The Live Comedy Association is owed \u00a3103 by the charity behind Leicester Comedy Festival, for an event the LCA itself produced as part of the festival. That \u00a3103 does not appear on the creditors list. The trade body has spent months chasing this money on everyone else’s behalf. If it can’t get its own invoice onto the paperwork, the odds on a Tuesday-night MC from Loughborough being on there are not brilliant.<\/p>\n
The initial creditors report for Big Difference Company, summarised by the LCA on 22 August, puts the total debt in excess of \u00a3215,000. It lists more than 100 people and organisations owed money. Chortle, reporting the same figures, notes that \u00a3215,000 is more than 40 per cent of the charity’s annual \u00a3500,000 turnover. We first wrote about this in May, when the settlements due to acts didn’t land. The number has gone up every time somebody has opened a spreadsheet since.<\/p>\n
The Charity Commission register still shows the last filed year, ending 29 June 2025. Total income was \u00a3499,562, total expenditure \u00a3495,352. That was the half-million-pound charity that went bust<\/a>. The surplus on that year was \u00a34,210.<\/p>\n Inside that \u00a3215,000, the staff team of six is owed more than \u00a350,000, according to Chortle’s read of the report. Just The Tonic is down for more than \u00a313,000 in ticket sales. Other charities are owed just over \u00a320,000 between them, and HMRC is owed just under \u00a32,000. That’s the line I keep going back to: HMRC sits near the bottom of this pile at just under \u00a32,000, while the six people who actually staffed the festival sit near the top with more than \u00a350,000 between them.<\/p>\n The LCA’s own \u00a3103 is the tell, though. It’s a small enough sum that nobody would have chased it for its own sake – about what a comic spends getting to Leicester and back with a sandwich at the station. It’s also the one entry the LCA can prove from its own bank statements. Over the 24 hours after the report circulated, the association said it had emails from members confirming they were owed money who were not on the creditors list at all, which means the totals could be underestimated. The LCA says it has 1,600 members, and several of them have written in to say they aren’t on the list either.<\/p>\n Jessica Toomey, the LCA’s chair, put it plainly in the association’s 22 August statement<\/a>:<\/p>\n It seems the information the liquidators have been given by the trustees isn’t accurate and we are appealing for anyone who is owed money to contact us as soon as possible. We will be assisting the liquidators in their task of trying to piece together the jigsaw and getting a more accurate figure.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n If you are owed money and your name is not on the creditors list, the route in the public domain right now is to contact the Live Comedy Association as soon as possible, which is exactly what Toomey asked for in that statement. The LCA says it will pass what it collects to the liquidators. No published coverage I can find names the liquidator or the insolvency firm handling it, so I can’t tell you who to write to directly, and I’m not going to guess at a name.<\/p>\n Toomey also told the LCA’s members that one of the eight questions the association sent to the trustees was confirmation of the total amount owed and the number of people owed money, and that no answer has come back. Those questions went to the chair of trustees, named in the LCA’s letter as Chris Traill, with a deadline of the end of the month; we ran through all eight of them last week<\/a>. Question four is the one that matters here, because it asks for the size of the debt and how many people are owed. The creditors report got there before the trustees did, and going by the LCA’s inbox it got the number wrong.<\/p>\n Meanwhile the money that actually reaches people is coming from a crowdfunder. The LCA fund has raised just under \u00a34,000 against a minimum target of \u00a330,000, on top of \u00a35,000 the association distributed in grants earlier in the year. Equity, separately, has already clawed back pay for three of its members. That \u00a34,000 is under 2 per cent of what’s owed, and the fund hasn’t yet reached a seventh of its own minimum target.<\/p>\n I went and looked at Companies House, which nobody covering this appears to have done. Pull up BIG DIFFERENCE COMPANY LIMITED, company number 03121538, this morning and the status reads “Active”. There is no appointment of liquidators on the filing history, no statement of affairs, nothing. The registered office is still 30 Nelson Street, Leicester, LE1 7BA. Next accounts, for the year made up to 29 June 2026, are shown as due on 29 March 2027, which is an optimistic date for a company that stopped trading in August.<\/p>\n What the filing history does show is a flurry in the same week the questions landed. On 18 August the register recorded the termination of Jonathan William Kerry as a director, effective 25 June 2026, and the termination of Simon Brown, effective 8 July 2026 – both filed six to eight weeks after the fact. Emma Mary Anderson’s details changed the same day. On 19 August, details changed for Robbie Kerr and Professor Kevin Schurer; on 20 August, for Ms Christine Douglas Traill, the chair. Earlier, on 2 July, the termination of Jonathan Sutton went on file, effective 17 June.<\/p>\n Director detail changes are usually mundane admin, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But the paperwork catching up in a three-day burst, backdated to June and July, while creditors are being told the numbers they’ve been given aren’t accurate, is the sort of thing an unpaid comic is entitled to notice. It’s free to look at, too, which is more than can be said for most things in this story.<\/p>\n Leicester City Council said on 5 August that it will work with local promoters, venues and stakeholders to ensure a comedy festival takes place in the city in 2027, using its festivals and De Montfort Hall teams. City Mayor Sir Peter Soulsby said the festival has been “a hugely important part of Leicester’s cultural calendar, bringing thousands of visitors to the city every year, and with them a big boost to our economy”, while making clear the council cannot assume the charity’s debts and is aiming at an interim programme while a sustainable long-term operation is worked out.<\/p>\n Separately, Chortle reports that a new independent Leicester comedy festival<\/a> with no connection to the old one will launch in February. Two Februarys, one city, and a creditors list that still doesn’t have the LCA’s \u00a3103 on it. If you played Leicester in February 2026 and never got paid, the useful thing you can do this week is one email to the LCA – four minutes, less if the booking confirmation is still sitting in your sent folder.<\/p>\n <\/p>\nSix staff are owed \u00a350,000 between them<\/h2>\n
How do I get on the Big Difference Company creditors list?<\/h2>\n
Companies House still has the company down as Active<\/h2>\n
What happens to February<\/h2>\n
Sources<\/h2>\n
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