauses. “Writing a standup show.”
And so, for the second year running, Tothill arrives in Edinburgh with a near-death experience to relate – although this one will be “couched in a general history of gluttony in England,” he tells me over coffee in a London cafe. That’s par for the scholarly course as far as Tothill is concerned. His persona, which arrived fully formed on the fringe two summers ago, is one of giddy intellectual self-delight. He fizzes with foppish pleasure at our company as he discourses on his life, high-minded philosophy, and the bathetic discrepancies between them.
“It needs to be on stilts,” says Tothill of his unique style: “so high-status that it becomes low-status again. A kind of idiot academic [combined with] the naive hedonism of a slightly nerdy misfit. The dream is, you should feel like your parents have dropped you off at university in your first year, and you’ve wandered in to some idiot’s room, and he’s just so excited to be there. I was a bit like that at university,” adds the former Cambridge Footlights man, “all self-absorbed excitement in the idea that I’d met my people. There’s probably more of me in the character than I care to admit.”
Tothill credits the late, great director Adam Brace with helping him find this standup voice, and in remarkably short order: he took up standup in November 2022, nine months before his first full-length fringe set. While comedy had “always been the dream”, he’d previously worked as a primary school teacher – an experience he draws on in his shows. “Having been a teacher grounds my stage persona,” he says now. “The audience can understand [my shows] as a sort of pretentious lesson.” His debut set argued that hedonism in England died with the Reformation; its follow-up Thank God This Lasts Forever explored the pleasure principle and the Aristotelian good life – but also includes tales of boisterous socialising and a mouse infestation in Tothill’s flat.
The glee he displays on stage (to his audience: “I’m obsessed with you …!”) finds its echo in Tothill’s feelings about the festival, which he just can’t wait to revisit – not least because he missed so much of last year’s. “It’s brilliant, and it continues to be brilliant,” he insists – not the most fashionable opinion these days. “It’s very touching that there are people who want to come and see five shows a day. That’s life-affirming. Edinburgh’s main competitor is not another arts festival – it’s people staying at home and not coming to things. And that’s disgusting. That’s outrageous. That’s unforgivable.”
Those who do come to This Must Be Heaven are promised the tale of Edward Dando, “a folk hero in Victorian London,” Tothill tells me, “who ate hundreds of oysters and refused to pay for them”. Of such overindulgent forebears, Tothill is the proud inheritor. “My standup persona sees himself as the final incarnation of a long-forgotten tradition, his appendix story the culmination of centuries of a misguided culture.”
The irony is that before falling sick last summer, “I was taking [the fringe] very seriously,” he protests. “I wasn’t drinking, I was eating as healthily as I could.” He blames his medical crisis on one fatal portion of cheesy chips, “and I ate them far too close to bed.” Fatty foods are an occupational hazard for visitors to the fringe – but presumably Tothill, two brushes with death down, will be more careful this time round? “Well, in some ways,” he counters, “you graduate from a second near-death experience with a degree of cockiness you don’t get from just one. So no, I don’t think it has taught me to be more moderate. If anything, I’m going to be making up for lost time.”
