Leicester Comedy Festival: nil assets against £184,510 owed, and comedians on the creditors list

Kirsty Munro is down for £3,510. Alfie Moore’s company is listed at £2,886, Alexis Dubus’s at £2,034, Jason Neale at £1,808. Those four names sit on the creditors list filed by liquidators FRP Advisory Trading for Big Difference Company, the charity that ran Leicester Comedy Festival. The same document puts the charity’s assets at zero. Chortle reported the filing on 21 September. There is no pot, no partial dividend, nothing held back pending a sale of anything.

Anyone who has ever handed their door money to a third party and waited should read that list twice. The shape of it matters more than the total at the bottom. Every person on there had agreed, in one way or another, that somebody else would hold their money first.

How much does Leicester Comedy Festival owe creditors?

The liquidators recorded £184,510 owed to unsecured creditors, against nil assets. On top of that sits £47,433 in unpaid employee wages and benefits, and £3,280 to HMRC. The biggest single line is £48,145 to local promoters Triple CeePee. YMCA Leicestershire is owed £18,646, Just The Tonic Productions £12,517, NatWest £5,790, and the app designers Stagematic £5,000.

“Unsecured creditor” is the category that matters for a comic. It means you are behind the taxman and the employees in the queue, and when the assets are nil the queue is decorative. Alfie Moore is on the list through Moore Enterprising Ltd, and Alexis Dubus through A Due Bus Limited. That is the ordinary business of being a jobbing stand-up with an accountant, and it makes no difference whatsoever to the recovery.

Big Difference Company formally declared insolvency on Wednesday 5 August 2026, after 32 years. British Comedy Guide notes the festival was established in 1994 by a group of students studying Arts Management at De Montfort University. That is the sort of origin story that usually ends with a plaque rather than a liquidator’s filing. The directors put the cause down to “increasing costs, a difficult funding environment, and significant pressures within the live comedy sector”.

Two sets of numbers that do not line up

Back in August, Chortle reported the charity had gone into liquidation owing £215,000. That figure included over £50,000 in wages to six employees, just over £20,000 to other charities, more than £13,000 to Just The Tonic and just under £2,000 to HMRC. Set that beside the September filing and several lines have moved: Just The Tonic is now £12,517, HMRC £3,280. The two documents are not the same document, and the Live Comedy Association says the reason may be simpler than accounting drift.

LCA chair Jessica Toomey told Chortle: “It seems the information the liquidators have been given by the trustees isn’t accurate.” She appealed for anyone owed money to get in touch. The LCA’s own entry on the earlier list was £103, an amount small enough that somebody had to sit down and total it up on purpose. That tells you how granular the ledger gets once you go past the big names. If you are owed money and cannot find yourself on it, that is the body to contact, along with Equity.

What the LCA asked the trustees about ticket money

The association published a set of questions for the trustees. One of them does most of the work: “at what point did trustees authorise Big Difference spending the ticket money which had been collected on behalf of other people?” It also asked about the acts who did get paid after the February festival. The wording: “following the 2026 Leicester Comedy Festival we know some people were paid – how did you decide who received payment?”

No answers have been reported. The charity submitted a serious incident report to the Charity Commission on 21 July 2026, and the regulator said it was assessing the concerns raised. That is a long way short of a finding against anybody. The sequence, though, is documented: comedians started saying in April that they had not received ticket revenue from the February shows, and the charity acknowledged a cashflow issue. The Big Difference venue was later repossessed by its landlord over unpaid rent, following the cancellation of a planned outdoor gig.

That pattern is not unique to Leicester. The Great Outdoors Comedy Festival left refunds hanging in much the same way, and Fest magazine folded owing its Fringe reviewers. When the money runs out it lands on whoever was last in line, which in comedy is reliably the person who did the talking. For a comic currently averaging around two and a half gigs a week, a missing £2,000 is a lot of Travelodges already paid for on a personal card.

The Live Comedy Association set aside £5,000 from its Stand Up And Give Fund. It is an initial hardship pot for people in urgent need over the unpaid money. Its separate Leicester crowdfunder had raised just under £4,000 as of Chortle’s 22 August report, which is where that figure was accurate. It will have moved since.

The new festival never touches the ticket money

A replacement event runs in the same city from 3 to 21 February 2027. The Independent Comedy Festival was set up by stand-up Alex Hylton and TripleCeePee promoter Colin Bowles, a new festival run by different people with no thread back to the old one. There is no lineup yet, so the interesting part is the plumbing. Ticketing goes through a third-party service called TixEvery, which works directly with each act or promoter and bypasses the festival’s account entirely.

Harrison Salter of TixEvery, quoted by British Comedy Guide, put the mechanism plainly:

Funds generated from the face value of any ticket sales will not be accessible to the festival, which means we can make sure the people delivering the shows are paid directly and promptly.

The festival’s own site says ticket revenues will never be held by the Independent Comedy Festival and that TixEvery will pay artists directly. Hylton has said “For too long in the comedy industry, comedians have been at the bottom of the pecking order”. He added that “artists can trust that their ticket revenue will be kept secure”. Whether that survives contact with a bad February is a question nobody can answer until February. A platform holding your money is still somebody holding your money. Nobody has published the settlement terms: how long the money sits with TixEvery, in what sort of account, and what happens to it if that company hits trouble of its own.

Chortle reports registration fees for the new festival at £60 for shows in the smallest rooms, rising to £150 for the biggest. That is around 20 per cent cheaper than the old festival. The official site says registrations are not open yet, so treat those as reported rather than confirmed on the form you will eventually fill in. Against the cost of getting a show made and out on the road, £60 barely registers. What matters is whose account the card payment lands in when an audience member buys a seat. That is the same question comics are already answering when they fund and release their own specials.

Venues named as involved include The Y Theatre on East Street, Firebug and the Sue Townsend Theatre. (Anyone who has tried to unload a merch box outside the Y on a Friday knows what the parking is like.) Jessica Toomey said the city has “a massive reputation for supporting live comedy”, and the LCA is offering support to the new producers.

Meanwhile Anthony Lamb, who managed the old venue, has raised over £20,000 to reopen the space independently as Forum Porcorum. Geoff Rowe founded the thing in the first place. He said he was “incredibly sad and angry about the news about Big Difference Company ceasing trading and the impact this might have on the future of Leicester Comedy Festival”. Somewhere in a filing cabinet at FRP Advisory there is a spreadsheet with Jason Neale’s £1,808 on it, sitting in the same column as NatWest’s £5,790. The bank will handle it rather better.

Sources

• Not a penny left in Leicester Comedy Festival to pay creditors – Chortle, 21 September 2026
• Leicester Comedy Festival organisers declare insolvency – British Comedy Guide
• Independent Comedy Festival announces launch in Leicester – British Comedy Guide
• Charity’s debts exceed £215,000 – Chortle, 22 August 2026
• Live Comedy Association publishes more questions over the collapse – This Week Culture
• Independent Comedy Festival official site
• LCA launches fund to help those waiting Leicester money – British Comedy Guide