IN THE SPOTLIGHT
IN THE
SPOTLIGHT
Led by sibling duo Will Briggs and Cass Randolph, 57 sees around 100,000 tickets sold for its comedy festivals each year. Among the events it programmes, manages and promotes are the Greenwich Comedy Festival at the Old Royal Naval College, Bristol Comedy Garden and Brighton Comedy Garden. Here, Cass charts her comedy-filled career path.
Did comedy play an important part in your childhood? Hugely. Thanks to Malcolm, we spent most weekends at Up The Creek. We worked behind the bar, heckled the open spots, emptied our pockets into the fruit machines and generally lived at the venue. I even had a brief stint DJing there. It became our second home. Beyond the club itself, Malcolm was constantly surrounded by comedians, artists, writers and wonderfully eccentric characters. There was always somebody interesting coming through the house.
At the time it just felt normal. Looking back, we realise how unusual and influential that environment was. It gave us an early appreciation of live entertainment and the communities that form around it.
What was the first major live event that you attended, and did it have a lasting impact? Absolutely. My mum first took me to Glastonbury in 1990. I was seven and my brother Will was ten. I vividly remember watching Jesus Jones on the Pyramid Stage and later falling asleep in the imprint of a tractor tyre. It felt like another world.
Mum was a huge believer in the value of live experiences. Every year she ' d battle with our headteacher to get us time off school, arguing that we ' d learn more in a weekend at Glastonbury than we would in a year in the classroom.
Later, after she married Malcolm Hardee, who ran the infamous Up The Creek comedy club in south-east London, we ' d spend Glastonbury camped backstage at the Comedy Tent. The performers, the characters and the complete unpredictability of it all contributed to a pretty unique upbringing.
What led to your first role in live comedy production? I was working in the music industry on large-scale awards shows, while Will was building a reputation in comedy promotion through the acclaimed Sunday Special nights at Up The Creek.
He came through alongside a generation of comics who are now household names
— Josh Widdicombe, Tim Key, John Robins, Sara Pascoe and many more.
Every year we ' d religiously go to as many music festivals as possible, as well as the Edinburgh Fringe. During the summer of 2008 we realised how strange it was that London, arguably the capital of stand-up comedy, didn ' t have anything to compare. So, we set about changing that. We wanted to capture the spirit of a music festival with the electric energy of a comedy club, and we launched Greenwich Comedy Festival the following year.
Are there challenges involved in working with a sibling? I think anyone with a sibling already knows the answer to that.
It ' s definitely a unique dynamic. We can disagree spectacularly, often over the smallest details, but there ' s also a level of trust and honesty that would be difficult to replicate elsewhere.
I ' d like to think our success comes from some strange sibling alchemy— years of shared experiences, instincts and understanding. Naturally, Will would disagree and claim it ' s entirely down to his flawless programming.
The reality is probably somewhere in the middle. We have different strengths, different perspectives and a healthy willingness to challenge each other. That ' s often where the best ideas come from.
You ' ve produced many impressive outdoor shows at 57, not least bringing Greenwich Comedy Festival to life during the pandemic. What was the most challenging project you ' ve delivered? 2020 wins by a mile. We ' d already cancelled festivals in Bristol and Brighton, but there was still a possibility that Greenwich Comedy Festival could happen in September. What followed was months of constant adaptation. We reimagined layouts, rewrote plans, revised capacities, created socially
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