Comedian John Tothill and his malaria-funded laughs - Brighton date

“I’m so excited to bring my show to Brighton. As a gorgeous seaside town, I always think it feels like my hometown of Southend – if Southend had tried harder at school, dressed in wavier clothes and served nicer fish ’n’ chips!”

There will be plenty to talk about: “I have been building up to this tour for a while. I started doing stand-up comedy in 2022 but it feels like it was a lot longer than that in the making. I've wanted to do comedy forever.

“But actually I studied music and I was addicted to performing as a musician but at university I started doing sketch-comedy shows and plays. I was at Cambridge and I was just completely embarrassingly obsessed with performing. I must have been unbearable to be around. I was the archetypal theatre kid, but from that point I always knew that that was what I wanted to do. I graduated at the end of 2018 and then a year later we went into lockdown. So I'm pretty grateful that I graduated when I did because I loved university so much and it would have been a shame to miss out. After that I did a range of jobs. I did stupid jobs for a while. I worked in a coffee factory putting coffee into bags but I also worked as a primary school teacher for a year and a half or so and the great thing about that was that I could take on tutoring clients which gave me time to do comedy. That's when I went to Edinburgh in 2023 and then I went back again in 2024.”

The first visit was a visit he funded rather unusually: “One way that you can get gainful employment is to go on clinical trial and so I signed up to flu camp. Every year they round up a group of out-of-work actors and baby-faced English undergraduates and they give them flu and a couple of grand and then they harvest your antibodies. I signed up for flu camp but I was rejected because I was too healthy apparently! So they said that I was not eligible for flu camp but if I liked, they would put me down for a rather more vigorous trial. They asked if I had ever considered malaria? I don't know what price you would want for malaria but I settled for about £2,700.

“The plan is that they give you malaria and they monitor very closely and once you get to something like 500 parasites per millilitre of blood they start to treat you. It sounds like a lot but it's a bit like Covid really: you get a high temperature and a fever and you can't work and it feels a bit unpleasant but it's certainly not excruciating. But unfortunately my liver reacted unusually to the parasite and after a couple of weeks I suddenly started to feel pretty unwell. I had something like 28,000 parasites per millilitre of blood. They told me that I was going to be OK but that I was actually going to have pretty bad malaria. I had a high temperature and a high fever and you can throw in some pretty weird dreams and hallucinations. But really the tragic thing is that even though malaria is the third biggest killer in the world it is actually unbelievably treatable.”

And that's what funded Edinburgh first time round, at least partially: “It's scary how much it costs. That was 2023, and the show I took to Edinburgh in 2024 is the show that I'm now bringing to Brighton which talks about the malaria trial and lots of other things.”