Geoff Rowe is the director of the Leicester Comedy Festival, the longest running comedy festival in the UK. He's been with them from the beginning, so he's chock full of information about organising a festival...
So to start, how about you tell us a little bit about yourself.
I'm the director of Leicester Comedy Festival. I helped set it up in 1994 and have been involved in the festival ever since. It's been running for 16 years.
It feels surprising, because there was never a master plan to keep it going for so long, but it's great. It's good to have been involved since the beginning and watch it grow and develop, and more and more people now know about it and want to come to the festival, which is great.
I was a student at the time at De Montfort University and as part of our final year project we had to do something practical-I was studying Arts Management-and we decided to set up a comedy festival. In 1993, NME coined the phrase "Comedy is the new rock 'n roll" and Rob Newman and David Baddiel sold out Wembley Arena, so comedy was very fashionable and alternative comedy was very fashionable, so we decided to run a comedy festival. None of us had ever [inaudible] comedy before. And so we did start the festival in '94 and five thousand people came to about thirty shows and it worked really well, and so after we finished University, myself and two other people decided to do another one, and that seemed to work reasonably well and then it carried on and we're still doing it today.
Three days to organise it? Oh, don't. [laugh] It'll take you a lot longer than that. We're already programming for 2010. It takes a long time to raise money and confirm the venues and acts, so if you only had three days to put it together, then I'd probably say don't. Don't do it, really, you haven't got long enough. When we started the festival, we didn't book hardly anybody until September/October after Edinburgh for a February festival, but now we're increasingly booking people in June/July for the following February, so people now get booked up far more in advance than they used to.
Give us trouble? All of them. I'm only joking. Increasingly acts want to come and play here, which is great. And a lot of the acts have done the festival for a number of years, so we build good relationships with them. I mean, arguably, it's the other people involved who give us more trouble than the acts, really.
Who do we look out for? Well, you know, you have the whole industry, I suppose. It's a necessary part of it to deal with agents and managers and tour bookers and PRs and people like that. We probably spend as much time dealing with those people as we do with acts. They don't exactly give us trouble but you need to realise what we do is business and you have to work within the business.
A lot of it's about raising money and getting people to support the festival. A lot of it's about making sure that during the festival, there's a festival atmosphere in Leicester, and that's about putting banners up and branding and putting stuff up that's not normally up so people notice the difference and notice that there's something happening. A lot of it's about PR and publicity and doing things like this. And then obviously a lot of it is about working with acts and seeing acts and going to other festivals and trying to get people to do things that are a bit special as part of Leicester Comedy Festival as opposed to doing, you know, just a standard touring show or their standard material. Over the last three or four years, we've done a lot of work to try and make sure that there's special events at Leicester so that people can come and see stuff that they wouldn't see elsewhere.
Oh the best, well there's probably two best parts to my job. One part is choosing the image that we use to promote each festival, so sort of picking the brand and the identity of each annual festival, and the other bit is programming our launch show which happens a month before the festival, because that's an opportunity to pick some of the best acts who are gonna be in the festival, and showcase them to an audience who probably haven't seen them before. So a lot of the acts who do our launch show wouldn't have performed to two thousand people before, so that's a fantastic part of the job.
I do, but I couldn't possibly comment. [laugh]
Couldn't possibly comment. [laugh] There's plenty of both, actually, but um, no. I mean you know, there are people I look forward to seeing but it's hard to confess to having a favourite act because you've got to be fair to everybody, really, who's gonna be in the festival.
We do a show which is unique to Leicester called "Hotel de Comedy" where four acts stay the night in a hotel and we invite an audience to go and spend twenty minutes in each room with each act and have an intimate comedy show. That's something we've developed in the last couple of years and that's probably something that I'd suggest people go and see because they can't see anywhere else and it's a bit of a unique experience, really. Some of the acts have performed stand up in their room, but other people perform in the bath or perform from their bed or...you never quite know what you're gonna see when you walk through the bedroom door. It's a bit quirky.
Doesn't quite answer your question, but the day after the festival is probably the worst thing, because you go from being so busy and the phone ringing constantly and having zillions of emails to reply to and doing things, and it's really busy and manic and exciting. And then the day after it's all over, the phone doesn't ring at all and you don't get any emails and that's just it, really. And that's definitely the worst part of the festival. And probably the other worst part is when somebody's hugely offended by somebody's material, which essentially is just a joke, but on occasion some people do get very offended by some things that people say and I think that's often really difficult because you can't deny they've been offended but equally, it was only a joke.
