A Runcorn podcast is replacing Live at the Apollo

Adam Rowe was on the Breakfast sofa by the Sunday

On Sunday 2 August, Adam Rowe sat on the BBC Breakfast sofa opposite Emma Vardy and Roger Johnson. That was four days after the BBC confirmed the show was finished. He described the thing that had just been taken off him in the past tense. “It was a massive platform,” he said, according to PA’s write-up of the interview. He also said he wasn’t “surprised”. That is what comics say on live television when they are actually furious and remembering that their agent is watching. The show he was eulogising is the one that put him on TV in the first place. His own podcast biography still lists “Live At The Apollo (BBC1)” among the credits.

The bare facts, because people are searching for them. The BBC announced on 29 July 2026 that Live at the Apollo would end after series 21. The programme launched on 6 September 2004, with Jack Dee hosting the first two series. Blankety Blank and Celebrity Mastermind went the same day. Chortle’s report put it plainly. They “will also be axed as part of plans to save £100million a year from the BBC’s content spend”. One series, the 21st, has yet to broadcast, so there is still Apollo television to come. It was recorded at the Hammersmith Apollo in West London. Wikipedia lists the building at 5,039 on open seating and 3,632 reserved. It also has some of the least forgiving parking in the borough if you turn up in a car with a guitar in it.

Here are the two ratings numbers everyone has been quoting at each other since the announcement. At its peak, a December 2009 show with Rhod Gilbert and John Bishop, Chortle reports the programme pulled 6.29million viewers. The last series, per Chortle’s follow-up piece, “reportedly attracted around 660,000 viewers per episode”.

So what is the Apollo replacement?

Nothing on the BBC has been announced. The only named Apollo replacement anywhere is a YouTube series from the producers behind the Have A Word podcast. It runs to eight episodes, hosted by Rowe and Dan Nightingale, with “both Rowe and Nightingale hosting four episodes each”. Filming is in March next year. If you want to be on it, the address Chortle published is murderersrow@haveawordpod.com. That is a sentence I did not expect to be typing about the successor to a national stand-up showcase.

That name isn’t new. Chortle notes the team “have previously run line-up gigs under the name Murderers Row at major venues including the King’s Theatre in Glasgow, Manchester Opera House and the Hackney Empire in London”. That last venue has become a properly busy comedy room this year, with Jamali Maddix taking a run of Empire Nights there. Rowe’s own framing of why they’re doing it was posted alongside the announcement: “We believe there needs to be a regular stand-up series that showcases the best comedians in the country…without the shackles & censorship that naturally come with broadcast TV.”

He was more sentimental about the thing he’s replacing. “It’s the show that got an entire generation of people into stand-up, including me,” he said. “Without this show, I’m not sure I would be a comedian (maybe you think that would be a good thing).”

There is a live possibility that somebody else buys the format instead, and it isn’t far-fetched. Chortle points out that “the cancellation of Live At The Apollo follows the 2022 axing of Mock The Week, which was revived by the TLC channel earlier this year”. So a broadcaster resurrection is genuinely possible, and right now it comes with no date, no host and no submissions email, while the Runcorn lot’s version has all three.

The word in the BBC statement is ‘shortly’

Here is the corporation’s statement in full, as carried by Chortle. It is the clearest available statement of the view I’m arguing against: that the BBC remains the home of British stand-up and something is coming to prove it:

We are incredibly proud of all three of these much-loved shows and would like to thank everyone involved, both in front of and behind the camera, for bringing them to screen and making them such a success over many years. Unfortunately, we have to make some really tough choices in light of our funding challenges, and these savings have been identified from the entertainment genre. We will still continue to commission ambitious entertainment shows and invest in distinctive UK content… as well as prioritising digital innovation that can serve fans of these shows and beyond. For example, we will shortly be announcing digital plans focused on stand-up and emerging comedy talent, ensuring we continue to support the stand-up community in a rapidly changing and increasingly competitive media landscape.

