‘Comedy will die from grassroots up’

Published: 9 July, 2010

Businesses, audiences and performers are all losing out because of City Hall’s de facto flyering ban, argues David Mulholland

Westminster Council is forcing up the cost and driving down the quality of stand-up comedy shows in the West End.

Right now, the UK leads the world in comedy and the centre of the UK comedy scene is London’s West End.

Westminster Council has essentially banned flyering by threatening to take away the licences of comedy show venues that use flyerers.

The police have told us that this is not law. But the threat to venues of having to spend tens of thousands of pounds in legal fees to retain their licences has coerced them into co-operating with the council.

This has led to the perverse situation that there are actually more flyerers now than a year ago, but they are all from a single club that operates out of the Thistle Hotel because hotels have different licences.

A flyering ban is bad for everyone.

Tourists lose out because no one is allowed to tell them what is on offer.

Businesses lose out because people can’t find what they want in Leicester Square and go elsewhere.

And comedians lose out because there are fewer gigs at which to hone their craft.

For the surviving clubs, it means that they can no longer top up their audiences through flyering, which means higher advertising costs and less revenue, forcing them to raise prices and cut pay.

Flyering is a life and death issue for small clubs that are just starting up.

Already three have died because of the de facto flyering ban.

It is on this circuit that comedians such as Eddie Izzard, Omid Djalili, Jo Brand, Al Murray, Lee Evans and Michael McIntyre started their careers.

It may sound like hyperbole that something as simple as a flyering ban could ultimately abdicate Britain’s crown as king of comedy.

It isn’t.

I’ll give a simple example.

Last week Stephen K Amos wanted to try out some new material at my Soho Comedy Club for a TV show he was taping the next day.

Soho Comedy Club has a reputation in the comedy community for being a high quality club with large audiences.

But we only had 25 people instead of our previously normal Thursday crowd of 75 because of the flyering ban.

Stephen K Amos lost out because it was too few people for him to try the new material; 25 people lost out because they didn’t see a TV star at the show.

Another 50 people lost out because they didn’t know a great comedy show was happening.

And the British public lost out because Amos has been forced to put untested material on TV.

One of the strengths of the British comedy scene is people like Stephen K Amos can go and try out new material in the handful of great little comedy clubs in the West End and then tweak the material before taking it on air.

The flyering ban is strangling those clubs.

It is worth bearing in mind that the birthplace of alternative comedy in the UK, the Comedy Store, started above a strip club in 1979 and relied heavily on flyerers to attract audiences until 1993.

If flyering had been prohibited in 1979 there would be no alternative comedy scene in the UK and the country would still be importing comedy from the US instead of exporting it.

There is an important parallel here.

The British music industry from the late 1960s through the 1980s was a major source of national export earnings.

Seemingly minor changes in pub and venue licensing regulations starting in the 1980s slowly strangled the grassroots level music scene, which in turn killed the industry.

The situation for music has got so bad that today Britain’s major music exports are theme songs to exported British television shows.

This is a shocking fall.

The same sort of small changes in licensing that killed grassroots music in the UK can kill grassroots comedy and once the grassroots are dead the rest of the industry will wither.

Finally, the ban is putting comedians, flyerers and venue staff out of work during a recession.

You can help. Sign the petition at http://londonisfunny.com/petition and join the Facebook group “Stop Westminster’s Flyering Ban”.

David Mulholland is a promoter for the Soho Comedy Club