Oh yeah, definitely. I mean, it depends on your definition of offensive, I suppose. I mean, there are certain acts that we just wouldn't book because we think their material is horrible and offensive and nasty, but on the whole, yeah absolutely. Over 16 years, what I've been able to see is a lot of changes in terms of what's offensive and what isn't, so language and material that might have been offensive sixteen years ago isn't now. A classic example is Diana jokes. When somebody dies, you can't tell a joke that day, but the next day jokes start appearing online and people in playgrounds start exchanging jokes and all that, and then it becomes accepted. You can tell jokes about stuff that happened five years ago but not stuff that happened yesterday. That whole world of being offensive is partly what comedy is about, I think, and so just because somebody was offensive last year, doesn't necessarily mean that they'll be offensive next year. That's a bit ramble-y.
[laugh]
We have a fairly open selection process. We operate probably more like Edinburgh than maybe other festivals do so we actively encourage people to come and have a go and do their thing here. I suppose the main venues have a fairly strict programming policy, really. I mean, if you need to sell eight hundred upwards seats, then you'd need to know that somebody's gonna sell the seats who's gonna be, you know, of a reasonable standard, but then a lot of our venues hold thirty, forty, fifty people and we want to encourage people to come to Leicester and try out stuff, so even some established names will come and try out material in small venues and just try out stuff in front of small audiences. So I'd say we have a fairly open criteria, I suppose, but we do a lot of work to find out where people have performed elsewhere so that we're not just getting the bloke in the pub who thinks he's highly amusing.
Well, everything isn't in October. I mean Glasgow happens in March and various other festivals happen throughout the year. February is a great time to have a festival. People have just got enough money after Christmas. It's a fairly dismal time of year and people need cheering up. There's all kinds of boring reasons like the venues like it because it's getting towards the end of the financial year and they get a boost to their sales, ticket sales and bar sales. Early on there was a lot of talk about moving us from February to the summer or to the autumn, but we resisted and ploughed on with staying in February and that works because we've done it for 16 years, so it works. We get average attendance of the festival is about 74% or something, so we're selling 74% of all our tickets, which is not a bad figure.
Very early on we promoted a late night comedy club every night during the festival. And it worked sort of weekends, but on a Tuesday night at one o'clock in the morning when you're standing at the door and there's no audience coming in and you're knackered anyway, and you spend that hour working out how much money you've lost as a result of putting on a comedy club, that's not the best experience in the world. But, you know, now we have late night stuff at the festival and it works really well, so it's about doing stuff that's appropriate for the audience and where you're at as a festival. It was a dismal experience, you have to go to the acts and say there's nobody here and, you know, they've stayed up late to do the show and when it's full and it's happening and it's vibrant, it's fine, but when it's not, it's not a great experience.
Yeah, you know, not least because you're tired. And you kinda think, well I could be either out enjoying myself or I could be at home, catching up on some sleep and instead you're standing there. But plenty of things that we've done haven't worked, but you just change it the following year and adapt it so that things do work.
No. No, I mean it's great. It's a great thing to do, it's a great job to have. I think people should do it, people should give it a go if they want to. I don't have any problem with other people setting up comedy festivals and seeing if they can work and stuff, you know, I think it's a great thing to do. There are worse jobs to have.
Just do it. I think um, I think don't do it if you want to make huge sums of money. I think concentrate-I think the biggest frustration that I have with some other festivals is that they're not festivals, they're just a collection of shows that might ordinarily happen somewhere else and I think you need to concentrate on making it festive, on making it exciting, on making it different, otherwise people are just going to see five shows that they might have seen somewhere else. So yeah of course you need some great comedians and you need some great talent, but you also need to think about how it's going to be exciting, both for the audience and also for the acts, because if you look after them it'll work and it'll keep happening probably every year. And make mistakes in that time and just change it, keep evolving it. The other thing is that people run festivals which is the same program every year, it's the same people that come back every single year. That's a bit dull.
Well, I suppose, running the risk of sounding like an elderly uncle, it's a lot easier now than when we first started it because of the internet and because you can Facebook acts direct and you can find out who manages acts or who is the agent, find their contact details really easily. When we started, we had none of that and so it's much easier now certainly to get in contact with acts on MySpace or directly on the internet or whatever than it was when we started it. And also in terms of marketing, and you know I remember when somebody suggested that we would need a website and I kind of dismissed it and said that I didn't know what a website was, which is unthinkable now, you know, but when we started it, we didn't have any of that. So I think all of those things have made life a lot easier, and people should continue to look at all of that and see how they can make a difference in terms of running a festival.
