Leicester Comedy Festival and De Montfort University (DMU) Leicester have had an intimate relationship for more than three decades now, and it is still going strong.
During that time, and with DMU's help, the festival has grown to become one of the biggest and best known in the comedy festivals in UK and routinely attracts the brightest stars in comedy including Jo Brand, Paul Merton, Jack Dee, Johnny Vegas, and Katherine Ryan, to name but a few.
Beginning this week, the 2025 Leicester Comedy Festival will run for 19 days from the 5 to the 24 of February, and feature hundreds of performances at dozens of venues across city and county. Nowadays, with its rich mix of comedy, film, spoken word, theatre, visual arts exhibitions, and children’s shows, the festival is undoubtedly a first class event in the cultural and economic life of the city and the region. According to research conducted by festival organisers back in 2017, one third of festival goers travelled to the city specificially to attend a show, helping the festival to contribute at least £3 million to the local economy in that year alone.
All this is a far cry from the very first festival which was created in 1994 by founder Geoff Rowe and student colleagues as an assignment for the final year of their arts administration degrees at DMU. That first festival lasted seven days and saw around 5,000 people watch a total of 40 performances. Compare that to last year when tens of thousands of people bought tickets for more than 700 shows.
Geoff Rowe has long valued the close relationship between the festival and the university. “The festival would not exist if was not for DMU,” said Geoff who vaguely recalls that he got a 2.1 grade for the assignment in which he created it.
The close relationship with DMU continued after Geoff graduated, chose to remain in Leicester, and decided to keep the festival going “as a kind of hobby”. “It was great fun," he said, "so we just kept on doing it.”
DMU has backed Leicester Comedy Festival from the very beginning, but its support has always gone way beyond its financial sponsorship of the event, whose profits go to charity each year. As Geoff explains DMU students have always been at the heart of the festival. “They run front of house, they do all the marketing, and whole host of people have gone on to work for the festival after they graduated,” he said.
“It’s a brilliant relationship we have with DMU, absolutely brilliant. We work really closely together and I hope it’s of equal value to the university as it is to the festival. I know that I, and the current festival team, are enormously proud of the relationship.”
As well as the financial and backing and student power, DMU also looks after more than 30 years worth of material that make up the Leicester Comedy Festival archives which are hosted at the Kimberlin Library on DMU’s Mill Lane campus.
In fact, anyone interested is invited to join Geoff Rowe and members of the DMU’s Special Collections team to explore some of the collection including promotional materials, photographs, press cuttings and other memorabilia. Advance booking is essential. The event is offered on a 'pay as much as you wish' basis with all proceeds going to the future development of the archive. It runs from 12pm to 2.30pm, on 22 February, at the DMU Gallery in the Vijay Singh building on Mill Lane.
Book here.
Posted on Thursday 6 February 2025