Lamesha Ruddock
What a stellar, stand up set. I reckon we need Sapphire for football to come home!
Sapphire is a comedian from Leeds living in London, but that isn’t her full personality trait, even if she may try and make it that. She also has a degree.
She’s outrageously funny, balancing real-life events, from living in a hostel aged 16, to pretending to do sickle cell research to get a library card, with a razor-sharp eye for the absurd. She’s agile on her feet, very adaptive at having muffled sex and going viral on Insta.
She clowns the UK and what it is readily willing to accept, like SPAM, but Jerk Chicken and Yorkshire puddings may be just for the Farmers Market type. She paints a clear picture of her environment, from the great migration from Kent to Millwall of Stone Island gilets for the football games, to showing us peeks of her inner Graham, that screw-face we all have.
What grounds the piece is the solace and freedom she found through her love of football, through the coaches who were formative in her life, to the audition process and casting in Ted Lasso.
Sapphire keeps the audience hooked with crowd work, understanding that we are all living parallel lives, unlocking memories of female adolescence and the casual misogyny and fear that were imparted onto us.
Squeaky Bum Time shows her tenacity, from living in a “too woke for their own good” co-operatives, to making it to training even when she was late, to naming the adults that supported her.
Sapphire is a testament to the support systems that provided her a place to launch from. I really wonder how much we’ve lost from austerity that we don’t even know about.
Agents sign her.
Recommended Drink: A pint of Lion Wharf Stout.
Performances of Sapphire McIntosh – Squeaky Bum Time have now concluded at EdFringe 2026.
