When Frankie Boyle wanted to get started as a comedian, he showed up at the door of the Stand Comedy Club in Edinburgh and asked for a slot that night. “I remember this lanky, speccy guy coming down the stairs in quite an animated fashion,” says Tommy Sheppard, who had started running comedy nights in a basement bar a few months earlier.
“Trying to sound all professional, I said to him, ‘No, you can’t just turn up on the night. That’s not how it works.’ He told me he had 12 mates upstairs and they’d all pay the ticket price, I was sold. The lure of 12 paying punters made me amend all my principles — he was on the bill that night.”
That was in 1995. These days, you can’t throw a brick without it landing on something broadcasting Boyle or advertising his latest book or comedy tour.
In the past 15 years, Sheppard has helped to launch the careers of plenty of comics. Household names such as Dara O Briain, Jimmy Carr, Johnny Vegas and Michael McIntyre all played some of their earliest stand-up gigs in one of Sheppard’s tiny venues. Even now, high calibre acts such as Daniel Kitson insist on performing their Edinburgh Fringe shows at the Stand.
“You’ve got to remember, it started out as a hobby for my partner and me,” says Sheppard, who now sells 100,000 tickets a year for comedy gigs at his two venues in Edinburgh and Glasgow, featuring more than 600 performers.
When the Stand opened a dedicated, seven-nights-a-week comedy club in Edinburgh’s York Place in 1998, it was the first of its kind in Scotland. Other stand-up nights were held in pubs or arts venues but, beyond the Fringe, there was no hub where the comedy community could base itself or venue where performers could hone their material in front of a regular crowd.
“I’d lived in London during the early 1980s, and had seen that first wave of modern stand-up comedy. I saw Julian Clary doing his Joan Collins Fan Club bit in some tiny room above a bar, or Jo Brand when she was just starting out. These places seemed to be combining very theatrical, alternative comedy performances, but in these informal venues. I really enjoyed that.”
Moving back to Scotland in the 1990s, Sheppard was surprised to discover that there were no equivalent venues here.
“Even then, with the Edinburgh Fringe being the biggest showcase of stand-up comedy in the world in August,” he recalls, “come September 1, all that was left were the tatty posters flaking off the walls. It was weird how it went from such a huge comedy scene to nothing overnight. That really shocked me.”
Sheppard and his girlfriend at the time, Jane McKay, began running comedy nights at WJ Christie’s bar in West Port, Edinburgh, in 1995. They wanted to provide a platform for emerging Scottish comedians, as well as a place for people, just like them, who enjoyed comedy “that looks at the world from a slightly different perspective”.
Describing himself and McKay as a “pair of old lefties”, Sheppard says the pair were determined that the comedy venture would be run fairly.
“There’s always been a desire to treat people decently,” says Sheppard, who was deputy general secretary of the Scottish Labour party from 1994 to 1997. “It’s important to build an organisation that is a win-win for everyone.”
That means punters are charged a reasonable ticket price, bar prices are low, the staff are paid fairly and fledgling performers, rather than being asked to produce the cash upfront for their debut Fringe runs, have their costs covered by Sheppard and the club.
“I can’t stand these venues that want to put the financial risk on to the backs of the performers,” says Sheppard, who also helps to organise the Glasgow International Comedy Festival in March, in his capacity as director of the Scottish Comedy Agency. The agency has produced recent big-name tours, featuring comedians Rory Bremner, Ross Noble and Fred MacAulay.
“If Tommy’s booked you and Tommy likes you, there must be, hopefully, something about you that’s unique and entertaining.”
“When we bring along a new act, we want to give them a break,” he says. “Financially, we hope to break even with them, but we would never want to turn things into a sordid marketing exercise or a giant corporate effort, that’s not what we’re about.” From a performer’s point of view, Sheppard’s attitude is a refreshing one. “You know, after 20 years in the comedy industry, that ethos is pretty unique,” says the comedian Paul Sneddon, who performs under the comedy aliases of Vladimir McTavish and Bob Doolally. “Trust me, there are some real s**** in this business.”
Sneddon, who will compere a BBC Scotland radio programme about the club next month, rounds up opinions from Stand veterans including Stewart Lee, Bruce Morton, Des Clarke, Miles Jupp and Johnny Vegas.
Jupp, who has gone on to appear as a government press officer in the BBC satire The Thick of It, made his first tentative steps into comedy when he attended the Stand’s Sunday afternoon comedy workshops. Vegas, who Sheppard insists gave some of the club’s best ever live performances in the 1990s, filmed his first live DVD at the Stand.
In fact, Sheppard was so supportive of the nascent talent of Vegas, who had studied art and ceramic design at Middlesex University, that he exhibited some of the comedian’s pottery in an exhibition at the Stand club in Edinburgh shortly after it opened in March 1998.
“I suppose we’re a bit like a dysfunctional family,” says Sheppard. “For a while in the early days, our flat was like a really badly run B&B. Johnny [Vegas] used to sleep in our spare room, and there were times when three performers would be living with us in our two-bedroom place in Gladstone Terrace.”
On one occasion, Sheppard and McKay had gone on a trip to London, leaving their flat in the care of up-and-coming Frankie Boyle, who needed a place to crash for a few weeks.
As Boyle describes in his autobiography, My Shit Life So Far, the couple came home to find him blatantly disregarding McKay’s no smoking request.
“Eh, it wasn’t so much the smoking thing that was a problem,” says Sheppard. “I think it was more the ‘don’t shag the staff’ rule that he was breaking. We’d come home earlier than planned, to find the flat in a real mess and we saw Frankie coming out of our bedroom, looking very, very sheepish.”
Building up close relationships with performers, as well as with the regular gig-going crowds in Glasgow and Edinburgh, means Sheppard has developed an unmatched reputation for providing quality comedy in Scotland.
“As a result, the [Stand] audience comes in with very high expectations, but with very high expectations for all the right reasons,” says Vegas.
“If Tommy’s booked you and Tommy likes you, there must be, hopefully, something about you that’s unique and entertaining. It’s pretty symbiotic between Tommy, the acts and the audience. We’re all striving for the same thing, which is unique stand-up.”
In the face of comedy chains, where lowest-common denominator gags pull in the stag and hen night crowds, the Stand remains a venture run with principles and an eye for the next big thing in comedy. As the stand-up Susan Morrison puts it: “It’s not that there was never any talent in Scotland before; there just wasn’t any shop window, and now there is.”
No Going Back, BBC Radio Scotland, January 4, 11.30am