Serious competition

Published on Friday 26 September 2008 19:48

IT APPEARS THAT THESE DAYS YOU can't turn on your telly without seeing some celebrities slipping on the ice or messing up at the Proms in order to get a prize.

Despite the sense that it's difficult to compare like with like, stand-up comedy is not short of tournaments. While many have fallen by the wayside (The BBC New Comedy Award, Daily Telegraph Open Mic and Dubble Act Award for three), some regionals are going strong (the north-west of England and Leicester both hail their comics of the year), Funny Women is fairly self-explanatory; though the rather more confused Richard Pryor Award gave up the ghost after one ceremony. Meanwhile, the daddy of them all, the Perrier, morphed into if.comedy three years ago. The cult of the competition is truly upon us.

Yet, a gap was spotted in the market by Alan Anderson, a Scottish comic who started promoting gigs while studying in Manchester. "I saw comedians like Alan Carr, Jason Manford and Justin Moorhouse grow up through the City Life Comedian of the Year competition and saw what it did for their careers," he recalls. "So when I returned to Scotland I wondered why there was nothing like that here."

Through Ha Ha Comedy, his company which has produced and promoted stand-up in Scotland since 1998, Anderson finally realised his ambition to get a Scottish Comedian of the Year tourney up and running in 2006.

"I felt it was important to celebrate Scottish comedic talent. Every August we welcome the world's comedians into the country yet much of the time, audiences don't have a clue who they are but they see 'winner of such and such' and they go to those shows. We don't shout enough about how good our own talent is."

Anderson felt that someone needed to redress the balance and start recognising the nation's best cultural export. "What I'd noticed was that Scottish comedians were taking part in all these UK-wide competitions, but as soon as they got to the latter stages, the London audiences didn't get the cultural references and the judges thought they were being too parochial. These were people making a fantastic living in Scotland but falling down at the last hurdle."

After a series of regional heats in Glasgow, Aberdeen, Kilmarnock and Helensburgh, Mark Nelson was crowned the inaugural champ. His prize was glory, some cash and a gig at the 2007 Glasgow Comedy Festival. "I know some people think it'll be a disaster if they don't win, but for me it was just a bonus." Nelson's concerns only crept in once his CV bulged with the words "Scottish Comedian of the Year".

"The title is a bit misleading and I got more worried about having this title than thinking 'this is suddenly me set on the road'. I think I became better known through word of mouth and I eventually got to support Andrew Maxwell at the Glasgow Comedy Festival."

Doubts over the title is merely one of the elements that bugs the competition's highest profile critic, Tommy Sheppard, head honcho at The Stand. "I think it's wrong for people to set something up as the 'Scottish anything' unless there's a demonstrable case to be made that it represents the world as it applies to their particular discipline. If it was the Ha Ha Comedian of the Year or Alan Anderson's Comedian of the Year, fine, not a problem, but to call it the Scottish Comedian of the Year is a misnomer and does a disservice to all the people who aren't entering. It's entirely self-selecting, a competition of those who choose to enter it which is a small proportion of the people plying the trade of comedy in Scotland."

Anderson shrugs off Sheppard's criticisms. "I think the success of the competition speaks for itself; it's something that the comedians and audience and the industry feel is a good thing. Why is it that we cannot celebrate and give awards to comedians that are out there?"

But is the title misleading? Would some people not hear it and imagine that Frankie Boyle or Jerry Sadowitz have been on stage slugging it out for that crown? Anderson has no qualms about the name. "It was never for year one or year two; the title is for a competition that I see will run for decades. As the competition grows it will grow into the title. It's open to all so if Frankie Boyle or Billy Connolly wanted to enter they would be welcome."

For Sheppard, the way to develop the next era of Scottish comedic talent is not through the tense and divisive nature of a competition where acts are judged on a performance lasting up to ten minutes but through nurturing stand-ups at Red Raw, The Stand's weekly showcase for fresh talent in both Edinburgh and Glasgow. "It offers ten spots for newcomers every week. The Scottish Comedian of the Year suggests to a young kid that this is a potential big break to stardom as though it's The X Factor. But it doesn't work that way because your eight-minute spot you practise for a competition is not a good apprenticeship. Making the leap from that to 20 minutes is the hardest thing in the world."

Still, come tomorrow night, the ten finalists (including circuit comics such as Teddy, Scott Agnew and Keir McAllister) who will be aiming to succeed last year's victor Sean Grant will probably care little for long-term development and will be focused on simply giving it their best shot. Whether anyone will leave thinking they've seen the next Big Yin is another matter.

&#149 Scottish Comedian of the Year, Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow, tomorrow.