On Friday 18th March 2016 Jimmy became the first British comedian to release a stand-up special on Netflix, ending his run of 8 DVD releases. The special took the name of the tour it was taken from: Funny Business.
The deal was inked in 2015 and, so far, he’s delivered 4 specials to them (and also hosted The Fix and appeared on other people’s releases).
The 9 DVDs had sold 1.2m copies, between them, but up to the end of 2024 his 4 Netflix specials had been watched for over 10.2m hours. As described in this stats post – the total of 10.2m is only the most recent 2 years of stats, so will actually be higher than that.
No one knows how much comedians get paid, by Netflix, but you would imagine that, at the very least, the global exposure drives up ticket sales.
This special was filmed in London’s Hammersmith Apollo (now the Eventim Apollo) on November 13th 2015. Written and performed by Jimmy – he also took on the Producer role.
Before writing this up I had a browse through some of the forum threads and found a fair number of complaints about it not being dark / blue enough. The problem with these specials is that Lawyers have to be involved and also the delivery is slowed down, for an International audience. They are never going to be quite as “lively” as an actual live gig, where pretty much anything goes.
Having said that, this is actually probably my favourite (watched it several times) and I love the energy in the trailer, below.
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