British Alternative Comedy Started in a Strip Club, Sixteen Days After Thatcher
An insurance salesman came back from a Los Angeles holiday, rented Saturday nights above a Soho topless bar, and ran a gong show. Within a year it had produced the cast of British television comedy for the next decade.
The founding document of British alternative comedy is a holiday anecdote. Peter Rosengard, a Hammersmith-born insurance salesman, was in Los Angeles with his wife in 1978, had a free evening, and asked the hotel concierge what to do. The concierge sent him to the Comedy Store on Sunset. Rosengard's own account is that there was then no live comedy in the UK outside working men's clubs in the north, that he loved what he saw, and that he decided to open one in London despite everybody telling him he was mad.
The premises
He did not build a club. He rented Saturday nights in one.
Since 1925 the top three floors of 69 Dean Street in Soho had housed David Tennant's Gargoyle private members' club. By 1955 the building had been relaunched as a strip club called the Nell Gwynne. By the late seventies it operated as the Nell Gwynne by day and the Gargoyle at night. Don Ward, who ran the premises, told Rosengard he could have Saturdays.
So the first home of British alternative comedy was a topless bar, reached through a working strip club, with topless bar staff — a detail Rosengard had to explain to comedians who turned up to audition, and with no lavatory in the dressing room, so male and female acts shared a sink.
The Comedy Store opened on Saturday 19 May 1979 — sixteen days after Margaret Thatcher's first general election victory. The coincidence is not causal, but it is the reason the scene's politics are inseparable from its founding date in every account written since.
The gong
The format was an open mic run as a gong show. Unknown acts went up and the audience was invited to gong them off. This is the part that gets romanticised, and it should not be. A gong show is a brutally efficient filter operated by a room that has been drinking, and it selects hard for a specific skill: surviving hostility fast.
The comic Philip Herbert describes the working night in a passage worth reading in full on the club's Wikipedia entry — the strip show ran until about eleven, then the room turned into the Comedy Store; once it succeeded they dropped the stripping on Fridays and Saturdays and ran two comedy houses, at eight and at midnight. A working act would open the first house, go do a pub in Stoke Newington, and come back to do second or third on the bill in the second show.
That is a circuit forming in real time inside one postcode, and it is exactly how a healthy comedy city still works: enough rooms, close enough together, that a competent act can string three sets into an evening.
What came out of it
The founding line-up made their reputations in that room: Alexei Sayle, Rik Mayall, Adrian Edmondson, French and Saunders, Nigel Planer and Peter Richardson. In 1980, barely a year in, Richardson led those same pioneers into a breakaway venture elsewhere in Soho — the Comic Strip — and from there onto television, where they reshaped British TV comedy for the whole of the 1980s.
The club also started the careers of Paul Merton, Ben Elton, Keith Allen, Jo Brand, Mark Thomas and Arnold Brown. Merton, who debuted there in 1984, is still associated with the venue, and presented a BBC One documentary on its first twenty-five years in January 2005.
What "alternative" actually meant
The word has drifted, so it is worth pinning to its original sense. In Britain it did not mean experimental structure. It meant an alternative to the mainstream stand-up of the day — the working men's club circuit, characterised in most accounts by recycled gags with a heavy freight of sexism and racism. Alternative comedy was, first and foremost, a content position: a refusal to do those jokes.
That is a commercial fact as much as a moral one. A new generation of performers identified an audience the incumbent circuit was actively repelling, and built a parallel circuit to serve it. The venue was a strip club, the format was a gong show, and the business logic was as clean as any market-entry case study: the incumbents had left a large audience unserved, and somebody rented a Saturday night.