Radio 4 books four comedy clubs as Live From The UK returns

The Y Theatre sits at 7 East Street in Leicester, calls itself the city’s oldest theatre and turns 125 this year. In its own words on its own website, it is “an independent venue that doesn’t receive regular funding”. On 20 September a BBC recording truck’s worth of kit turns up there and starts taping national radio. That is the first date of the new run of Live From The UK, the Radio 4 stand-up showcase. Chortle reported on 11 September that it is coming back for another go, with Angela Barnes hosting again.

Here are the dates, because this is the bit people will actually google. Chortle lists the Y Theatre in Leicester on 20 September, then the Glee clubs in Cardiff on 23 September and Leeds on 1 October. The Exeter Corn Exchange follows on 28 October. Tickets to sit in the audience are free, through the BBC’s shows and tours site. Nobody has published the line-ups yet. That is normal for this format, and mildly annoying if you’re an act hoping to find out whether your agent has been quietly pitching you.

The series has form: since May 2025 it has run 10 episodes across two series, and Seann Walsh, Phil Ellis, Jo Caulfield and Susie McCabe are among the names that have gone out on it. What’s different this time is the state of the rest of the circuit, and the fact that half the rooms on this run aren’t comedy clubs.

Where is Live From The UK recorded?

In working comedy rooms and regional theatres, with the outside broadcast kit carried in for the night. For this run that means the Y Theatre in Leicester, the Glee clubs in Cardiff and Leeds, and the Exeter Corn Exchange. The first series, taped across April 2025, went to the Frog & Bucket in Manchester, the Glee Club in Birmingham, and The Stand in both Newcastle and Glasgow. Line up both runs and you get Manchester, Birmingham, Newcastle, Glasgow, Leicester, Cardiff, Leeds and Exeter, and the Glee chain takes two of this autumn’s four dates, which is a decent bit of business for one operator.

Two of this autumn’s four venues aren’t comedy clubs at all, which is worth saying out loud. The Exeter Corn Exchange takes comedy in among everything else it takes, and the Y Theatre is a 125-year-old theatre that happens to programme comedy. The sound in a room like that is a different job for the engineer. A low-ceilinged basement throws the laughs back at you off the wall. Anyone who has done a radio record in a theatre knows the warm-up has to work twice as hard. Four hundred people spread across raked seating do not laugh like 180 people jammed into a cellar.

There’s also a small, unremarked thing about Leicester getting the opening night. This is the city whose comedy festival charity, the Big Difference Company, went under earlier this year owing performers money, and a crowdfunder is still trying to make some of that back. Seven months on, the BBC is taping a national stand-up series a ten-minute walk from where all that happened. Nobody at the BBC has framed it that way, and I doubt anybody intended it.

Four acts a room, and what became of the sixteen

The 2025 template is the one to study if you want to know how these bookings actually work. Chortle published the line-ups at the time. Birmingham on 14 April had Josh Pugh, Scott Bennett, Tal Davies and Lindsey Santoro, and Manchester on 15 April had Brennan Reece, Hayley Ellis, Melina Fiol and Josh Jones. Glasgow on 21 April had Susie McCabe, Stephen Buchanan, Jay Lafferty and Mark Nelson. Newcastle on 22 April had Lauren Pattison, Gavin Webster, Louise Young and one more act unannounced at the time.

Four acts a room, four rooms, four 30-minute episodes, which is sixteen people driving to a gig for what might come out as six minutes of tape. Beyond The Joke reported that the first broadcast went out on Wednesday 14 May 2025 at 6.30pm. It took one act from each room: Mark Nelson from The Stand in Glasgow, Louise Young from The Stand in Newcastle, Hayley Ellis from the Frog and Bucket, and Josh Pugh headlining from the Glee in Birmingham. So a recording night is four separate auditions for a slot in a half-hour that gets cut together afterwards, and the running order on the night tells you less than you’d think about who ends up where in the edit.

The BBC’s own description of the series, quoted by Chortle when it was first announced in April 2025, was this:

Recording at some of the leading comedy clubs the country has to offer, Angela will bring the best acts from different regions to the airwaves for this high calibre stand-up showcase.

Press-release prose, obviously. But the operative word is regions, and the line-ups back it up rather than contradict it, which is not always the case with this kind of copy.

£21,143 a year and 2.54 gigs a week

Radio doesn’t pay like telly and never has. It matters more than it did anyway, because the alternatives keep closing. The BBC axed Live At The Apollo in July after 22 years, as part of £100 million a year of content savings. The 21st series is still sitting unbroadcast. Blankety Blank and Celebrity Mastermind went in the same round, and both of those gave comics screen time too. The replacement the BBC gestured at was “digital plans focused on stand-up and emerging comedy talent”, and nobody has put a name, a slot or a commissioning editor next to that yet.

Set that against what the acts are earning. The UK Live Comedy Sector Survey, reported by Chortle in February, put average annual turnover at £21,143, down from £26,778 the year before, from 272 respondents. Turnover, note, not take-home, so the diesel to Leeds comes out of that. Average shows per week fell from 3.2 to 2.54, a drop we wrote about in the piece on comics down to 2.5 gigs a week. The share earning nothing at all from comedy went from 7 per cent to 17. One respondent told the survey: “I earned more per gig in 2004 than now.”

A Radio 4 stand-up fee will not fix that for anyone. What a broadcast credit does is sit on a poster and in an agent’s email, and for a club act with no television to aim at, there are now very few of those going. The BBC New Comedy Awards heats are one of the few ways in at the bottom of the ladder, and a Radio 4 record is one of the very few left in the middle of it.

A quick word about the free tickets

They’re free, they go through the BBC’s ticketing site, and free does not mean easy. Radio recordings over-allocate because free tickets get no-showed, so the room you play might be fuller or emptier than the ticket count suggests, and the warm-up is there partly to fix whatever gap that leaves. If you’re an act on one of these bills, the audience in front of you was recruited by a broadcaster’s mailing list rather than by the club’s regulars. That is a different crowd from the one the Glee sells to on a Saturday.

Exeter Corn Exchange on 28 October is the one I’d watch. It’s the last date of the run, it’s the furthest from anywhere else on the list, and by late October the Devon weather will have opinions about whether the audience turns up at all. Someone at BBC Studios has presumably already had the conversation about a contingency date. Somebody else will be the one who has to ring four acts and tell them.

Sources

• Chortle: Live From The UK to return to Radio 4 (11 September 2026)
• Chortle: Angela Barnes to host new Radio 4 stand-up series (10 April 2025)
• Chortle: Live At The Apollo is dead (29 July 2026)
• Chortle: Comedians report a huge wage slump (4 February 2026)
• Beyond The Joke: Angela Barnes Hosts New Radio 4 Stand Up Show
• The Y Theatre, Leicester