The most consequential line in this week’s Have A Word announcement is an email address. Producers are inviting comics, agents and managers to pitch to murderersrow@haveawordpod.com. (An address with “murderers row” in it is a lot to type while asking a stranger for work, but there it is.) Anyone who has spent three years trying to get a tape in front of a television commissioner will understand why. It’s tucked at the bottom of Chortle’s report, under all the stuff about hosts and studios.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Here are the plain facts. The team behind the Have A Word podcast is making a line-up stand-up series for YouTube. It’s a response to the BBC axing Live At The Apollo after 22 years<\/a>. The hosts are Adam Rowe and Dan Nightingale, both stand-ups, and the show is recorded in a purpose-built studio in Liverpool. Eight episodes will be filmed in March next year, which is March 2027, with Rowe and Nightingale hosting four each. Chortle reported the plan on 8 August. The BBC said it axed Live At The Apollo to save money, and promised to unveil “digital plans focused on stand-up and emerging comedy talent” in its place. A 21st series has already been recorded and has yet to broadcast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rowe announced it on Instagram, and the bit of his statement everyone will quote back at him is the one about broadcast constraints. Producers, he said, want to use the channel they’ve built to let comics do their stuff. That means working “without the shackles & censorship that naturally come with broadcast TV”. The bit I’d rather flag is the sentence before it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “We believe there needs to be a regular stand-up series that showcases the best comedians in the country. A combination of big names and the comics you haven’t heard of yet that are about to become your new favourite. But maybe it doesn’t need to be on terrestrial TV any more.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n That’s Rowe, quoted by Chortle from his Instagram post. “The comics you haven’t heard of yet” is the load-bearing clause. The historic complaint about Apollo bookings was rarely about the quality of the acts on it – it was that the pipeline into them ran through a small number of agents and a producer’s shortlist. If you weren’t on it, you could do twelve years of Saturday clubs without ever getting the call. An open inbox doesn’t fix that on its own, because someone still reads it and someone still decides. It’s still a different object from a closed shortlist, and it’s the first genuinely new thing to happen to UK stand-up booking access since Jon Petrie left the BBC for Hat Trick – roughly twenty minutes of your evening, most of which goes on choosing which clip to attach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You email murderersrow@haveawordpod.com. Chortle’s report says producers are sourcing acts directly as well as taking pitches from comics, agents and managers, so the inbox is one route in among several. No submission form, no closing date, no stated word count on the covering note. That is the full extent of the published application process at time of writing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What has not been announced: any fee for performing acts, any filming venue, any recording dates beyond the month. Also unstated is whether the series carries the Murderers Row name, and what rights the taped sets sit under afterwards. I’d treat all five as open questions rather than omissions – the announcement is nine days old and a March shoot is seven months out. Producers have previously run line-up gigs under the Murderers Row name. The venues included the King’s Theatre in Glasgow, Manchester Opera House and the Hackney Empire in London. The Empire seats 1,275, so the live version has been playing at a scale where a fee conversation exists. The ATG listing for that tour currently shows no upcoming dates. It describes the format as guest comics who “include superstars and rising talents”. That’s a sentence doing an enormous amount of work for a bill that hasn’t been booked yet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Chortle put the numbers side by side, and they’re the reason this isn’t just a podcast announcing a thing. The podcast’s YouTube channel has more than 100,000 subscribers. The last series of Live At The Apollo reportedly drew around 660,000 viewers an episode. Rowe’s 2023 special Juicy has done 403,000 views in three years. And the podcast has almost 44,000 members paying at least \u00a33 a month on Patreon. My own arithmetic on that floor price puts the gross a shade under \u00a3132,000 a month – before Patreon’s cut, tax, or the studio in Liverpool, and before whoever it is who orders the biscuits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So the funding model for a stand-up showcase now looks like a membership base rather than a licence fee. That is a genuinely odd thing to type. Whether any of that reaches the acts on the bill is the question nobody has answered. It’s the same question the Comedy Fee Tracker<\/a> has been forcing into the open on the American club circuit, where openers were logging $500 a night. A TV showcase used to pay a modest fee and hand you a clip worth more than the fee; if the clip is now the entire product, somebody has to say out loud what twenty minutes on camera is worth. Nobody has put a number on it, and the shoot is seven months out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Buried in the Chortle piece: the pair say their current touring material will be used for this show. That’s instead of the new full-length specials they’d planned to release this year. That’s a real cost, and they’re eating it themselves. A set you’ve taped is a set you can’t take round the Glee clubs for another eighteen months pretending it’s fresh. Two hosts feeding four episodes each means eight recorded chunks of hosting that can never be reused.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The comparison worth watching is NextUp’s Fringe streaming slate<\/a>. Sixteen shows go up for \u00a350, and the acts know exactly what the deal is going in. A YouTube series doesn’t have a subscription wall to split. The value to a booked act is the exposure, plus whatever the producers decide to pay. That’s not a criticism of Rowe and Nightingale, who have built the audience themselves and are under no obligation to run a public service. It does mean the fee question has to go in the pitch email itself, because there’s no agent’s assistant on the other end chasing it for you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The thing I keep turning over is the shoot month. March, seven months out, eight episodes: that’s a proper block booking. It’s the kind of schedule that needs a theatre, a crew, and a lighting rig that doesn’t belong to a podcast studio. Somewhere there’s a venue diary with eight provisional dates pencilled against a name that hasn’t been announced yet. And a room manager who has no idea their Tuesday is about to become the thing that replaced Live At The Apollo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\nThe pitch address is doing a commissioner’s job<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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How do comedians get on the new Have A Word stand-up show?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
660,000 viewers, 44,000 Patreons and a bit of arithmetic<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Rowe and Nightingale are burning their own tour material on it<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Sources<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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