Chris Forbes is a comedian and actor who has been an in-demand fixture on the UK circuit for over 15 years. As well as numerous Fringe shows and gigging all over the world, he’s known for playing PC Charlie MacIntosh on BAFTA Award-winning comedy Scot Squad, and for creating and starring as the ‘Other Murray Brother’, Duncan Murray, in a series of sketches featuring Judy Murray. He’s bringing his latest show, ‘Father Christmas’ to the Fringe in August. We spoke to Chris about the show, his writing process, and the best things about the Fringe.

Can you tell us about ‘Father Christmas’?

It’s a fairly unique show, obviously, given that it’s a show that’s set at Christmas and about Christmas, but obviously performed not at Christmas, and there is a reason for that. One of the big factors in me wanting to do a show about Christmas time was becoming a dad again last December, just before Christmas. So, ‘Father Christmas’ has a bit of a dual meaning in that respect.

But also Christmas is such a small and interesting kind of microcosm of family; fallouts, fears, love, joy, hilarity, loneliness – it’s kind of an ecosystem of every single human emotion. So it just seemed like a great place to set the show around, as there’s a relatable part of that particular seasonal holiday for people that do and don’t celebrate it. Without giving too much away, there is another big reason that I have done a show that’s set at Christmas, and I guess I’m going through, chronologically in a way, a lot of different Christmases that I’ve experienced, and how each particular one has affected my life leading up to the last one, where we’ve just had a little girl, a wee Christmas baby.

And what’s your writing process, from the germ of an idea through to actually getting it ready to present to an audience?

This is the most I’ve worked on a show, I think. I’m certainly guilty of, and I know most comics would say, you have an idea and you’ve tried it out, but sometimes the Fringe comes much faster than you expect, and you’re still trying to figure the show out really, in the first couple of weeks, and by the end of it you’re thinking, ‘Oh, I’ve got a good show here,’ but the Fringe is finished. So I did try and start this process just over a year ago, actually, and the idea of already setting a show at Christmas was in my head as just a unique experience.

I like the idea of an audience coming into a room and already feeling like they’ve been transported to a different time, a different moment in life, and feeling like they’re instantly immersed within a show, so I was already kicking ideas around doing a Christmas themed show, and then when our baby was born, that really just cemented things. And the links between that and other events in my life were just too hard to ignore. So yeah, from a small germ of an idea of thinking it’d be funny to see people coming into a Christmas room in the hot heat of Summer grew kind of arms and legs,

Was there a point where you decided to be more autobiographical in terms of using other Christmases as almost narrative stepping stones?

Yeah, big time. There’s particular events in my life that are very easy to plot by going back to certain Christmases, and I think again, whether you have family or don’t have family, Christmas is a time of year that really highlights those relationships positively and negatively at times. I realised very early on that was a good way to chronologically tell a particular story of my life, and it was also a lovely excuse to kind of go down memory lane and find a lot of old pictures that I use in the show as well.

You’re also bringing your podcast, Stop Watering Dead Flowers, to the Fringe for one night. Can you tell us about that, and how you translate that to a live setting? And do you have guests lined up for it already?

Well, I’ll answer the last question first, which is no, I don’t yet! I’ll probably wait until closer to the time to confirm the guests, but being that it’s the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, there’s so many great characters and acts or people around, so I’ve got no doubt we’ll have some tremendous guests, and I was really spurred on by the success of the first live show that we did at the Glasgow Stand, which was a great experience.

The podcast, obviously, is about sharing these, you know, ‘dead flowers’, as they’re called; kind of annoying memories and brain worms that you can’t get out of your head. If you picture it last minute, you can’t get back to sleep. And the beautiful thing about doing it with a live audience, as well as having extra guests – we did it with three guests in the live show, and we’ll be doing that again in Edinburgh – is that the audience were encouraged to bring along their own stories and fill in a little slip that we hand out, and we share them live and talk about them with the panel, and we have a microphone that roams, and we can speak directly to the the audience. So people that are fans of the show get to come and really be involved, which is great fun.

As someone who gigs in Scotland all year-round, when it comes to the Fringe is there ever a sense that Scottish acts are almost sidelined sometimes by the acts coming up from the rest of the UK and further afield? Is it harder to get an audience, or do you have a loyal audience that comes to see you every time?

I think I’m in a fortunate position where I’m not a huge act or name by any stretch of the imagination, but have have been going to the Fringe for long enough that I feel like I have a nice level of support from people that will come along and see shows that are a bit different. I realise this one’s particularly different in that it’s a Christma-themed show, but I’ve had people come along to my show about 90s basketball, as well as a show about meeting a man that claimed to be the son of God. So thankfully people have built up a good deal of patience and curiosity with the shows I attempt to do at the Fringe.

