The Week on Stage at Edinburgh Fringe: Seann Walsh, Mat Ewins, Aliya Kanani, Tarot

Seann Walsh: Is Dead. Happy Now? – The Stand ★★★★☆

Seann Walsh says he’s doing well for the first time in a wild four years. He asks us to cast our minds back to 2018. One day, he was competing on Strictly Come Dancing. And then, as you’ll probably remember, a cheating scandal with his dance partner made him into the most-hated man in Britain, with every newspaper branding him a “love rat”. “I could have found Maddie McCann – no one would have given a f***,” he says. He’s probably right.

But Walsh has taken his time and stands before us as a changed man with a comeback comedy hour. Given everything that he’s been through, it would be easy for him to turn his show into a rant against “cancel culture”. But he doesn’t. Instead, he speaks with honesty and humour about what happened, the aftermath and the impact on his mental health. He talks from a place of acceptance, and the comedy is infinitely funnier because of it.