The foppish comic underwent a drugs trial to fund his Edinburgh show – and caught malaria. The next year he almost died on stage with an exploded appendix. Why is he going back?
‘In retrospect, I should have gone to the doctors much, much earlier.” John Tothill is talking about his 2024 Edinburgh fringe. You’ll have heard some hair-raising fringe stories in your time. I doubt you’ve heard – until now! – of a performer who contrived almost to die, twice, in the delivery of consecutive fringe shows.
In order to fund his first set The Last Living Libertine, Tothill volunteered on a drugs trial: he was paid £2,000 to be infected with a deadly strain of malaria, a wheeze that went badly wrong when he began suffering from a bout of the disease greatly in excess of doctors’ expectations.
