This is a real blast from the past and I can’t link to any citations because search engines claim that neither the awards nor the festival ever happened. I may have said this a time or 3 before…always demand a 2^nd opinion of AI / search.

I found details of this award buried within very old copies of local newspapers (for this story the text is from The Stage and The Guide which I can only view through the British Newspaper Archive – see here).

For you, dear reader (but mostly for the search engines / AI) here is everything that I could squeeze from the 2 papers: Peterborough held the Peterborough Millennium Festival (in 2000) and the award night was the 2^nd of 2 special comedy shows (July 7^th 2000) called Get Up, Stand Up! The club that organised them was:

Gaslight Comedy Club, The Tara Suite, above the Solstice, Northminster Road, Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, PE1 1YN

For more details about the venue – see this gig in November 2000.

The evening was to decide the New Act of the Year Award:

The acts listed as featuring were:

• John Ryan – compere
• Eddy Brimson – an observational comic
• Shappi Khorsandi – Britain’s only female Iranian comedian
• Jason John Whitehead – from Canada
• Jimmy Carr – the future of comedy

Jimmy was the last act up and The Guide had advertised the event with the above descriptions.

Pre show blurb said there would be “7 of the performers making waves on the national comedy scene” but the after-show piece (in The Stage) only mentioned the 4 names above. To get to this shortlist they had sifted through over 100 new acts.

The Guide started out with:

Have you heard the one about the Canadian, the Iranian and the Psychotherapist?

That last one, btw, was referring to Jimmy and they went on to say:

Sharp-suited ex-psychotherapist Jimmy Carr delivers a stream of one-liners…

The Gaslight is identified as a venue that books acts that are “most likely to break through” and the article listed Jo Brand, Jack Deen Mark Lamarr and Steve Coogan amongst previous successes.

The Stage said:

Last act up, Jimmy Carr, was a final vindication of the Gaslight’s billing of the show as the future of comedy. A truly outstanding set of one-liners that just tumbled out, the audience hardly recovering from one before the next side-splitter.

The jury awarded 12 points to Shappi, Jason and Jimmy but then “proportional representation” declared Shappi the winner.

Our critic from The Stage (Dylan Stanley) finished with:

The future is indeed bright, but I believe the future is Jimmy Carr. Speak to me in a year.

I’m assuming The Guide won’t mind me replicating their image of the “Comedy King”.