New-Wave Circuit Alternative Circuit

Also at this time, community theatre grants were allowing artists to create unusual comedy collectives such as The People’s Show, National Theatre of Brent, Ken Campbell’s Roadshow, The Wee-Wees and Marcel Steiner’s Smallest Theatre in the World (right). Their material helped to re-formulate stage comedy. Indeed, the poetry nights at The Apple & Snakes club in Covent Garden were promoting a completely new kind of performance with rhyming punchlines.

With the decriminalisation of homosexuality, gay clubs were opening in many cities of England and with it came the drag act. Cutting and catty, the act rarely pulled punches and, more often than not, they were frighteningly vicious to anyone who dared to heckle them. As a consequence in the late 70s, Stag and Hen nights would often employ a Drag act over a comic because they would deliver scathing lines demanded by this crowd. Such virtuosos of this art were Phil Starr, Chris Kaye and, of course, Mrs Shufflewick.

In May 1979, the first “alternative” stand-up comedy club, The Comedy Store, opened in London, where acts such as Alexei Sayle, Keith Allen (left) and Ivor Dembina began their careers. These new, bohemian voices challenged the traditional “chicken-in-a-basket” comedy of the Working Men’s Club with their agit-prop, intrepid attitudes. However, throughout the next decade, comedy club chains began to multiply and flourish, and an evening of stand-up moved into place alongside cinema and concert-going as a commercial entertainment.

The Comedy Store, The Glee and The Stand were some of the UK’s finest, but the company that really rode the comedy boom was Jongleurs. By the end of the millennium, the brand had over twenty purpose-built comedy rooms in major cities across Britain. With the rise of televised stand-up, comics were looking to perform in bigger venues, and in late 1993 Rob Newman and David Baddiel (right) performed to 12,000 people at Wembley Arena: the stadium gig had come of age. Now, comedians can complete a three-month tour in just one week.