Milo Edwards: ‘There’s no proof I was on Clare College roof’

Comedian and University of Cambridge graduate Milo Edwards is bringing his latest comedy hour, How Revolting! Sorry to Offend – “a show about class, Britain, common decency and other revolting things that are best not talked about” – to the Junction this week.

The Essex-born stand-up studied classics at Peterhouse and was a member of the Cambridge Footlights and a student comic before moving to Moscow in 2015, where he became a TV performer.

How Revolting! Sorry to Offend ran at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2024 and his latest work-in-progress show was nominated for Best Comedy Show at the Newcastle Fringe Festival in July this year.

Tell us what the show, How Revolting! Sorry to Offend, is about?

I decided to write a show about the British class system from the perspective of someone who’s that type of middle class where you’re not posh but objectively your life wasn’t that hard either.

I’m from Essex but I often get called posh because I sound like I was raised on the set of Newsnight, and so this is a show about what we think of as posh, versus what posh actually is – and also about this time I got a temporary tattoo on my a***!

How did the show come to be?

This is my fourth solo hour and the previous two had been about losing my dad and then my mum in quick succession, so, having run out of bereavement material, I decided to examine my parents’ true legacy: the fact that I sound a bit like Fiona Bruce.

This show has already been on tour in Australia – how was it touring a show with such British themes over there?

In some ways it was easier than performing the show in the UK. Australians are well-versed in British culture but they have less prejudices about class than we do.

Having said that, there’s always some references in my shows that are too niche for non-Brits, so I’ve come up with a cheat system: I give people a handout explaining niche references in the show as they come in and then they laugh more because they’re pleased with themselves for doing the reading. If you’re not laughing, you literally are learning (who Danny Dyer is).

You used to be a TV comedian in Russia – how did that happen? What was it like?

I taught myself to speak Russian at uni (don’t ask) and I decided to move there for a gap year when I graduated to get fluent.

I was keeping my hand in at stand-up by doing these English gigs in an ex-pat bar in Moscow when I got scouted by some TV producers who (I can’t stress this enough) spoke no English.

I ended up performing in Russian on TV for the next 2.5 years and travelling all over the former Soviet Union to do shows.

Truly no two shows were the same; I performed in symphony halls, school gymnasiums in Siberia, and got arrested on the way to a show in Oryol. You can hear all about this in my YouTube special, Pindos.

What other projects have you got on the go? Anything exciting on the horizon?

My podcasts (Trashfuture, Glue Factory and Masters of Our Domain) keep me fairly busy and I’m taping a new special in September (my previous tour show, Sentimental), which I’m quite excited about.

Aside from that, I’m soon going to be releasing a show we taped in Bristol in June, which is a kind of improvised satire of Question Time.

I’m hoping if that goes well it can become a regular thing. Other than that, you can probably find me at a motorway services near you.

What are your memories of your time at Cambridge?

I have so many great memories of Cambridge from my uni days but, on the off-chance that my old director of studies is reading this, my favourite activity was probably reading classical literature in the library.

There is no legal proof that I was ever at The Maypole or on Clare College roof...

From 2018, Milo became a rising star of the UK comedy scene, with his 2019 Edinburgh Fringe show Pindos (about his time as a comedian in Russia) receiving five-star reviews. It was later released as a YouTube special in 2023.

His second Edinburgh Fringe hour, Voicemail, had a close to sold-out run at the festival in 2022 and was nominated for Best Show at the Leicester Comedy Festival before transferring to a UK tour and the Melbourne International Comedy Festival the following year.

As well as stand-up and podcasts, Milo has written for Mock the Week, Breaking the News, and BBC Radio 4’s The News Quiz, among other things, and his writing has also appeared in Private Eye and The New Statesman.

See Milo Edwards’ latest show, How Revolting! Sorry To Offend, at the Cambridge Junction (J3) on Sunday, 21 September. Tickets, priced £17, are available from junction.co.uk. For more on Milo, go to miloedwards.co.uk.