Make 'em laugh

Every August a new comedy star is crowned at the annual Perrier Comedy Awards at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. It's a big deal, with winners receiving £7,500 prize money, international media coverage and guaranteed bookings - for the coming year at least. And while not all Perrier winners go on to have the stratospheric careers of past winners such as Lee Evans, Jenny Eclair, The League of Gentlemen and Steve Coogan, almost all will be considered hot property on the national comedy circuit.

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Comedy, as the cliche goes, is the new rock and roll. It's guaranteed (with the right performers) to pull in the crowds, with potential to bring in big bucks for canny operators, particularly big businesses such as the Comedy Store in London and the 17-strong Regent Inns-owned Jongleurs clubs, which dominate the market. Yet the dedicated clubs aren't traditional venues for the stand-up. The classic stomping ground for this kind of comedy has always been the intimate venues in pubs, with audiences packed into atmospheric upstairs rooms or basements, with plenty of alcohol and cigarettes to fuel the show. Which is how Adam Franklin likes his comedy clubs, especially his own. The owner of the Slaughterhouse pub in Liverpool, and its adjacent basement comedy club, the Laughterhouse, has become a significant name on the comedy circuit in only two years. But it wasn't just business potential that persuaded him to throw his money and effort into the arena. Franklin has been a comedy fanatic for more years than he can count. It's a passion which began with regular visits to London's Comedy Store when he worked as a chef in the capital in the 1980s. "I always loved comedy," says the Liverpudlian. "I was aware of who was on the scene and I also knew that outside London there weren't many good comedy clubs. There are only about 30 outside of London and a lot of them are soulless, festive hell holes, places that care more about pints and hen nights than comedy. "The Slaughterhouse is a rough-and-ready pub, but people think that's cool, and we have great acts. In the comedy club downstairs people see the mike on the stage and they feel the energy. The whole pub bounces every weekend." Comedy is not Franklin's first love, though. The 33-year-old started out as a chef, trained at Chester School of Catering and become senior sous chef at Daphne's in London in 1995. He went on to become executive chef at the Riverside restaurant in Chiswick, before a talent for business led him to City Centre Restaurants where he became food development manager. He went on to become operations director to Piaf restaurants, then Naked Restaurants in Birmingham. Tired of the corporate life, however, he decided to focus on his home town, Liverpool, in 2002, and set up his own business. "I was pissed off filling in checklists and driving around the M25 and saw that Liverpool was going to explode with potential in the same way Birmingham had. I'd always loved comedy and I saw the opportunity here in Liverpool. I wanted a bit of rock and roll," he says. He bought the Slaughterhouse, a run-down boozer owned by Bass in June 2002. Dating back to 1723, it's the oldest pub in Liverpool, spread across four floors with dark wood panelling and oak floors in the middle of Liverpool's business district. Borrowing from family, using savings and releasing equity on his house, he came up with £17,000 for the lease, but it was still a gamble. Bringing in a turnover of about £1,500 a week, it was, Franklin says, on its knees. Installing a good food offering was a crucial first step. Franklin put together a simple gastropub menu of classics such as traditional fish and chips, braised lamb shank cooked for seven hours with root vegetables and 21-day hung steaks at an average spend of £15. Other dishes on the daily-changing menu created by head chef Dean Martindale typically include roasted whole sea bass served with coriander mash, black and white pudding with apple fritters and chilli jam, and grilled calves' liver with crushed potatoes and tarragon gravy. The food alone wouldn't bring the pub back to life, however, and being in the middle of the business district had its drawbacks. The pub was good for lunchtime trade but not for the evening, and Franklin needed to turn it into a destination venue and get the comedy club launched as soon as possible. With no experience in booking acts, he typed into Google, "someone to book comedy acts" and came up with the Gag Club, run by comedy booker Richard Batsford. Franklin rang Batsford up (and later employed him as his creative director) and the club was launched a month later. So what was business like in the early months? "The first few months were shocking. We were making about £4,000 a week but ploughing it back into the business and making a few bad decisions. I should have admitted we were insolvent many times, but I didn't - I hid instead," he laughs grimly. "We'd have a bad weekend, followed by a good one so I could just pay a few people off. We should have gone under many times in the first 18 months but I knew if we stuck with it that comedy was easy to market." Franklin dug in, stuck it out and steadily built up the pub and club's reputation over the following year, spending time carefully balancing the acts for each Saturday, positively discriminating towards female comedians in the male-dominated world of stand-up and insisting on no censorship - something that many clubs do practice. "The worst that can happen is everyone walks out," he explains. "and we did have one act when 90 out of 120 of the audience left after 10 minutes." These days, regular comics include Howard Marks, Perrier winner of 2002 Daniel Kitson and Mark Thomas, plus cast members from The Office, Red Dwarf and Phoenix Nights. Tickets cost £10 per Saturday night, capacity in the club is 135 and Franklin is booked to capacity weeks in advance. The pub also offers free chilli or curry after the show to keep punters in the pub until turning-out time at 2am. The pub and club now brings in about £12,000 to £14,000 a week in turnover. As the Slaughterhouse became self-supporting, Franklin continued to search for more sites. Another city-centre pub, the Firehouse - unloved and losing money as part of Bass's Edwards chain - was bought, for nothing, last September. Franklin moved in, took out the branding and the offers, and put in leather sofas, flame lamps and a good pub menu. "Within two weeks we'd got rid of the men drinking £1 pints and filled the place with women drinking bottles of wine. And if you fill a place full of women the men come. It staggers me that people don't get that. It was an instant win and we are now taking a profit of £2,500 a week." And it doesn't stop there. Franklin is opening another comedy club in the next few months, in partnership with the Lyceum Group (owner of the Pan American Club and Blue Bar in Liverpool), while promoting the franchise of the Laughterhouse concept in Dubai. He heard about the country through his wife, a singer, who had worked there and loved it but said the expats were starved of entertainment. Franklin got on the phone to Dave Cattanach, the general manager of the Aviation Club resort in Dubai and flew out next day. He was signing a deal within 72 hours and taking acts out to the country by March 2003. Sponsors such as Royal Dubai Airways, the Riviera Hotel, Time Out, and drinks sponsors A&E cover costs, while the venue sells the tickets, the comedians get paid double rate and Franklin gets a management fee as part of the deal. "We did loads of research on expats all over the world and we identified the changing market," he says. "There are so many expats on one-year contracts who know what's going on in the rest of the world. They are used to comedy and comedy clubs, so the franchise really works. We sell more than 600 tickets for each gig in Dubai and we're now doing one each month." The Laughterhouse concept could now be taken to other Middle Eastern countries - Oman, Abu Dhabi by next year - while the purchase of a third gastropub outside Liverpool is currently being negotiated. As a group, the Irish American Leisure Company announced a turnover of £300,000 in the first year, increasing to £1.3m by year two. Franklin expects to bring in £3m next year. "Everything's great. I'm sleeping at night, have cash reserves and no outside interests or pressure to keep people happy, plus the freedom to do new deals," he smiles. "And you know what else? It's fun because it's all punctuated by three hours a week of being told great jokes." FactfileThe Irish American Leisure CompanyVenues: The Slaughterhouse, the Firehouse, The Laughterhouse (comedy club) Turnover 2002: £300,000 Turnover 2003: £1.3m Projected turnover: £3m Owner: Adam Franklin Finance director: Claire Lewins Executive chef: Juan Hidalgo Head chef of the Firehouse and Slaughterhouse: Dean Martindale