Stuart Panrucker, who runs the Rik Mayall Comedy Festival, reckons last year’s debut shifted more than 10,000 tickets. He points to “audiences travelling from across the world.” Healthy for a volunteer-run festival in a Worcestershire spa town that didn’t have one two years ago. The line that made me put the coffee down sits near the bottom of Chortle’s write-up. With four days still to go before the 2026 edition even opened, organisers say they had already sold more tickets to this year’s festival than they managed across the whole of last year.

The festival honours Rik Mayall, who died in 2014 aged 56 and grew up in Droitwich. That’s where he first found his feet on stage at the Norbury Theatre. The second run stretches across nine days, from 29 May to 6 June, and Chortle puts it at more than 300 performances over 30 venues. That is a great many get-in times to coordinate. Somewhere in Droitwich a volunteer is almost certainly fielding a phone call right now about who’s bringing the extension leads.

Year one was Greg Davies, year two is the originals

The first festival, an eight-day affair from 31 May to 7 June 2025, leaned on a recognisable telly name. Greg Davies headlined, and the booking made obvious sense because Davies had acted alongside Mayall in the Channel 4 sitcom Man Down. Around him sat Peter Richardson, Helen Lederer, Shaparak Khorsandi, Paul Foot, Red Richardson and Laura Smyth. It was a mix of Mayall’s actual contemporaries and a few road-tested club acts.

Year two pivots harder onto the people who built alternative comedy in the 1980s. Nigel Planer brings his Young Once book tour to the Norbury, Alexei Sayle does an In Conversation with Robin Ince, and Richard Herring records a live edition of his podcast RHLSTP. John Otway and Comic Strip founder Peter Richardson return too. The working-club end of the bill is the part I’d actually queue for, mind. Rachel Fairburn is back after a sell-out, plus Nick Helm, Phil Ellis, Redditch’s Lindsey Santoro, Harriet Kemsley, Laura Smyth and Tiff Stevenson. Panrucker is plain about the strategy. He describes the line-up as “not just about nostalgia, it is about celebrating and supporting new artists by embracing Rik’s chaotic and beautiful spirit.” You don’t often get a booker spelling the reasoning out that plainly – a Flight of the Conchords warm-up run certainly doesn’t – and underneath the bill sits a youth-talent layer most tribute events don’t bother with.

Droitwich Working Men’s Club becomes the Lord Flashheart Club

The detail I can’t let go of: Droitwich Working Men’s Club is being rechristened The Lord Flashheart Club for the festival, curated by musical comic Mitch Benn and sponsored by PSS. There’s a new exhibition by photographer Andy Hollingworth, an outdoor stage and roaming performers along High Street and Friar Street across the festival weekends, and the Norbury Theatre at the centre of it – the same stage where a young Mayall, who moved to Droitwich aged three, took part in plays throughout his childhood. Sponsorship is everywhere in comedy festivals now, of course, from a crisp brand buying up the Joke of the Fringe to councils chipping in for outdoor stages.

Beneath the headliners there’s a real grassroots tier: comedy workshops for ages 12 to 17 and a showcase for local drama groups at Droitwich Spa Community Hall. Workshops and a local-drama showcase are what give a one-weekend tribute a chance of still running in five years, and it puts Droitwich a long way from the festivals where the ticket money gets spent before the acts get paid. Whether the new-act stream produces a future headliner the way the new-act competition circuit does is a question for year four, not now.

A tenner, a Q&A and a charity called Headway

Saturday’s quiet highlight costs a tenner. “Working With Rik and Other Grim Tales” is a 5pm Q&A on 30 May with director Bob Baldwin, hosted by Elene Hadjidaniel, and it raises money for the brain-injury charity Headway. Baldwin is promising “some work that has never been broadcast before,” which for a festival built on a back catalogue is a sharper draw than another tribute set.

Baldwin and Mayall worked together for over three decades: Grim Tales on ITV and Channel 4 from 1989 to 1991, the 2001 BBC Choice piece Tales of Uplift and Moral Improvement (in which Mayall played a 120-year-old Edwardian woman named Ffine Carmody), the 1993 musical film Horse Opera (scored by The Police’s Stewart Copeland, with Mayall cast as Wyatt Earp), and the 2004 Discovery series Violent Nation. The Grim Tales idea, Baldwin told the BBC, came together down the pub after Mayall had finished a stint reading George’s Marvellous Medicine on Jackanory.

“Where do you start with a relationship that was over 30 years long?”

That’s Baldwin, speaking to the BBC ahead of the session and reported by Chortle at chortle.co.uk. He called Mayall “a multi-dimensional performer” who could play five characters within a single Grim Tales story, and remembered him as “a lovely, generous, thoughtful friend” with an infectious laugh and a habit of pulling the awkward person at a party into the room.

There’s something fitting about a festival whose biggest advance-sales story sits right next to a £10 charity Q&A and a working men’s club renamed after a Blackadder character. If the ticket curve holds, year three’s real headache in Droitwich won’t be filling seats so much as finding 30 venues nobody’s already booked.

Sources