BBC New Comedy Awards heats put 30 comics on six free Coventry shows

Thirty acts, six shows, and doors at six on a Tuesday

Thirty comics will play six shows across three nights this month, in a shed off Far Gosford Street in Coventry. Not one person watching pays anything to be there. The BBC New Comedy Awards heats run at The Box at FarGo Village on Tuesday 22, Wednesday 23 and Thursday 24 September. Doors are at 6pm and 8.15pm every night, and the shows are filmed for BBC Three and BBC One. The venue’s own listing sells it in the register you’d expect. “Catch the funniest up-and-coming comedians battling it out live at the BBC New Comedy Awards Heats!”

When the BBC pulled every 2026 heat to Coventry, back in May, it was a paragraph in an entry announcement and a closing date. Now it’s an address, six door times and a ticket link. Which is roughly the moment acts stop discussing a competition in car parks and start looking up off-peak returns to Coventry.

Grapevine Birmingham published the ticket details on 2 September. It puts the format plainly: “thirty comedians battle it out live in front of a panel of A-list comics, to compete for the laughs, glory and the ultimate title of BBC New Comedian 2026”. The panel is Amy Gledhill as head judge, with Kiell Smith-Bynoe from Ghosts and Dan Tiernan, who won the thing himself. Gledhill told Chortle in May that she was “really looking forward to uncovering the best new comic talent the UK has to offer”. That is the kind of line every head judge files. She is at least a head judge who was doing five-minute spots herself recently enough to remember what the walk to the mic feels like with a camera on a jib behind you.

Where are the BBC New Comedy Awards 2026 heats?

The Box at FarGo Village, Far Gosford Street, Coventry CV1 5ED. The dates are 22, 23 and 24 September 2026, with two shows a night at 6pm and 8.15pm. Tickets are free and, per Grapevine, available “Only at https://www.fargovillage.co.uk/events/bbc-new-comedy-awards”. The FarGo listing lets you book one show, two, or all six. The final then moves to Birmingham in October. Chortle’s report of the entry announcement sets out what the winner gets: “the winner will receive £1,000, a trophy, and a paid commission to write and perform a 30-minute audio pilot with the support of a BBC comedy commissioner.”

Worth knowing what the room actually is before you picture a theatre. Wikipedia describes The Box as “a 500 person capacity music and drama venue” inside a site that opened on 27 September 2014. Cvent’s venue profile lists a standing capacity of 500 and a seating capacity of 250. Six seated shows at that number tops out at 1,500 seats across the run, which is my arithmetic rather than anybody’s press release. A chunk of those will go to friends, family and Coventry University students who fancy a free Tuesday. Parking around Far Gosford Street is the usual pay-and-display lottery, so the acts driving down from Manchester should budget for the walk.

The fee nobody has published

Here’s what none of the announcements say: whether the 30 acts performing in the heats get a fee, or travel money, or a hotel. Not the Grapevine ticket piece, not the FarGo listing, not Chortle’s report of the entry rules. It may well be covered in the entrant terms and conditions that only the 30 shortlisted acts have read. I’d rather say I don’t have that number than invent one. Six televised shows in three days is real production spend, and nothing public says how much of it lands with the person doing the five minutes. If anyone in the 30 wants to tell me what turned up in their inbox, I’ll print it.

Set that against the rest of the year. Our own reporting on UK comedians’ earnings in 2025 put the average at £21,143, down £5,635 on the year before. Birmingham’s Breaking Talent Award gave its winner a mug. The BBC Comedy Collective handed out ten bursaries worth £15,000 between them. Against that spread, a grand and a commissioned audio pilot is a genuinely good prize. Twenty-nine of the 30 acts in Coventry will not receive it.

Eli Hart won the 2025 edition. He gave Chortle the least grandiose account of what winning does that I’ve read from any award recipient this year:

Winning the New Comedy Awards has changed my life in both big and small ways. The smallest of ways being that there is now a physical piece of evidence in my living room that suggests I’m not entirely delusional.

– Eli Hart, 2025 BBC New Comedy Award winner, quoted by Chortle

The other thing a heat gives an act, regardless of the result, is broadcast-grade footage of a tight five in front of a real crowd. You can send that to a booker without a covering email apologising for the sound, which is more than can be said for most phone clips shot from the back of a pub function room. If you’re one of the 30, the shape of those five minutes matters more than anything the judges say afterwards. Our guide to writing a tight five exists for exactly this kind of night.

The man who sent it to Coventry has already gone

The West Midlands move was announced with a quote from Jon Petrie, then the BBC’s director of comedy. He said: “For more than three decades, the BBC New Comedy Awards have helped launch some of the UK’s most recognisable comedy voices, and the search for the next breakout star is always a highlight of our year. Taking the competition to the West Midlands this year feels especially exciting – it’s a region bursting with talent, as last year’s winner Eli Hart proved.” Four days later, Chortle reported that Petrie was leaving: “He will leave the BBC in August and take up his role later this year”. He was joining Hat Trick as creative director, with commissioning editor Emma Lawson stepping up as interim director of comedy.

So the executive whose enthusiasm for Coventry framed the whole thing was out of the building before the doors opened on it. That happens constantly in television and the shows will run exactly as scheduled, though it does shuffle the question of who’s really watching the 30 acts and who ends up shepherding the pilot commission through. The winner’s audio pilot will be mentored by a BBC comedy commissioner. Which commissioner, on whose slate, is a question worth asking in about November.

One more thing about the promo. Grapevine’s list of names the competition has produced runs “Lee Mack, John Bishop, Sarah Millican, Peter Kay, Jason Manford, Joe Lycett, Tom Allen, Rhod Gilbert, Alan Carr and Dan Tiernan”. Chortle’s list of actual past winners is shorter: Alan Carr, Tom Allen, Lucy Beaumont, Josie Long, Nina Conti, Rhod Gilbert. Several of the biggest names in the marketing were finalists rather than winners, which is either a warning or the best news in this article, depending on how your heat goes.

Sources

• Grapevine Birmingham – Free tickets available for the BBC heats at The Box at FarGo (2 September 2026)
• FarGo Village – official event listing for the heats
• Chortle – BBC comedy heats are sent to Coventry (27 May 2026)
• Chortle – BBC comedy chief Jon Petrie steps down (1 June 2026)
• Cvent – The Box, FarGo Village venue profile
• Wikipedia – Fargo Village

If you want the cheapest ticket in British comedy this month, it’s a 6pm on a Wednesday in Coventry. You watch people you’ve never heard of do five minutes, with a BBC camera pointed at them and a former winner marking their card. Somebody in that room will be doing arena support in six years. The booking form will also let you take all six shows, which is three nights of tight fives, two door times a night, and however many trips to the FarGo bar you can fit between them.