Leicester Comedy Festival liquidation: nil assets, £184,510 owed, and two rival February 2027 programmes

Nil in the assets column

The statement of affairs filed at Companies House puts the assets of Big Difference Company at nil. The charity organised Leicester Comedy Festival for more than 30 years before it became insolvent and ceased trading. Chortle reported the same filing shows £184,510 owed to unsecured creditors. A further £47,433 is owed to staff in unpaid wages and benefits, and £3,280 to HMRC. We went through the creditors list when it first landed. A week on, the money side is settled at that nil, and what is left to sort out is who actually puts on a comedy festival in Leicester next February.

The largest non-employee creditor named in that reporting is Triple CeePee at £48,145. Then come YMCA Leicestershire at £18,646, Just the Tonic Productions at £12,517, NatWest at £5,790 and Stagematic, the app designers, at £5,000. FRP Advisory Trading is handling the liquidation. An earlier creditors’ report put the collapse at more than £215,000 owed to over 100 people. Chortle noted that figure represents more than 40 per cent of the charity’s annual £500,000 turnover. With assets at nil, none of those hundred-odd creditors gets a payout, though NatWest, in for £5,790, will survive the experience rather better than the acts sharing the list with it.

At the September creditors’ meeting, the Live Comedy Association reported that trustees said they did not know payments would not be made. The first they knew of it, they said, was when they read about it on Chortle. The trustees also said they did not authorise the spending of ticket money on operational costs. The LCA’s estimate of what went in the other direction is the figure that stings most for anyone who registered a show. It puts approximately £70,000 as received from comedians, promoters and venues in registration fees for the 2026 festival. The majority of that came in early October 2025. Creditors voted at the end of that meeting to establish a creditors’ committee, and the LCA will have representation on it.

Who is running Leicester comedy in February 2027?

Two separate things are scheduled, and neither is the old festival. On 5 August 2026 Leicester City Council said it will ensure an interim comedy festival programme takes place in 2027. That work involves local promoters, venues and stakeholders, alongside the council’s own festivals and De Montfort Hall teams. City Mayor Sir Peter Soulsby was direct about the limit of that: “While of course we can’t pick up the debts of a registered charity, we do want to ensure the festival goes ahead next year.” So there is council money for keeping something in the city’s February diary, and nothing in that statement for the acts who worked last February.

The second thing is the Independent Comedy Festival, running 3 to 21 February 2027. It was founded by stand-up Alex Hylton and promoter Colin Bowles of TripleCeePee, the same TripleCeePee sitting at the top of the creditors list. Comedy.co.uk noted that Bowles’s promotion company already stages shows at venues including The Y Theatre, Firebug and the Sue Townsend Theatre, pointing to his track record rather than naming venues for the festival. The new festival’s own homepage names no venues at all yet, which is honest of it. It is mildly frustrating if you are trying to work out whether your two-hander fits in the Firebug back room (it does, just about, if nobody wants a soundcheck).

Hylton put the pitch to Chortle in terms that will be familiar to anyone who has been chasing an invoice since March:

We’re going to put on something really special. Leicester deserves a brilliant comedy festival, artists deserve to be treated fairly, and audiences should know that their ticket money is going to support the show they have paid to see.

He also told Chortle that “For too long in the comedy industry, comedians have been at the bottom of the pecking order.” Mark Watson backed the new venture, saying Leicester “as a city has supported a unique, hugely valuable festival for many years now”. He was “very happy to hear that that gap is going to be filled by people who know what they’re doing and truly care about comedy”. Jessica Toomey, chair of the LCA, was warm rather than partisan: “The city has a massive reputation for supporting live comedy and we wish the producers of the new festival all the best.”

The box office never touches the festival’s bank account

The genuinely new bit of plumbing is on the ticketing side, and it is worth reading before you register anything. The Independent Comedy Festival’s site states that it is working with TixEvery as its official ticketing partner for 2027. It spells out the arrangement in a single line: “TixEvery will pay artists directly; ticket revenues will never be held by the Independent Comedy Festival.” Hylton told Chortle that artists “can trust that their ticket revenue will be kept secure”.

Whether that promise holds is a matter for February, but the structure is the thing worth checking. What went wrong in 2026 was that money performers reasonably thought was theirs sat inside an organisation with other bills to pay. A ticketing partner that pays the act and never routes box office through the festival’s own account closes that particular trapdoor, while leaving the others where they are. Registration fees, if there are any, still go somewhere, and the festival has not opened registrations yet. The site says only that it will be ready to open them “soon” and invites performers to join a mailing list. Anyone who has watched another festival leave refunds waiting will recognise the shape of that risk. For now the only thing the site will actually take off you is an email address.

This matters more than it would have five years ago, because the margin for an unpaid February has thinned. The LCA’s own sector survey found average wages dropped to £21,143 in 2025, down from £26,778 the year before. The average number of gigs fell from 3.2 per week to 2.5. Against a £21,143 average, a registration fee that vanishes and a February that pays nothing take a real bite out of the year.

The hardship fund closes on 5 October

Anyone still carrying a 2026 Leicester comedy debt has a date, and it is close. The LCA’s hardship fund is taking second-round applications until 11:59pm on Monday 5 October 2026. It is open to people who worked on the 2026 festival and were not paid by Big Difference Company. The first round, in June, gives you a sense of the arithmetic. £5,000 was allocated by LCA directors from the Stand Up And Give Fund. Eighteen applications came in totalling £5,893.38 in unpaid settlements, and the fund distributed £5,009.37 at a flat 85 per cent rate. That worked out at 85p in the pound, which is 85p more than the liquidation is going to find.

The second round is funded by a public fundraiser aiming to raise at least £30,000 from individuals and businesses across the sector. The LCA says the Stand Up And Give Fund has raised over £30,000 to date. We tracked the slow start on that crowdfunder in August, when it was a long way short. So the bill for compensating unpaid acts has been picked up by comedians and comedy businesses, the same crowd still arguing over a £1 ticket levy modelled on music’s grassroots scheme and topping up its own award prizes at Edinburgh.

There are three things left for a working act to decide: which February programme you register with, who physically holds the card payment when a punter buys a ticket, and whether you get your claim in before Monday week. Everything else about last February is now a filing with a nil in it, sitting at Companies House next to a £5,000 line for an app nobody will open again.