This month has seen much excitement around the 30th anniversary of the Leicester Comedy Festival and in Special Collections we've been doing our best to share and promote the archival collection that festival founder and Director, Geoff Rowe donated in 2019. The papers relating to the largest and longest-running comedy festival in England contains a fabulous selection of programmes, flyers, posters, audio-visual recordings, merchandise, administrative files and photographs. You can browse a basic but detailed list of the collection on the online catalogue here: Papers of Leicester Comedy Festival.
To join in with the celebrations we created an online exhibition, published a feature in the DMU Alumni Newsletter and Special Collections Manager, Katharine Short took part in the symposium, The Cultural Economy of Comedy. Find out more below!
Exhibition
This timeline exhibition charts the development of the festival starting in 1994 when Geoff Rowe, then a student of Arts Administration (now Arts and Festivals Management) at DMU, developed the idea for a Comedy Festival for his final year practical project.
Above: the Comedy Festival Bus, 1994.
Exploring the ways in which the festival developed over the years in terms of duration, venues, spin-off events, awards and launching pioneering new shows, the exhibition includes photographs of many big name comedians, including Mel &Sue, Russell Howard, Shappi Khorsandi plus many more and those pictured below.
Page from the 1998 programme with Craig Charles Sarah Millican, 2006. LCF Programme cover, 2007.
Stewart Lee, 2006 Flyer promoting LCF events taking place at The Criterion, 2015. Alan Carr, 2006.
As well as highlighting how LCF has become a hub for finding new comedic talent and its economic benefit to Leicestershire, the exhibition also illustrates its significant and invaluable cultural impact on the local community and beyond. Rowe and the team founded the Big Difference Company in 2010, which, as well as overseeing the organisation of the festival also runs community projects, using comedy to make a positive difference to people’s lives.
Flyer for the Big Difference Company, 2010.
To read more about all of the above you can access the exhibition here: From Final Year Project to International Success: Celebrating 30 Years of Leicester Comedy Festival
DMU Alumni Newsletter, Winter Edition
To accompany the exhibition and further promote the LCF archive, we also wrote a piece for the alumni newsletter. Created and distributed by the Alumni team, the online magazine is available to all alumni. If you are an alumni and haven't signed up, you can find out more here: https://www.dmu.ac.uk/alumni/index.aspx or contact them on Twitter @DMUforLife.
Above: Contents Page from the Alumni Newsletter. Link to the Newsletter
Symposium: The Cultural Economy of Comedy, 17th Feb, 2023.
This one-day event, organised by Dr Claire Sedgwick and held at Phoenix Arts Leicester, brought together comedians and comedy researchers to explore comedy, precarity and inequality today. To contribute to the event Special Collections provided a display of materials from the LCF archive for delegates to view between talks and after the event.
Above: Display featuring LCF archival material.
Alongside keynote speaker Dr Sharon Lockyer, Reader in Sociology and Communications and Director at the Centre for Comedy Studies Research at Brunel University there were also presentations from comedy researchers and those working in the industry to advocate for equality practices within the industry.
Above: Louise Peacock, Interim Head of School of Humanities and Performing Arts, spoke about the potential uses of the collection in academic contexts.
Special Collections Manager Katharine also took part on a panel, sharing with delegates our role in ensuring the papers are kept in environmentally secure conditions while enabling everyone to access them, including working with academic partners to help realise the research potential of the collection, as seen through the work of PhD student Rachel Abbey below who introduced her thesis by discussing diversity in comedy:
Above: Rachel Abbey, M4C Collaborate Doctoral Award Student, introducing her thesis.
What an eventful archival month with the LCF collection! While the festival is over for another year, we are delighted to be the custodians of LCF’s archives, ensuring that the history of the comedy event is secure for future generations.
Above: the LCF collection in the archive store.
If you would like to view the collection or find out more, do get in touch using our email: archives@dmu.ac.uk.
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