Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Cecily Hitchcock promises us a silly, silly time and she delivers. Wearing a T-shirt which reads ‘I have been nothing but sexy and funny to you all’, she combines feminist, self-deprecating body humour with a sultry, lip-glossy delivery. She is commanding and a safe pair of hands. When a squealing baby interrupts, she threatens to marry it.

Hitchcock has built an online following with surreal stories and offbeat observations, but Family Recipe is her debut Fringe hour. Here, she stretches that sensibility across a full show, returning to her childhood in Cambourne and the peculiar dinnertime mythology of her own family.

The show centres around being the youngest (and supposedly strangest) of three in the Cambridgeshire new-build town constructed around the turn of the millennium. Cambourne is cosily conjured through lifted local news headlines and Avon ladies arriving at the door like ‘cunty Jehovah’s Witnesses’.

What appear to be real childhood anecdotes spiral into something more outrageous. You’re left asking, could her father really have eaten a pheasant from the spokes of a neighbour’s bicycle wheel? Did Mollie from marketing deliberately kill a cat at nine years old? Did Hitchcock herself really ask a one-night stand to perform American Civil War roleplay? And, crucial to the whole Family Recipe saga, could a family really have eaten bananas wrapped in ham for dinner?

The pleasure comes from not knowing quite where Hitchcock’s life ends and her imagination takes over. Other bits have the quality of wacky pub talk, such as wondering what would happen if salmon took gap years as part of their migratory patterns. It is funny, but the titular idea of family recipes does not quite carry the whole hour. Jokes can feel randomly assembled rather than part of the same meal.

There is something very 2008 about Hitchcock’s Cambourne, right down to her attempts at Tony Blair and Gordon Brown satire. I wish she wouldn’t do the accents.

She has good fun with props, asking a punter to climb into a banana costume while she dons a pink blanket with a hole cut into it like a Halloween ghost costume intended to make her look like ham.

The show is uneven, but Hitchcock herself never seems uncertain. Her campy, homemade silliness feels almost defiant in a greyer, straighter world. She told us we would have a silly, silly time and, amid the bananas, ham and gap-year salmon, she was as good as her word.

Review date: 14 Aug 2026
Reviewed by: Lauren Sneade
Reviewed at: Pleasance Courtyard