Christopher Hall

Playground impressions, then a dance career

Hall has described his comedy as starting in mimicry: impressions of Ruby Wax and Barbara Windsor performed in school playgrounds, encouraged by a father who kept a stock of character voices on the go. A sixth-form production of Hay Fever cast him as Clara the maid, a part that got laughs, and a sketch-comedy class at college produced a Spanish waiter character and a romantic farce performed with a friend. A tutor there told him his comic timing was the strongest thing he had.

The timing went unused for years. At 18 he enrolled at musical theatre college and trained as a dancer with ensemble work in mind — the West End, or ideally a job dancing behind Lady Gaga. The promoter copy for his current tour compresses that stretch into Soho dance-offs and cruise-ship musicals, which is a fair summary of a jobbing dancer's CV rather than a comic's. The childhood living-room shows he staged for family are the detail he keeps returning to in interviews, and they explain a lot about how the stand-up looks now.

Five months of posting daily

The pivot came during the second Covid lockdown, when Hall started putting sketches and characters on Instagram and TikTok and kept going — posting daily for roughly five months, sometimes twice a day. The run produced the material he is still best known for: Background Singers, a series built around his sister Elizabeth, plus the solo characters Your Cat and The Millennial. His management puts the aggregate at more than 12 million likes and over 50 million views.

Background Singers worked well enough that the pop acts being parodied started joining in. The collaboration list PBJ Management keeps runs to Kylie Minogue, Shania Twain, the Jonas Brothers and Sophie Ellis-Bextor; the tour announcement adds Sugababes, Natasha Bedingfield, JoJo, Delta Goodrem and Olly Alexander. He and Elizabeth have appeared together on ITV's Lorraine.

The industry side followed the numbers. Hall was signed by the agent Daisy Skepelhorn at PBJ Management after exchanging direct messages, and his first stand-up set — around 20 minutes, which is a long way past a club open spot — went up in September 2021 on a bill run by David O'Reilly. He went on to co-host the LGBTeeheehee night with Mark Bittlestone, who had offered him a split bill.

Four Fringe hours, and a tour that arrived early

The Edinburgh record is a steady climb rather than an overnight one. Self Helpless went up in 2023 and later toured to festivals in Australia. Girl For All Seasons followed at the 2024 Fringe, running at Gilded Balloon's Museum venue from 31 July to 25 August at 9.10pm, then became a UK and Ireland tour. A work-in-progress hour filled 2025. Pizazz, in 2026, is the fourth.

The 2024 tour is where the limits showed. Reviewing Girl For All Seasons at Cheltenham on 21 September 2024, Chortle's Steve Bennett gave it three stars and called it a triumph of personality over content — generous about Hall himself, who he said was as gregarious, personable and gossipy as anyone could want from a camp best mate, but blunt that the material backed away from meaning whenever it got close to any. Bennett's read was that a social-media following had put Hall in theatres before the writing was ready, with the emphasis on the word yet. Amy Webster was also on that bill and Hall covered for her when the tech failed.

Screen and radio work accumulated alongside. His credits include Vandullz for BBC iPlayer in 2022, The Stand Up Sketch Show and Celebrity Big Brother: Late & Live for ITV in 2024, and the film Don't Hate Me, also 2024. He has hosted the podcast Unguilty Pleasure as well as the one he is currently known for.

Pizazz: the hour that changed the reviews

Pizazz played Gilded Balloon Teviot's Lounge through August 2026, running until the 31st at 8.20pm with tickets at £15.50 to £17.50. The hour hangs on a thin narrative frame — Hall is on his way to a dinner party — which exists to hold a run of stories about stag dos, children's birthday parties, weddings and a fortnight in Zante. Underneath it is a specific subject: being the one still going out, in his early-to-mid thirties, while the friendship group marries and has children. Magic Mike Live and Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents both get a mention; so does the 2010s clubbing scene he is partly eulogising.

Chortle's Tim Harding reviewed it on 22 August 2026 and gave four and a half stars, calling Hall an inferno of charisma and noting that the script fires out funny moments in a complex attack pattern that stays surprising across the hour. Harding's point was that the apparent abandon is constructed: the staging is close to choreographed, with attention paid to how Hall moves and where he stands. Set against Bennett's 2024 verdict, that reads as the writing catching up with the performer.

Not everyone went that far. Max Roberts gave it three stars in The Skinny on 19 August 2026, praising the crowd work — audience members swap stories and come away feeling they were present for the nights in question — but arguing there is almost too much content packed into the hour, and that a tighter edit down to the best material would serve it better. Roberts linked the density to Hall's social-media training, where constant novelty is the job. Rachel Morrell, writing in The List on 9 August 2026, landed between the two: snappy lines, impressions, callbacks, physical comedy, and a participatory streak that she said turned even the shyest spectator into a social butterfly, but amusing fun rather than anything more searching.

October 2026: mid-tour

The Pizazz tour was announced on 2 December 2025, with a Ticketmaster pre-sale on 3 December and general release through the promoter Mick Perrin Worldwide on 4 December. It opened at Where Else? in Margate on 30 September 2026 and closes at the Leicester Square Theatre in London on 18 November, with Belfast's Limelight on 7 October and the Sugar Club in Dublin on 8 October already played. Mainland European dates take in Hotel Cecil in Copenhagen on 3 November and Boom Chicago in Amsterdam on 4 November.

Demand has moved the schedule since the announcement. The original routing listed one Manchester night at HOME on 10 October; a second has since been added on 14 October. Liverpool's Philharmonic Music Room has appeared on 22 October, and the London finale has grown into two Leicester Square Theatre nights, 11 and 18 November. Cardiff takes two nights at the Wales Millennium Centre on 13 and 14 November. Shows are 18+.

The podcast is now the steadier engine. Stay Hydrated with Chris and Lizzie launched in 2025, drops weekly on Tuesdays and has passed 85 episodes, holding a 4.8 rating from 52 reviews on Apple Podcasts in the UK; its most recent instalments were recorded live at the Fringe. On announcing the tour Hall said only that it would be his best show yet — a claim the Edinburgh notices have, on balance, supported.