For the first time in the history of Edinburgh’s festival fringe, the top comedy award has been shared between two acts.

Stand-up performers Hannah Gadsby and John Robins won the best comedy show at the lastminute.com Edinburgh comedy awards.

Judges who scoured pubs and church halls across the city for a winner ultimately found it impossible to choose between them.

“Both shows, which could not be more different, were hotly debated and fiercely fought for,” said Nica Burns, the West End stage producer and long-standing director of the fringe awards, at the ceremony on Saturday.

“Comedy has many possibilities and audiences very different funny bones. These two incredibly talented winners make you laugh and touch your heart.

“And yes, they will both receive £10,000 each so it’s been an expensive year,” she said, adding that it was unlikely two acts would share the award again. “Long may comedy break the rules.”

Robins has already attracted interest outside Edinburgh this summer because his show, The Darkness of Robins, focuses on the breakdown of his relationship with the television comedian and panel show star Sara Pascoe.

Pascoe’s show, LadsLadsLads, was predicated on the same personal theme; but though well-reviewed, it did not make the award shortlist of nine, which will do nothing to smooth relations between the former partners.

Yet when Robins, a 35-year-old Bristolian, accepted his award, he said: “The first person to congratulate me [on being nominated] was Sara, and I’m wearing the lucky beagle [charm] she gave me before the festival.”

Gadsby, meanwhile, has said her show Nanette, which emerged from a blog she wrote about equal marriage rights in Australia, would be her last. The effort of being a lesbian performer working in the face of what she described as a tide of sexist and homophobic disapproval had proved too much.

Aside from breaking with protocol, this year’s awards were also special because, to mark the 70th anniversary of both the Edinburgh international festival and its huge fringe, four famous former winners of the comedy award handed over the prize.

Mark Gatiss, Reece Shearsmith, Steve Pemberton and Jeremy Dyson – who all made their names as The League of Gentlemen – won the award in 1997, when it was known as the Perrier. The foursome were at Saturday’s festival to officiate alongside last year’s winner, Richard Gadd.

“It was a real vindication of our work,” Shearsmith said. “It wasn’t just us doing it for our friends. It was the Perrier award for goodness sake, something every comic wanted to win.”

“The thing I most remember was being hot,” Pemberton added. “We were in the hottest room at the fringe, the Pleasance Attic, in dinner suits.”

When The League of Gentlemen walked off with the prize, the defeated nominees on the shortlist were hardly relegated to obscurity: they were Al Murray, Graham Norton, Milton Jones and Johnny Vegas.

“Who, at the time, would have thought that all the shortlisted acts would become household names?” Burns said. “The League have gone on to be incredibly successful writers as well as performers, equally at home in drama as with comedy.”

Shearsmith and Pemberton are now best known as actors and the creators of the acclaimed BBC2 show Inside Number 9. Stage actor Gatiss is a co-creator of Sherlock, in which he appears as the detective’s older brother Mycroft; he is also a writer on Dr Who. Dyson created and co-wrote the West End show Ghost Stories.

The winner of the the fringe’s best newcomer award – and its £5,000 prize – was Natalie Palamides, for her show Laid, described as a wonderfully enthralling dark comedy about a woman’s relationship with her own fertility.



The seven other nominees for the best show award this year were: Ahir Shah, Elf Lyons, Jordan Brookes, Mae Martin, Mat Ewins, Sophie Willan and Spencer Jones.

Additional reporting: Veronica Lee