Edinburgh Fringe sell-out Chief Petty Officer comes home to Sheffield
After a sell-out 10-day run at the 2026 Edinburgh Fringe, Chief Petty Officer is coming back to Sheffield for its first performance since the festival.
And, because I believe comedy can happen without destroying your Monday, it’s a civilised Sunday afternoon show, with brilliant support still to be announced. And if you’re just here to find the ticket link, I’m going to make it nice and easy - it’s here! Show is at 4pm on 4th October at Sheffield Plate!
What is Chief Petty Officer?
Chief Petty Officer is my visually driven comedy lecture about pettiness, built from an unreasonable amount of research into the grudges, feuds and magnificently disproportionate acts that have peppered history and popular culture.
What do 50 Cent, Fleetwood Mac, Count Binface, Wagatha Christie and a collection of people who simply could not let something go have in common? Quite a lot, as it turns out.
At the centre of it all is the Hill to Die On, a highly scientific graphical representation of the point at which satisfying pettiness tips over into catastrophic commitment to the bit.
There are strange true stories, original research, history, pop culture, audience judgement and considerably more graph-based analysis than any sensible person would have committed to a stand-up show.
It’s smart, structured nonsense for people who enjoy learning something while they laugh. It’s basically the start of a conversation I hope you continue to have on the tram on the way home, in the pub, at pub quizzes, and via DMs to me when you see petty nonsense out and about after.
From Sheffield to a sell-out Edinburgh Fringe run
Sheffield has been a huge part of this show from the beginning.
I worked on Chief Petty Officer in front of audiences here at The Fat Cat and Square Hole, and I couldn’t have asked for better people to help me figure it out. Sheffield audiences are funny, generous and wonderfully honest. They’ll come with you wholeheartedly when something works, and you also know pretty quickly when it doesn’t. I moved here just over three years ago and there is a real thread of familiarity that matches where I’m actually from, Cardiff. Born Welsh, spiritually Northern by association.
One of the great joys of those shows was what happened afterwards. People would come over and tell me their own petty stories - neighbour disputes, family grudges and tiny acts of revenge they were still visibly delighted with years later. I have learned an enormous amount about this city.
Those performances helped turn a strange idea involving history, pettiness and an ambitious graph into the show I eventually took to Edinburgh.
What I didn’t know was whether there were enough people who wanted an hour of deeply over-researched pettiness to fill a room every day.
There were.
Chief Petty Officer went on to a sell-out the Edinburgh Fringe run, with standing-room-only performances (I stole a chair from another performance one day) and some lovely reviews.
★★★★ - For The Plot Magazine
British Comedy Guide praised the show's “winning graph”, while one of my favourite audience responses described it as feeling “like a recording of a Radio 4 series!”
So it feels particularly special that the first place I get to perform it after Edinburgh is Sheffield. Audiences here were an essential part of making the show, and now I get to bring back the version all that work became.
Who is Chief Petty Officer for?
If you like smart comedy, strange true stories, history, cultural rabbit holes, Radio 4 comedy and watching somebody apply completely unnecessary levels of analysis to relatively minor human behaviour, I think we’ll get along extremely well.
You definitely don’t need to have seen any of the work-in-progress shows, although if you did you’ll probably enjoy seeing what I did next. This is the full post-Edinburgh version of Chief Petty Officer.
Who is Vix Leyton?
Who IS she? In my best Nikki Graham impression. I’m an award-winning comedian, writer, broadcaster and consumer commentator based in Sheffield, with live comedy that has sold out at festivals around the UK.
I’m also the host of The Comedy Arcade, the smash-hit podcast live show, and Sheffield listeners may know me as a regular consumer finance expert on BBC Radio Sheffield. My national broadcast appearances include BBC Morning Live, BBC Radio 4’s You and Yours, LBC and Steph’s Packed Lunch.
Chief Petty Officer brings together a lot of the things I love most - comedy, research, storytelling, history, human behaviour and taking something far more seriously than the situation warrants.