I think it’s a larger discussion about [whether] the Scottish acts get a bit sidelined, and sometimes I think it’s an easy thing to assume. But I think it’s just because there’s such an influx all of a sudden of acts from south of the border, but also from around the world. It can feel like we’re sidelined, but I think it’s just [that] you’re all of a sudden immersed amongst acts from literally all over the world, so of course that brings a certain sense of excitement for punters that get to go, ‘Well, we’re not going to get a chance to maybe see this again,’ But yeah, I I know all Scottish acts really do champion the idea of going along to support local when you can, and support the acts that you go and see throughout the year, because it does mean an awful lot to us to get to be able to perform our kind of ‘home festival’ if you like, so it’s nice if we’re not forgotten about.

What constitutes a successful Fringe for you? Is it the the experience generally you’ve had, or is it a lot of bums on seats, or something less easily defined?

You always want an audience, and no one is any stranger to the fact that sometimes there’ll be days where there’s harder rooms because it’s very quiet, But overall, a successful Fringe, I think, is if you can literally just enjoy doing your show; if you don’t get too caught up in the whirlwind of the Fringe and start comparing yourself to other people or worrying about someone else’s show, or what people thought about your show. You have written and are performing a show that you’ve wanted to present to people, so if you can’t enjoy that at this type of festival, then you’re doing something wrong,

But it’s very hard to sometimes to [stop] the mind straying from just enjoying the fact that you are performing something that you are lucky enough to get to perform. So if I can concentrate on that – and with two young kids, and traveling back and forth every day, which takes me completely out of the bubble, I’m hoping that will help me achieve that – and because my show is also about my family, a successful run will also mean that my brother and sister will come and not disown me afterwards.

And what for you are the best things about the Fringe?

I think the best thing is just that there is… this sounds like such a cliche, but there’s literally something for everyone, and you don’t even need to know what your thing is. As a punter, you can just go to Edinburgh, and you could even just walk around. I love the idea that there is something on every 100 meters of the Royal Mile, or in every corner, you could walk into any pub or venue, and there’s going to be a kids’ entertainer, or a magician, or a band, or a comedian, or a piece of theatre, and it’s remarkable.

Me and my friend were just looking for something that was really unusual. We were trying to almost go out of our way to find something that was wild, and we ended up going to see a piece of theatre that was a movement workshop by a female performer that was in her 80s, that was just all about what she could still achieve with her body, and she was like balancing ourselves on seesaws and planks of wood, and and you just think, ‘There’s nowhere else in the world you’d have been able to just walk around and find that,’ So yeah, the ‘variety is the spice of life’ type of element is what I think is the best thing,

Apart from the show and the podcast, can we expect to see you performing elsewhere during August, doing guest spots compilation shows, and that sort of thing.

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Yeah, so I always love being involved with the ‘Best of Scottish’ lineups at the Stand Comedy Club, and I’ll be involved with ‘The Big Show’s, multi-bill at the Monkey Barrel, as well, and popping up here and there. I’m very excited about getting to do the Forth on the Fringe gig at the Playhouse, which is a gig I’ve been really, really keen to do for years, and luckily getting to do it this year.

And are there any other shows or performers at the Fringe that you would recommend we go and see that might not get as much attention as they should?

Echoing back to what we spoke about near the start, there is a lot of Scottish or Scottish-based acts that are doing brilliant shows. I think Gareth Waugh‘s is going to be a show that I think a lot of people should go and check out. [It’s] kind of true crime. almost podcast. story meets comedy show. And other people that I’ve kind of seen little sneak peeks of… I think Kate Hammer is going to have a great show. My good friend Mark Nelson, he’s only doing a short run, so always well worth it if you can get a ticket for him. There’s so many, and it’s almost a shame to try and pick out one or two, but there’s a couple.

Following Scot Squad, and your memorable cameo [as a tattooed junkie] in Dept. Q, can we expect to see you on our screens again soon?

Nothing in particular, certainly high-profile TV-wise, but I am very excited about a short film that we filmed at the beginning of the year that is out this Summer, which is called Standing on the Bridge, and it’s a film that highlights a very different kind of theme for me. It’s about female on male domestic violence, which is based on real stories and kind of the Channel 5 documentary, My Wife My Abuser, so that was a real change of pace for me, doing a very dramatic role, but I’m very excited to be part of that project that’s highlighting this kind of very real issue. I’m looking forward to seeing the reaction to that.

‘Father Christmas‘ is at Monkey Barrel Comedy 2 from Tue 4 to Sun 30 Aug 2026

‘Stop Watering Dead Flowers‘ is at Stand 1 at The Stand Comedy Club on Thu 20 Aug 2026