The biggest night Live at the Apollo ever had was a December 2009 episode with Rhod Gilbert and John Bishop on the bill. It was watched by 6.29 million people, according to Chortle. Its most recent series pulled around 660,000, down from about 1.3 million in 2018. On Wednesday 29 July the BBC confirmed the show is finished after 22 years. One commissioned series still hasn’t been broadcast, which is the only part of this that changes anybody’s diary.<\/p>\n
The strand premiered on 6 September 2004 and was produced by Open Mike Productions at the Hammersmith Apollo. Jack Dee hosted the first two series for BBC One in 2004 and 2005, per Chortle. After that the format handed the compere job to one of the night’s acts. It moved to BBC Two in November 2015. Wikipedia’s episode listing counts 20 series and 130 episodes, plus specials. That’s a lot of eight-minute spots, and a lot of comics who got to write “as seen on Live at the Apollo” in their tour blurb afterwards.<\/p>\n
Blankety Blank and Celebrity Mastermind went in the same announcement, though the straight Mastermind with Clive Myrie survives. PA reported Celebrity Mastermind fell from an average of 4 million viewers in 2017 to 1.7 million, and Blankety Blank from 5.5 million in 2021 to 2.3 million. Three shows, three graphs pointing the same way in whatever deck this decision came out of. The BBC said it was “incredibly proud of all three of these much-loved shows”. It said it has to make “really tough choices in light of our funding challenges, and these savings have been identified from the Entertainment genre”. PA reported these decisions form part of the BBC’s “previously announced first phase” of proposals to make \u00a3500m of savings over three years. Beyond The Joke put the content division’s target at “a minimum of \u00a3100 million of recurring annual savings” by 2027\/28.<\/p>\n
Bruce Dessau, writing at Beyond The Joke, put the loss in circuit terms rather than schedule terms:<\/p>\n
\nLive at the Apollo has given a huge boost to the live stand-up industry in general.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
He credits it with helping “to launch major careers over the years”. His list of beneficiaries runs John Bishop, Michael McIntyre, Sarah Millican and Micky Flanagan. Not everybody is convinced the maths adds up: one X user, @daryl_millar, posted that he was surprised to see it go because “It can’t cost much and has been instrumental in giving many comedians their big TV breaks”. Nobody outside the production knows what an episode actually costs, but a night in a theatre that’s already selling tickets is a cheaper hour than a studio sitcom, and the BBC has never published a per-episode figure for anyone to argue with.<\/p>\n
When is the last Live at the Apollo recorded?<\/h2>\n
Nobody has said publicly. Chortle’s line is that one further series, the 21st, “has yet to broadcast”. Wikipedia’s entry states the show “will end after series 21, which will be filmed in the autumn, due to cuts at the broadcaster”, and I can’t find a trade report that pins a date to that, so treat autumn as the working assumption rather than a booking.<\/p>\n
I checked the other end of the pipe, which is where you actually find out when a TV stand-up show is taping. SRO Audiences handles the free audience tickets, and its Live At The Apollo page currently lists no recording dates at all. The apply button is still sitting there pointing at nothing. What the page offers instead is the line: “if you would like to add your details to our mailing list here, we can email you with details of possible future recordings.” So as of today, the agency that fills a 3,500-plus-capacity room for the BBC has nothing on the calendar for the last-ever series of the show it fills it for.<\/p>\n
Any manager telling a client that a series 21 Apollo spot is live ought to be able to point at an SRO date, and there isn’t one yet. Audience booking, per the SRO page, opens a few weeks before recording, and “Tickets are limited so apply quickly”. By the time those dates go up the bills behind them have long been signed off, which is why the page never names a single performer.<\/p>\n
Two episodes a night, 18 and over, no names in advance<\/h2>\n
The mechanics of the tape are worth spelling out, because the strand’s reputation as a career-maker rests on a fairly brutal room. SRO’s page gives the address as the Hammersmith Apollo, 45 Queen Caroline Street, W6 9QH, nearest tube Hammersmith, which is a mercy: the surrounding parking is a flyover, a one-way system and a lot of hopeful behaviour on double yellows. Audiences see two episodes in a session, 6:30pm to roughly 10:30pm, and the minimum age is 18. The Christmas show is a one-off afternoon sit, 1pm to about 4pm, for a single bumper episode.<\/p>\n
Performers aren’t announced in advance. That means several thousand people applaud a comic they’ve never heard of, twice in one evening, in a theatre that Theatres Online lists as holding over 3,500 mixed standing and seated and 5,000 all-standing. Do that well and you have eight or nine broadcast minutes with your name in the corner of the screen. I don’t have the per-act fee, because the BBC doesn’t publish it and none of this week’s coverage carries it, and I’d rather leave a hole than guess at a number acts will read as gospel.<\/p>\n
The replacement is one sentence about digital plans<\/h2>\n
PA reported the BBC “would ‘shortly be announcing digital plans focused on stand-up and emerging comedy talent'”, and Chortle carries the accompanying reassurance: “We will still continue to commission ambitious entertainment shows and invest in distinctive UK content.” There’s no production company attached to that, and no shoot window. Until there’s a commissioning brief with both, no comic can put it on a calendar or in a funding application.<\/p>\n
The context around it is not encouraging either. Jon Petrie leaves the BBC’s comedy department for Hat Trick in August<\/a>, so the digital plan will be announced by somebody else. The BBC New Comedy Awards pulled all of this year’s heats into Coventry<\/a>, which is a talent-finding exercise rather than a broadcast stand-up strand. Chortle notes the Apollo axe follows the 2022 axing of Mock The Week, a show that eventually came back on TLC with 17 comics across five Sundays<\/a>, which is not a channel anybody’s agent had in the plan. Meanwhile the actual growth in stand-up-on-a-screen is happening in places like NextUp’s 16-show Fringe bundle for \u00a350<\/a>, \u00a350 being, in London terms, roughly two club tickets and a service charge.<\/p>\n
Working comics aren’t mourning the 660,000 viewers so much as the credit itself: the one nationally recognisable line a club headliner could earn in a single evening without a Netflix deal, an agent with a development slate or a podcast with sponsors. Whatever the digital replacement turns out to be, it will not put your face on BBC Two at 10pm between Christmas repeats.<\/p>\n
For now the SRO page sits there inviting you to join a mailing list about possible future recordings of a programme that has just been cancelled. Somebody will still fill that room in the autumn, and a dozen or so acts will walk offstage at Queen Caroline Street having done the last-ever tapings of a show they grew up watching, then get the Piccadilly line home.<\/p>\n
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