The Cambridge Footlights

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What to expect

Bloomsbury presents The Cambridge Footlights by Robert Sellers, read by Mike Read.

In the league table of the funniest universities in the world, Cambridge wears the crown. Home of Britain’s oldest student sketch comedy troupe, the Cambridge Footlights, it has been a veritable conveyor belt of comic talent that’s been rolling for more than a century.

From Monty Python, The Goodies and Not the Nine O’Clock News to Peep Show, QI and The Great British Bake-Off, its alumni are behind many of the shows that have entertained since the 1960s to today. This book tells the story of the Footlights, chronicling its evolution from its creation in the 1880s to the present.

The Footlights has long been a potential portal to fame: talent scouts, especially from the BBC, were in the habit of coming up to Cambridge on the lookout for comedy writers and material. This book traces the journeys of its most distinguished alumni, including Germaine Greer, John Cleese, Douglas Adams, Peter Cook, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Miriam Margolyes, Emma Thompson, Richard Ayoade, David Mitchell and Sue Perkins, among many others.

Featuring interviews with numerous former Footlights alumni, and accounts of routines and revues, it vividly captures the desire of each successive intake to make their comic mark. Through examining the impact of the Footlights on British popular culture and comedy over the last 60 years, it demonstrates how its farces, musical comedies, pantomimes and the famous May Week revues have both reflected the tastes of the times and served as a ‘nursery’ for generations of comic writers and performers. In the world of comedy, it is a unique institution.

Critics Review

An eminently readable book … Sellers is particularly good at sketching the breadth of influence the Footlights has exerted, and he makes a persuasive case that much of British comedy from the 1960s to the 1990s (and beyond) would look very different without its graduates, whether as performers, writers, directors, or producers working behind the scenes.
LouReviews
[A] well-researched book.
Mail on Sunday
Sellers has interviewed more than seventy Footlights alumni, and his portrayal of these later years is generously sprinkled with their memories.
Literary Review
Sellers has produced a definitive history, drawing on an impressive range of original interviews with the likes of Baddiel, Garden, David Mitchell, John Lloyd, Bill Oddie, Jan Ravens, Clive Anderson, Simon Munnery, Nick Hancock, Steve Punt, Matthew Holness, John Finnemore, Stefan Golaszewski and Amy Hoggart, as well as acts currently breaking through, such as Archie Henderson, aka Jazz Emu, John Tothill and Hasan Al-Habib.
Chortle
Drawing on a wealth of interviews with so many Footlights members who went on to become stars, this book presents a detailed and highly engaging history of this venerable Cambridge institution that has done so much to shape British comedy.
Oliver Double, author of Alternative Comedy and Getting the Joke, and Reader in Comic and Popular Performance, University of Kent, UK
How a tiny, scruffy club, begun as a cricket match against a psychiatric hospital and with never more than a few dozen members, changed comedy forever. Immensely readable, consistently surprising, and often very funny.
John Lloyd, Producer of Not The Nine O’ Clock News, Spitting Image, Blackadder, and QI
A deeply researched journey through the generations of the Footlights club, from a camp coterie to an accidental passport to a career, to a training ground for comics, and for some turning out to be an embarrassment as tastes turned from old school sketch comedy to edgier material.

I suspect most ex-members of the Cambridge Footlights are like me, with a hazy knowledge of its early days and past members and with little idea of how the club has developed in the years since our departure. This book traces the history of the Cambridge Footlights, from a gentleman’s club with a penchant for female impersonation to a haven for young men who enjoyed the fun of amateur comedy to a training ground for career comedians, male and female.
Graeme Garden OBE, Footlights President 1964, Radio and TV humourist
A wonderful history of the Footlights club before money and scandal brought it to its knees.
Matthew Holness, Creator of Garth Marenghi

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