“Shortly” was 29 July, and it’s 13 September as I write this. I have searched the trade press and the BBC’s own announcements and cannot find those digital plans. Absence of a search result isn’t proof of absence, though six weeks on, no comic has been able to read a brief, work out whether they’re eligible or ask what it pays. Radio 4, for comparison, has already booked four comedy clubs for the return of Live From The UK, which is what an announced plan looks like. Until that document lands I’m reading the BBC line as a cushion in a press release, and the only Apollo replacement a comic can actually apply to this month is the one with a filming date and an inbox.

The wider cuts programme makes that promise harder to believe. The same round, confirmed in June, has commissioned programming falling by “100–150 hours” and audio output reducing by “350–400 hours, with core daily programmes protected”, against “£80 million in commissioning spend” coming out. A broadcaster removing that many hours of original programming does not then quietly add a stand-up strand nobody has heard of. It might add a YouTube channel of clips from a back catalogue it already owns, which is a different thing and would still be announced with the word “innovation” in it.

The strongest argument against me involves a Liverpool podcast booking its mates

Take the opposing case seriously, because it’s a good one. Six hundred and sixty thousand viewers an episode is not 100,000 YouTube subscribers, and Chortle’s comparison of the two figures is the honest way to present it. More importantly, an Apollo credit was a credential that travelled. A booker in Wolverhampton who has never watched a minute of the show still knows what “as seen on Live at the Apollo” means on a poster, and no independent channel can hand out that currency on day one. There’s also the structural point: a public broadcaster has an open commissioning route, a compliance department and diversity obligations, and an Apollo replacement run by two mates from Liverpool and Preston has none of those. It has a WhatsApp group. The risk of a national stand-up showcase becoming a closed shop for whoever was on episode 212 is real, and anyone who has watched a promoter’s lineup calcify over three years knows exactly how it happens.

Two things beat that argument. The first is that the email address exists, published on day one, which is more of an open door than most television commissioning ever offered a comic without an agent. Whether they actually read it is at least something a comic can check. The second is that the remit argument died with the hours. You cannot simultaneously cut 100 to 150 hours of originated programming and be the guaranteed home of anything. And on the credential point, the currency was already devaluing on its own. A show pulling 660,000 was no longer minting stars at the rate it did when it was doing 6.29 million. The comics I know who taped it recently described it as a good gig and a usable clip.

Nightingale, incidentally, is described on the podcast’s own site as “a much respected stand up comedian and podcaster with over 20 years experience as a professional comic” and “a veteran of seven Edinburgh Fringe Festivals”. That is a longer circuit apprenticeship than several people who hosted Apollo episodes had.

Nobody will tell me what either show pays

Here is what we can count. Chortle reports the Have A Word YouTube channel has more than 100,000 subscribers and that the podcast has almost 44,000 members paying at least £3 a month on Patreon. Multiply the floor and that’s a base of at least £132,000 a month, my arithmetic, from their figures. That pays for a podcast and a studio in Runcorn, and nobody should mistake it for the budget of eight episodes of television. What it does buy them is something the BBC gave up somewhere along the way: 44,000 people with a standing direct debit for stand-up.

What we cannot count is the bit that decides everything. Neither the BBC nor the Have A Word team has published what a headline spot paid on Live at the Apollo or what it will pay on Murderers Row. I don’t have either number, so I’m not going to pretend to. A national showcase that pays a comic a fee they’d accept for a Saturday headline is a replacement; one that pays in exposure is a Patreon perk with a lighting rig. In a year when the average UK comedian’s earnings came in at £21,143 and working comics are down to around 2.5 gigs a week, that gap is somebody’s rent, or in two cases I can think of, somebody’s van insurance.

The podcast started, by its own account, “in the spare room of Dan’s house back in 2020 before moving over to sunny Runcorn where our first studio was built”. Six years later it’s the only organisation in Britain with a dated plan to film a national stand-up lineup show.

So: the Apollo replacement is eight YouTube episodes from Runcorn, shooting in March, and the BBC’s “digital plans focused on stand-up” are a sentence in a press release until somebody publishes a brief and a fee. I’d rather be wrong about that. If a commissioner emails me a document with a rate card on it, I’ll write the correction myself, and I’ll put the rate in the headline.