Monday 23 December 2024

LAHS Public Heritage Fund Grant for Leicester Comedy Festival Archive Group

The grant will help a volunteer team catalogue the digital archive of the UK's biggest comedy festival.

Graham Norton performing at the 1997 Leicester Comedy Festival. Copyright Leicester Comedy Festival Archive.

Leicester Comedy Festival was set up in 1994 and has developed itself into the UK’s largest comedy festival, featuring hundreds of performances and projects each February. The event is a significant event in the local and national cultural calendar, regularly being featured in local and national media and attracting audiences from across the UK.

The festival is produced by registered charity Big Difference and is a not for profit event. Alongside the famous comedians and performers is a well established community programme which engages with all sorts of communities across Leicester, Leicestershire & Rutland. 

A few years ago, the charity donated its physical archive to De Montfort University’s Special Collections Unit. Since then the founder of the Festival (Geoff Rowe) has been trying to catalogue the considerable digital archive of photographs from the festival to ensure this is preserved and can be included in the DMU main archive and become publicly available. The collection is an incredible and important archive of live comedy since 1994 and features photographs of performers including Nicholas Parsons, Jo Brand, Ken Dodd, Barry Cryer and many more.

In addition to the archive being a record of the festival, it is also an important record of the cultural life of Leicester, Leicestershire & Rutland and features many venues which are no longer open, as well significant members of the local cultural community.

Further details of how to get involved will be shared in due course.