Sunday 14 June was meant to be Lou Sanders, Phil Ellis, Tom Rosenthal, Kiri Pritchard McLean and Nabil Abdulrashid on a stage in Abbey Park from midday to half past two. Tickets were \u00a330, plus a \u00a33 booking fee on top. Ticket-holders found out last Thursday that none of that is happening. They’ve been told the \u00a330 will be back within ten days. The \u00a33 booking fees, paid on every single seat sold, are not coming back.<\/p>\n
That’s the news Chortle broke on 4 June<\/a>, with less than a fortnight to go before the gig. The event page on the festival site has already been quietly deleted. The email to ticket buyers blames “unforeseen circumstances”. That’s the catch-all every promoter reaches for when the real reason is one they don’t want in writing.<\/p>\n The booking fee question is the one I’d want answered if I’d bought a ticket. On a standard outdoor comedy show the \u00a33 fee usually covers the ticketing platform’s cut and payment processing. The rest is whatever the promoter has decided to skim on top. When a show goes ahead, the punter never sees that money again and that’s a fair trade. When the show is pulled by the organiser with under two weeks to go, keeping the \u00a33 is a deliberate decision someone made in an office. Some platforms reverse fees automatically on a cancellation; others leave the call with the promoter, and Leicester Comedy Festival is, on this announcement, sitting in the second camp.<\/p>\n I don’t know how many tickets sold. The lineup was strong enough: Sanders and Rosenthal alone would shift them in a city Leicester’s size. Even a modest crowd of a thousand puts the un-refunded booking-fee pot at \u00a33,000. A bigger crowd makes it worse. That number isn’t trivial in the context of a charity whose annual income sits around \u00a3500,000<\/a>. The same charity spent April this year explaining why it couldn’t pay its acts on time.<\/p>\n Why does Leicester Comedy Festival cancelling a summer one-off matter more than the average promoter pulling an outdoor show? You have to go back to February. The festival ran from 4 to 22 February with more than 500 acts and a stated audience of 100,000. Acts were due paying out on 19 April. Per Chortle’s April reporting, only 22 per cent of those payments went out on time. 370 shows took place, and around 289 of them were still owed money by deadline.<\/p>\n The amounts named in coverage are not life-changing on paper and entirely life-changing in practice when you’re a touring act paying your own van diesel. Comic and promoter Benjamin Alborough told the BBC<\/a> he was owed almost \u00a32,000:<\/p>\n I’m owed just short of \u00a32,000. It’s very frustrating. I’ve got bills to pay like everyone else.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Zoe Brownstone was waiting on \u00a3180. Rachael Johnson, who put on two events, was \u00a3600 down and had still paid her own acts and crew out of pocket. Big Difference’s CEO Michael Harris-Wakelam told the BBC at the time it was “a case of the cashflow problem” and tried to frame it as “a small delay rather than ‘you won’t be paid'”. The festival’s own statement to performers conceded, in the kind of sentence you only write when a lawyer is in the room, that “the decision was made to prioritise” operational spending over ring-fenced artist money.<\/p>\n The line from the CEO accompanying the LCF In The Park cancellation, reported by Chortle, is short and worth reading twice. Harris-Wakelam said the organisation was “prioritising” artists “to the detriment of some of our other planned activities”. In other words: the summer flagship has been sacrificed to fund the people the February festival didn’t pay. That’s the most generous reading and it’s probably the accurate one. It should also worry anyone holding a ticket to anything else the festival has scheduled this year – you don’t pull the biggest summer gig two weeks out unless every other lever has already been tried, and anyone with a stub for the autumn programme will want to keep an eye on their inbox.<\/p>\n The optics of keeping the booking fees in that context are not great. If the message is “we are doing the right thing by performers”, and the same announcement quietly retains \u00a33 per punter from a show that won’t happen, those two things sit awkwardly together. The cleaner version is to refund the lot and swallow the platform hit yourselves. Anything else asks the audience to chip in \u00a33 a head toward unpaid February invoices on a show none of them attended.<\/p>\n The Big Difference Company is, on Chortle’s reporting, still pressing ahead with planning for February 2027. Acts I’ve spoken to in the past fortnight – none who want to be quoted while invoices are still outstanding – are split between “I’ll do it again because Leicester is a good audience week” and “never again until the money lands first”. Registration fees, the upfront cost an act pays to be on the programme, ran \u00a372 for a small-venue single gig and \u00a3310 for a larger room this year. That’s real money out before a punter has bought a ticket, and it is the bit that gets quietly forgotten in the “acts didn’t get paid” framing – they paid in first.<\/p>\n Festival payment problems are not unique to Leicester. Other organisations are at least trying to do this differently. Gilded Balloon is handing \u00a32,000 each to five Fringe shows<\/a> through its new support fund, and Aberdeen Comedy Festival has stretched to three weekends<\/a> partly to give acts more chance to clear a viable door. Even at the very small end, the Not So New Comedian competition went ahead with a \u00a3150 prize<\/a> for a single winner that 100 over-35s paid to enter, which is honest about what it is. Leicester Comedy Festival’s reputational problem is that February’s IOUs are still circulating, and now the summer marquee gig has been pulled to pay them down.<\/p>\n The Abbey Park stage won’t be empty all summer – the park hosts Madness in July among other things, and the council has its own programme running. But the comedy bill that was meant to bridge the gap between February’s mess and August’s Fringe is gone, and the \u00a33 booking fees on every ticket sold are staying where they are. If you bought one, the refund email arrived last Thursday with \u00a33 missing from the total, and the autumn programme on the festival’s site is the next page worth checking before you book anything else.<\/p>\nWhat got refunded, and what didn’t<\/h2>\n
The February problem that hasn’t gone away<\/h2>\n
What Harris-Wakelam said this time<\/h2>\n
Acts I rang this week are split<\/h2>\n