Crudi Dench takes the £1,500 Bannerett Award at Bannerman’s

The deal Crudi Dench offers an audience at the Iron Belly is simple. They’ll crowd-surf naked if the show manages to solve one caller’s problem. On Monday 24 August, at Bannerman’s bar on the Cowgate, the solving went the other way round. The prize was £1,500, handed over by an outfit that only opened entries in July.

Crudi Dench is the alter-ego of Matt Stallworthy from Garston in Liverpool. The show is Someone Help Her!, playing the Iron Belly at Underbelly Cowgate. The prize is the London Arts Facilitation Society’s Bannerett Award. Chortle reported it as going to the best show at the Fringe by an artist from a low-income background. We wrote about the award when it launched on 14 July, when it was a Google Form, a £1,500 pot and a daily midday showcase at Hoots @ Nicolson Square. Nobody could tell you then whether anyone would bother applying.

Somebody did. Chortle’s report has Dench saying the money would help ease the financial pressure that comes with bringing a show to the festival, which is about as politely as anyone has ever described being several thousand pounds down by the third week.

Who won the Bannerett Award in 2026?

Crudi Dench won it, at Bannerman’s on the Cowgate on 24 August, and the prize is £1,500. The show carries on at the Iron Belly at Underbelly Cowgate at 20:10 until 30 August. So the money arrived with six performances still to go, at the point in a run where every cost has already landed. The edfringe listing we opened doesn’t display a face value, so I’m not going to guess at the ticket price. The run finishes on the Sunday like most of the Fringe.

The award’s own founding story is the sort of thing that sounds made up and isn’t. Chortle’s launch piece explained the name: a knight qualified to raise their own banner and lead their own forces into battle. It was a military position gifted to the working class rather than the nobility. The organisers said the award was for those brave enough to risk it all for a month of no work and high costs, just to get their art seen. They added that such acts give more than those in expensive paid venues while receiving much less coverage and support. Whether a medieval rank was the obvious branding route for a drag show about burnout is between LAFS and their designer.

What £1,500 actually clears in the last week of August

Do the sum against what a comic actually earns. The UK Live Comedy Sector Survey, reported by Chortle in February, put average annual turnover for an individual comedian at £21,143, down from £26,778 the year before. That’s a 21 per cent fall, before expenses, against a UK median salary of just over £39,000. We went through that survey line by line when it landed. Anyone who’s stood in a Fringe green room in the last week of August has heard some version of that maths being done out loud, usually while somebody counts what’s left of the flyers. Nearly three quarters of respondents said they needed second jobs. One of them told the survey: I earned more per gig in 2004 than now.

So £1,500 is about 7 per cent of an average comic’s whole trading year. It lands in the exact week when the flat deposit has gone, the flyers are printed and the returns are already known. Compare it with the Fringe Society’s own support: only 16 of 402 applicants got a £2,500 Keep It Fringe grant this year. That’s a bigger cheque, awarded to a much smaller share of the people asking for one. Accommodation gets paid before anything else does, and the official Fringe digs at Queen Margaret University check out on 30 August, a day before the festival ends, so anyone playing the final Sunday is sorting out somewhere else to sleep for the last night.

The Bannerett Award doesn’t fix any of that, and I don’t think it claims to. What it does is put cash in the hands of an act in a free or cheap room, which is a different transaction from the awards that hand over a trophy and a photo op. Readers who followed our coverage of Garry Starr putting £1,600 in so every ISH nominee got £100 will recognise the shape – a comic covering other comics, out of his own takings.

The company behind the prize is 14 months old

Nobody covering the win seems to have gone to Companies House, so here’s what’s filed. The London Arts Facilitation Society CIC is company number 16515755, incorporated on 13 June 2025. It is a private company limited by guarantee without share capital, registered at Parker House, 44 Stafford Road, Wallington, Surrey. Its stated business is support activities to performing arts. Its first accounts aren’t due until 13 March 2027, covering the period to 30 June 2026. So there is currently no public filing showing where the £1,500 came from.

Companies House lists three directors, all appointed on the day of incorporation: Samuel Dunthorne, Maria Fedulova and Jason Weinberg. Chortle’s July piece named the founders as married comedians Sam Rhodes and Maria Fedulova, with Weinberg heading the judging panel. LAFS’s own site describes Rhodes as a South London comedian and musician, and Fedulova as a Russian stand-up who came to the UK as a refugee and a BBC New Comedian semi-finalist. Weinberg is a theatre graduate with a background including storefront theatre, burlesque and professional wrestling. The site also says LAFS runs on donations and monthly subscriptions starting at £1 a month. That’s a funding model with roughly the same margin for error as taking a show to the Fringe.

Small thing, but it’s the kind of detail that trips up anyone googling this in six months. Chortle spelled it the Banneret Award in July and the Bannerett Award in August, and British Comedy Guide’s coverage of the win uses the double-t as well. Two spellings, one prize, no corporate sponsor attached to either.

Iron Belly, 20:10, and a phone that keeps ringing

The show itself is a fake light-entertainment programme in which audience members become celebrity guests and callers ring in with problems. It turns out the caller is Crudi. Reviewing it for West End Best Friend, James Edge gave it four stars and wrote:

There is such an effortless naturalism to their comedy, they can push a joke completely beyond the point of sanity, say something absolutely outrageous and somehow make it feel like the most natural thing in the world.

Edge signed off by telling Crudi to keep making the jokes go on too long, and to take a holiday from time to time. The holiday line reads as a gag until you remember what the show is about: creative burnout, performed at 20:10 every night for the best part of a month in a stone cellar off the Cowgate, with a naked crowd-surf promised at the end of it if the phone-in works.

Awards season carries on around it. The Comedians’ Choice Awards and the ISH shortlists are doing their rounds, the venues are counting the last weekend’s tickets, and somewhere on Nicolson Square there’s a midday showcase that has to strike its set by one o’clock. Whether the Bannerett becomes a fixture shows up on 13 March 2027, when LAFS files its first set of accounts and we all find out how much of that £1,500 came out of £1-a-month subscriptions.

Sources

• Chortle: Crudi Dench wins working-class Fringe award
• Chortle: New Edinburgh Fringe award for working-class acts
• Companies House: The London Arts Facilitation Society CIC
• Companies House: LAFS CIC officers
• West End Best Friend: Crudi Dench: Someone Help Her! review
• Chortle: Comedians report a huge wage slump
• LAFS: About