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? 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”.
Notwithstanding his patrician accent (he once joked that he sounds as if “I’ve been colonised by my own voice”), Shah is no stranger to low confidence. His approach to standup is to ask: “How are you justifying breaking the silence that exists in this room prior to you walking out?” With Ends, the justification was ample. Like all the Londoner’s work, the show teemed with ideas and erudition, this time at the service of a tale (as Shah now describes it) of “the sacrifices people are willing to make in their own lives for subsequent generations.
It was about what families do for one another.” But the show, pulled together as Rishi Sunak became prime minister, was also about the UK, and how it had changed since Shah’s grandfather moved here in the 1960s. But for most of my adult life, we’ve reflexively told only very sad and bad stories about ourselves. And you can only go on like that for so long.
As an individual, you can lie in bed saying: ‘I’m the worst person who ever existed. This is all pointless.’ You can do that – and, by God, I’ve given it a good go. But it’s no way to lead a fulfilling, three-dimensional life.
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