Where are all the South Yorkshire comics?

Desperate Foster launches apprenticeship

Look at any pub’s ‘what’s on’ listings and you might be forgiven for thinking the country was awash with open-spot comedians.

But stand-up Toby Foster is launching a free ‘comedy apprenticeship’ in Sheffield – claiming ‘there are no stand-up comedians in South Yorkshire’.

Foster hosts the city’s Last Laugh club runs several gigs around the city. But he maintains that as for professional acts in the region, ‘there’s me, Jo Enright and Rob Rouse but that’s it’.

‘We sell a thousand tickets a week in Sheffield but we don’t get Sheffield open spots at our gigs,’ he added. ‘South Yorkshire folk don’t seem to want to do it.’

Foster is planning to train six to eight applicants, assigning them professional comedians as mentors. After a series of open spots, the new acts will perform at Sheffield’s Memorial Hall in October, in the closing show of this year’s Grin Up North comedy festival.

Details of workshop dates and the professional comics involved are yet to be confirmed. But prospective stand-ups are invited to apply at comedyapprentice.co.uk.

‘We’re not excluding anyone’ says Foster. ‘If they don’t look like a nutcase, we’ll see them. It’s not going to be “do your act in front of five people in a pub at 11am” but just come down to talk to us. We can see people with funny bones, we can tell if they’re going to work. There’s no fucking gong or clapometer, no competition element or payment, we just want to up the quota of stand-ups in our neck of the woods.

‘We’ll work with them as long as they want to work with us. It’s almost entirely altruistic. Notwithstanding the fact that it would be so much better for us to have professional stand-up comedians in South Yorkshire, a base of people I can call on to fill the bill if it snows.’

Charlie Williams, the UK’s first prominent black stand-up was born in Royston, Barnsley. Tom Wrigglesworth hails from Sheffield and Daniel Kitson grew up in nearby Denby Dale in West Yorkshire. But both Wrigglesworth and Kitson began performing and honed their skills in London.

However, Glenn Moore,runner-up in last year’s Chortle Student Comedy Award after triumphing at the Sheffield heat, has said that: ‘I’m sure Sheffield has helped me develop. There’s a lot of great nights here and that forces you to raise your game.’

Sean Morley, founder of Sheffield’s Alternative Comedy Cabaret, claimed recently that: ‘Places like Manchester have always been associated with comedy but that’s not so with Sheffield.

‘The Last Laugh is great but it doesn’t offer an entry point where people can see new, developing comics for a couple of quid. That’s what we’re trying to do. And the signs are good. I’ve been putting on nights ... and the numbers grow each time.’

Chortle is also running another heat of Student Comedy Award in Sheffield this year – plus another in Leeds, less than 40 miles away. Both heats have been heavily oversubscribed.

Foster agrees that the problem isn’t a lack of open spots. ‘We run them every week at The Lescar, every month at the Greystones and the student gigs, it’s not like there’s a lack of opportunities. We just don’t get people ringing from South Yorkshire, and I don’t know why.

‘The last open spot from The Lescar who went on to become a full-time comedian was me and I started 12 years ago. Comics come from Liverpool and Newcastle and do great. Manchester pumps out comics as if it’s a sausage factory. But here, I don’t know where they’ve gone.’

Published: 20 Feb 2012

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