Romesh Ranganathan spent £5,000 of his own money on a comedy prize this week. He said he was “absolutely delighted to give the public impression of supporting new talent”. Within the same few days, Audible put its name on a different prize entirely, the one with the 46-year pedigree. Audible is the audiobook business that Amazon completed its acquisition of back in March 2008. Two awards landed in the same news cycle, one carrying a multinational’s logo and one funded by comedians dipping into their own current accounts.

Two prizes, one week, very different chequebooks

The big one first. Audible has signed a three-year deal to sponsor the Edinburgh Comedy Awards. The prize ran under the Perrier name for most of its life. The figure, as Chortle reported it: “The prize money for the Audible Best Comedy Show will be £10,000, with £5,000 each awarded to the Taffner Family Best Newcomer and Audible Panel Prize winner.” That’s £20,000 across three categories, with DLT Entertainment keeping its name on the newcomer gong and Donald Taffner Jr saying, of his family firm, “Comedy has always been at the heart of my family and my business.”

Nica Burns has directed and produced these awards since 1984. She gave the line you’d expect from someone who’s just landed a multi-year sponsor after a stretch of scraping by.

It is clear to us that they are committed to live comedy and the pleasure that it brings to so many people. We are looking forward to a long and fruitful collaboration with them.

That’s Burns, director of the awards, in Chortle’s write-up of the deal. “Long and fruitful collaboration” is the kind of phrase that gets typed into a press release at 4pm and read aloud at a launch by someone holding a warm glass of prosecco. But the underlying relief is real enough. The awards have spent years without a single title backer. A guaranteed three-year run means they can plan next August instead of waiting to see who picks up the phone.

Forty-six years of whoever’s paying

The list of names that have sat in front of the word “comedy award” reads like a tour of corporate Britain’s changing tastes. Perrier sponsored from the awards’ inception in 1981 until 2005. Intelligent Finance took over as if.comedy from 2006 to 2008. Foster’s Lager ran them from 2010 to 2015, lastminute.com from 2016, and the TV channel Dave from 2019. A patchwork multi-sponsor model arrived in 2023. Water, then a bank, then a lager, then a holiday site, then a telly channel, and now an audiobook app. Each switch tracked whatever advertiser reckoned Fringe audiences had spare cash for that year – bottled water in the eighties, a holiday-booking site after the crash.

Audible is the odd one out in one specific way: it makes the comedy it’s sticking its name on. Lisa Higginson, the company’s senior director of regional content, said Audible is “very proud of our brilliant Audible Original comedy slate, which has featured many of the previous prize winners and nominees”. So the sponsor is now, in effect, scouting from the same shortlist it’s bankrolling. That’s not sinister – DLT, Sky and others have commissioned acts they’ve championed for years – but it’s worth noticing that the company writing the cheque also sells what the winners make. Win the panel prize and you might find yourself recording an Audible Original for the same firm by Christmas.

For context on how thin the Fringe’s award economy actually is, it’s worth remembering that the Brighton Fringe handed 386 comedies just two awards this year, and that practical cash for shows tends to come from the venues themselves – the Gilded Balloon hands £2,000 each to five Fringe shows through its support fund. Against that backdrop, a £10,000 best-show prize is a genuinely large single payout.

The award with “insert sponsor here” in the name

Which brings us back to Romesh. The prize he backed isn’t Burns’s. It’s the ISH Edinburgh Comedy Awards, set up in 2023 by the comedian Nathan Cassidy after Dave pulled out of the main awards, and the initials stand for “insert sponsor here”. The whole gag is the absence of a corporate name – it’s funded by comedians reaching into their own bank accounts rather than by a brand. Ranganathan is donating £5,000 to this year’s best-show prize, which will carry his name. Sarah Millican is funding the £4,000 best newcomer prize, and last year’s total fund came to £12,500.01. That stray penny is the sort of detail that tells you exactly who’s running the thing.

Cassidy’s read on why it exists is blunter than anything in the Audible release: “These awards have tapped into something many in comedy already feel: there is huge talent across the piece that isn’t being fairly rewarded.” Millican, in her usual register, said she was “Very happy to help some new funny person kill off a bit of their debt and give them a comedy pat on the back” – we covered her newcomer pledge when she put £4,000 into the Edinburgh newcomer prize. Co-founder Sarah Bowles said the team was “overwhelmed with the backing this year and can’t thank Romesh enough”.

The contrast almost writes itself. The 46-year-old establishment award spent years hunting for a sponsor and has finally typed “Audible” into the blank. The breakaway award printed “insert sponsor here” on the trophy as a joke and is still funding itself out of comedians’ wallets, apparently by choice. The establishment version comes with a forward slate of original content attached, while the breakaway runs on Rhod Gilbert, Elf Lyons, a community radio station and a couple of telly-famous headliners reaching into their own pockets.

What the £10,000 means once the Portacabin clears

For an act on the receiving end, the establishment money still matters more in cold cash terms, because the establishment award has a 46th-year reputation and a panel to match. Ten judges will decide it this year, seven drawn from the industry and three members of the public chosen by open application, per the awards’ own announcement. The timetable is locked: the panel is named on July 8, the shortlist lands on Wednesday August 26, and the winners are read out on Saturday August 29. Whoever takes the £10,000 will, in a fair number of cases, have spent the month losing money on a room.

That’s the bit the prize money quietly underwrites. A solo Fringe hour can cost an act thousands once you count venue hire, accommodation, a flyering team and a PR who answers emails at midnight, and most of the sector is running on margins that prompted the Live Comedy Association to ask fans to email their MPs about a £1bn industry. A £10,000 cheque doesn’t fix that, but it clears a debt and buys a winner the line on the poster that books next year’s tour.

What I’ll be watching is whether Audible’s slate quote turns into actual commissions for the 2026 shortlist, the way DLT and Sky deals have before. Higginson said Audible was “thrilled to support the next chapter of that legacy”, and the most honest measure of that won’t be the logo on the trophy in August. It’ll be how many of the people standing on that stage have an Audible Original credit by next Fringe, and what the per-show rate on it turns out to be.

Sources