Scott Bennett has been highly rated on the comedy club circuit for a number of years now, but it finally looks like he is building up a much-deserved head of career steam. He has made a splash on Live at the Apollo with his laser-guided observational humour and now he has this more personal narrative-based show, Blood Sugar Baby, under his belt.

 

This latest show is already being adapted for BBC Radio 4, so as the Yorkshire-born, Nottingham-based stand-up points out onstage, he is starting to move in posher more cultured circles. It will make a compelling radio show, but it is really worth seeing onstage to fully appreciate this story of what happened when his daughter Olivia turned out to have an extremely rare life-threatening medical condition.

 

There have been numerous shows recently about comedians having a brush with their own mortality – Miles Jupp, Matt Forde, Rhod Gilbert, Richard Herring for example – but this comes from a different angle. Scott and his wife Jemma had to deal with the even more terrifying scenario of losing a child.

 

It might not sound like suitable material for comedy, but Bennett is a master of the kind of relatable quips that swiftly put the audience at their ease. The arc might be scary but it is packed with gags and asides that keep the mood upbeat, whether it is recalling the medication that made his child go from resembling a tiny bald Mitchell brother to being unusually hairy or recalling with a grin how he found himself swigging champagne on a private jet to a German clinic, courtesy of the brilliant NHS.

 

It's a deftly well-put together set that flows naturally. You could say Bennett is simply telling his audience what happened – he has said himself the structure was already there and it helped that Jemma had kept a scrapbook of the events – but saying that doesn't do the performance justice. Bennett is a master of picking out little comic details. He is up there with Jason Manford as a crowdpleasing chatterbox. He already has a successful podcast with Jemma, Brew with the Bennetts, and there are echoes of Chris and Rosie Ramsey too.

 

One thing to note is that there isn't a great deal of jeopardy here. At the outset Bennett puts everyone at ease by explaining that Olivia is now a trademark sulky teenager with a messy bedroom and biohazard teacups under the bed to prove it. But after the nightmare they went through when she was a baby having to deal with teenage behaviour is a doddle – and it also provides him with more relatable material. 

 

The main story has some lovely comic sidebars that keep waves of laughs rolling in. These include gags about coffee bar chains and an unlikely cameo from Ronald McDonald when you least expect it. Never mind the central drama, Blood Sugar Baby should come with a trigger warning for anyone who has a phobia of clowns.

 

At one point some Manchester United players visited the hospital and of course Bennett slots in a routine about Wayne Rooney's hair transplant. I thought for a moment he was going to suggest Rooney should've taken the same Wolverine-inducing medication as Olivia but Bennett shows that he is a better writer than me and goes in a different direction. 

 

Blood Sugar Baby shows that there is much more to Bennett that classic relatable comedy. In the first half of the show he talks about how comedians use trauma onstage and cracks that there is "money in misery". Bennett might be mining misery here, but the result is a fantastically funny and uplifting night.