Leicester’s unpaid comics fund has £4,000 of its £30,000, and an ISH prize

Five nominees, one £5,000 pot, and a creditor owed £103

Big Difference Company was the collapsed charity that ran Leicester Comedy Festival. Buried in its creditors’ report is a line for £103 owed to the Live Comedy Association. Chortle picked it out on 22 August, alongside debts of more than £215,000. Six staff are owed over £50,000 between them, and Just The Tonic more than £13,000. So the trade body that is itself a hundred quid light has spent this year handing out other people’s money to the acts the festival didn’t pay. Last weekend the ISH Edinburgh Comedy Awards gave it a share of their £5,000 panel prize for doing it.

We wrote about that hardship pot back in July, when it was five months on from the festival and the venue had already gone. Since then the charity has ceased trading, having taken £499,562 in its last full year. And the creditors’ list turned out to be missing people who are definitely owed money. The LCA is a not-for-profit community interest company founded in 2020. It says on its own site that it has over 1,600 members across the country, and that joining is free.

Chortle’s report on the debts carries a line from LCA chair Jessica Toomey. It explains why a crowdfunder exists at all for a sector with no statutory backstop:

The vast majority of people owed money are freelancers or sole traders who can’t afford to just lose their money and not receive anything.

Nobody in this story is on a payroll with an insolvency claim to file. They’re people who did forty minutes in a Leicester back room in February and invoiced afterwards.

How much has the Leicester crowdfunder raised?

Just under £4,000 of a £30,000 target, according to Chortle’s 22 August report. That is the most recent figure I can source to a primary outlet; the Crowdfunder page itself would not load for me. The Leicester crowdfunder went live on 5 August, the same week Big Difference Company announced it had stopped trading. Beyond The Joke’s Bruce Dessau reported the £30,000 figure as an initial target rather than a ceiling.

Before that, in July, an earlier £5,000 pot from the LCA’s Stand Up And Give Fund was shared out between 18 comedians and one promoter. Everyone who applied got something. Chortle reported that on 8 July, and it is worth holding the two numbers next to each other. £5,000 covered nineteen people, and the estimate of how many were hit runs to hundreds of comedians plus dozens of promoters and venues. The LCA says claims will be verified and payments made within a month of the application deadline. The process will be announced through its own site rather than through the festival, which no longer exists to announce anything.

Even a fully funded Leicester crowdfunder lands well short of the hole. Thirty grand against debts of more than £215,000 works out as a partial rebate for the people least able to absorb the loss, and the LCA has been open that no admin fee comes off the top.

Who else took a slice of the panel prize

The ISH panel prize was shared between all five nominees. The other four are worth naming, because they’re all doing the same kind of unglamorous logistics. Henry Churney of Laugh For Life Comedy runs confidence-building comedy courses for vulnerable adults in the North West. Jess Brough runs the Fringe of Colour Database, which is how a lot of audiences found shows by underrepresented artists this month. Lee Kyle and the Felt Nowt collective ran The Garrett and got 51 regional comedians up to Edinburgh. Anyone who has tried to book a Fringe room from Newcastle will recognise that as a properly mad undertaking. Sarah-Louise Young has been running peer-support meetups for solo artists since 2022 and co-founded a solo theatremakers collective with more than 1,000 members worldwide.

The awards haven’t published who got exactly what out of the £5,000, so I’m not going to guess at a per-recipient split. The overall ISH pot this year was £16,000.01. We’ve already been through how that breaks down, including the £1,000 that goes to a tech op. On the night itself, Harriet Dyer and Paul Foot shared the £5,000 best show prize. Sam Eley won best newcomer for his alter-ego Basil Crumbwick, and Matthew Gallagher took best joke.

You did the gig in February and you’re still owed £600

Nothing has reached you yet, which is the honest answer. Panel prize money arriving in the LCA’s account in the last week of August doesn’t become a bank transfer to a comic in Leicester until the application window closes and the claims are checked. Money raised by the Leicester crowdfunder moves the same way: an application, a verification, then a payment. If you performed at Leicester Comedy Festival 2026 and haven’t been paid, the practical steps are still the same ones. Get your claim into the LCA fund when the process opens, and keep the paperwork on what you were owed – the WhatsApp thread where a promoter confirmed your fee counts as paperwork, and it’s usually the only thing anyone kept. Don’t assume the creditors’ list has your name on it, because plenty of people’s names aren’t on it.

There’s a bleak symmetry in a comedy trade body winning prize money at one festival to pay the debts of another. Edinburgh’s award season is generally a machine for converting sponsorship into a handful of five-figure cheques for people who already sold out their run. The panel prize is the one bit of it that pays for admin, spreadsheets and the person who answers emails at eleven at night. Two nights after the ISH ceremony, the Malcolm Hardee awards gave comic originality to an ASMR show at Bannerman’s.

I keep coming back to that £103. Whoever entered it on the creditors’ schedule was recording a membership fee, or an invoice too small to chase. Someone typed it into a cell a few rows from the £13,000-odd owed to Just The Tonic, and there it still sits.

Sources

• Chortle: Harriet Dyer and Paul Foot share ISH comedy award (29 August 2026)
• Chortle: Leicester Comedy Festival charity’s debts exceed £215,000 (22 August 2026)
• Chortle: Help given to comics hit by Leicester Comedy Festival troubles (8 July 2026)
• Beyond The Joke: Leicester Comedy Festival £30,000 Hardship Fund Launched (5 August 2026)
• ISH Edinburgh Comedy Awards: prizes and panel prize nominees
• Live Comedy Association