Three comedians paid, and a union that won’t name them

Equity has got three comedians their money. That’s the concrete result out of the Leicester Comedy Festival mess this week. Set against a festival that ran more than 500 acts back in February, three is not a number that makes anyone feel better on its own. The performers’ union confirmed on 15 July that it had, in Chortle’s words, “successfully secured payment for three comedians who had been left unpaid for shows performed during the festival held in February”. It reckons the quiet pressure has shifted more than that.

This is the same festival I first wrote about when the bulk of its acts went unpaid after the February run. It’s the same one that pulled its summer outdoor gig with barely a fortnight’s notice. Five months on, the story has moved from “cashflow delay” to a union filing claims one performer at a time.

Ian Manborde, Equity’s Midlands official, put it plainly. Speaking to Chortle he said:

The problems with the company running Leicester Comedy festival make for terrible news for the many performers and other workers who are yet to be paid for their work this year

The union was careful about the arithmetic beyond the three confirmed cases. Equity said that “through some sensitive work, we’ve managed to secure payments for quite a few Equity members”. It urged other affected performers to get in touch. “Sensitive work” is union-speak for letters that don’t get published, and it’s doing a lot of load-bearing in that sentence. Nobody at Equity would give me a fuller tally, which is fair enough – naming figures mid-negotiation is how you blow up the negotiation.

How many Leicester Comedy Festival acts are still unpaid?

Nobody has published a firm total of comedians still waiting. What we do know: the festival attracted about 100,000 spectators and more than 500 acts in February. That bill included Sir Stephen Fry, Sara Pascoe and Rosie Holt at the top end and a great many gigging comics at the bottom of it. Organisers said they had settled almost half the outstanding bills by the end of April. By simple subtraction, that leaves a lot of invoices unaccounted for in the months since.

The company behind the festival is The Big Difference. Its chief executive, Michael Harris-Wakelam, has framed this from the start as a timing problem rather than a solvency one. Earlier in the year he said: “It is a case of the cashflow problem. What we’re trying to communicate with [the artists] is this is a case of a small delay rather than ‘you won’t be paid’.” He pointed at the money still owed to the festival itself: “We’re still waiting for money that’s owed to us for our activities during the festival. That comes from a number of sources, sponsorship, commission shows, ticket sales through third parties.”

That was the reassuring version. The version that landed in July is that the company’s Leicester venue was repossessed over unpaid rent, which Chortle was first to report, and which – in the words of the same piece – has been “sparking more fears over money owed to comedians”. Chortle also noted the obvious open question hanging over the lot of it: “It is unclear what is happening with the company. There has not yet been any indication it is seeking liquidation.” A comic owed for a February spot is now reading landlord-possession notices to work out whether their invoice survives, which is not a research task anyone signed up for when they took the gig.

A £5,000 fund against a far bigger bill

While Equity worked the individual claims, the Live Comedy Association went at the immediate hardship. Its emergency fund paid out £5,000 in total, split across 18 comedians and one promoter – and the LCA said flatly that “the amount of money owed is far greater than the £5,000 we have awarded”. I covered the fund and the venue loss in more detail when the hardship money first went out, but the maths bears repeating: eighteen people sharing five grand works out at a few hundred each, which is a tank of diesel and a night’s Edinburgh accommodation, not a headliner fee recovered.

That gap between a hardship handout and the actual sum owed is what makes a festival collapse so grim for the acts caught in it. A grant fund treats the symptom – it doesn’t put the door split back in the comic’s account, and it was never meant to. Equity is doing the slower, less photogenic thing: chasing the debt itself, one member at a time, on the argument that a booking was a contract the moment the comic walked on stage.

A letterhead, and the argument behind it

Michael Day, Equity’s variety official, put the Leicester story where it belongs – in a long line of them. “Sadly, this is not an unusual situation and far too often it is precarious, gigging performers and artists who bear the brunt of cancellations and collapses,” he said. He’s right, and it’s the reason the union keeps returning to the same fix: rules that ring-fence performer pay so it isn’t the first budget line a struggling organisation dips into. It’s also why the sector’s lobbying push keeps citing cases exactly like this one.

For anyone still owed Leicester money, the dull and useful lesson is that being in a union turned an ignored invoice into a paid one for at least three people this month. Equity has asked affected performers to contact its Midlands office directly. Those three got their fee back because someone with a letterhead asked on their behalf and kept asking – the festival didn’t suddenly find the cash. The other few hundred invoices are still sitting in an inbox somewhere, waiting on money that may itself be waiting on a sponsor who hasn’t paid either.