A creepy hotel run by Ronald McDonald in Berlin, meeting Wayne Rooney and a spanking new boiler all feature in Scott Bennett’s new stand-up show Blood Sugar Baby. He takes the audience back 15 years to when these life-changing events happened to him and his wife Jemma. Performing at the Soho Theatre as part of a wider tour, Bennett recalls drinking Blossom Hill in hospital toilets, falling in love with a handsome surgeon and travelling on a private jet all in the space of five months when his 10-week-old baby was admitted with congenital hyperinsulinism.
But Bennett reassures the audience from the start that this is a story with a happy ending. So happy, in fact, that baby Olivia is now 15 and “annoying.” The scene setter for Blood Sugar Baby is not the lead up to the frightening events of 2010 and the dread of her powerless parents, but the life with an uncommunicative teenager who stashes used crockery under her bed and is permanently attached to one headphone trailing from her ear. And it is this classic comedy of digression that motors the show, centred around the unfolding experience of the core story but unfolding in a number of unexpected and entertaining directions.
Baffled by the fascination with visiting other people’s babies, “every day’s a disappointment,” Bennett explains when the non-interactive child spends most of its first weeks looking like “a dehydrated Phil Mitchell.” And there are further light-hearted reflections on no-nonsense parenting drawn from his own childhood with his dad’s brusque man’s man style that recurs in several places throughout the show. Bennett weaves between stories about his father’s DIY skills and insistence on tie wearing with his own less confrontational approach, struggling to ask the right questions at the hospital.
Although this is a frightening story, with some years’ distance and a healthy if sleepy teenager at home, Bennett mines his memory for all its bizarre but very British comedy moments. A great sequence likens the hospital Costa café to a field hospital with queues of patients on drips and with eye patches discussing graphic ailments over a tuna melt. The encounter with the Manchester United football team visiting the children’s ward proves an opportunity for some classic and more contemporary comedy references as Bennett’s very hairy baby (a side effect of her medicine) proves awkward when meeting the follicle-challenged Rooney, while a more topical nod to Rebekah Vardy lands well.
Bennett weaves all of this together across the 75-minute show, interacting with the front row who become the main target of the ad-libbed sections and mocking his own passing resemblance to Keir Starmer. But there are plenty of enjoyable throwaway lines – ensuring his baby is given a “northern dummy” (a sausage roll) as soon as possible – and using the show as a springboard to a book deal and an appearance on The One Show. A comedian’s family and friends know they’ll inevitably appear in the work at some stage, but for the Bennetts, at least there is a happy ending – they got a new boiler and some photos of a very hairy baby to show a room full of strangers 15 years on.
Runs until 10 May 2025 and continues to tour
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Hairy digressions
