The Leicester Mercury Comedian of the Year event is held annually at the festival and is one of the most prestigious prizes on the comedy circuit. We enjoy covering the event each year at the festival as it sees a number of up-and-coming comedians performing short sets before one of them are crowned the winner at the end of the night. 2018 was a particular favourite of ours mostly because of its stellar lineup. The show was hosted by Zoe Lyons and its field of contestants boasted some of our favourite comedians including Catherine Bohart, Rosie Jones and the eventual winner, Jack Gleadow.
Previous winners of the award include Johnny Vegas, Seann Walsh, Josh Widdicombe, Alasdair Beckett-King and Romesh Ranganathan.
In 2019 we decided it would be fun to blindfold comedians and make them guess mystery objects using only their sense of touch. Gary has always been one of our favourite comedians to film with and he didn’t disappoint with his blindfold challenge. We also got to meet Gary’s dog Commander Tuvok which was an added bonus.
Again in 2019 we brought ‘speech jammer’ to the comedians performing at the festival. The jist of ‘speech jammer’ is to get the comedian reading from the festival brochure whilst wearing headphones and when they speak we feedback their voice a split second late into their headphones which makes it incredibly hard to speak properly resulting in a lot of slurring and bemused looks. We had a lot of fun trialling this idea in the office during the run-up to the festival and we thought we had come up with the impossible task until Catherine Bohart aced ‘speech jammer’. We played the game with Henning Wehn, Ed Gamble, Adele Cliff, Tom Allen, Jack Gleadow, Alex Hylton, Suzi Ruffell, and the champion of Speech Jammer, Catherine Bohart.
The Leicester Comedy Festival celebrated its 25th Birthday in 2018 and to mark the occasion we had a bunch of comedians performing at that year’s festival play a little game of pass the parcel which culminated with a nice surprise for the festival’s director Geoff Rowe at the end of the video. We had a great time putting this video together because of the array of different comedians and guests we were able to pull together for pass the parcel. Some of the names involved included Katherine Ryan, Ed Byrne, Flo & Joan, Suggs, James Acaster and Sara Pascoe. We also made Harry Hill hide in the box!
Our favourite video that we have produced for the festival has to be Comedian Job Swap which we put out at the end of the 2019 festival. We thought it would be a lot of fun to get A-list comedians doing the less glamorous jobs that need to be done behind the scenes to make the festival run smoothly. These included working in the ticket office, pulling pints, sweeping the stage etc. The comedians were all really up for the idea and got stuck into the jobs that we set them. A particular highlight was Johnny Vegas doing far too good a job at cleaning the men’s urinals at Hansom Hall.
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