Comedy Support Act UK is a charity that organises benefit shows to:

“…provide emergency funds and assistance to professional comedians who find themselves in financial hardship through serious illness or accident, as well as providing information and links to other professional and relevant organisations.”

I’ve had a look around the website (here) and searched to see what events they organise and very little comes back. Although they have some small benefit gigs this year and are up to date with Companies House.

Some of their (current) upcoming events include:

• Speaky Blinders (Glee Club)
• Joke Sellers (Edinburgh Fringe) – allows audience members to buy jokes, to raise funds
• Comedy Lounge, Hull
• Matt Reed Fundraisers

I stumbled across it while looking for an old gig of Jimmys and, as usual, the search engines did their thing and brought back nothing about what I was actually looking for.

But I did find that Jimmy is one of the names on the Roll of Honour (here), as someone that has performed for them, at benefit gigs.

In the final minutes of the 2021 Have a Word podcast (here) Adam Rowe mentions that he first met Jimmy at a CSA event, at the London Comedy Store. They were both on the bill – as were Dave Johns and John Bishop.

Jimmy didn’t remember saying this but Adam reckoned he had said “John Bishop’s here, shall I just tell him to go home – we don’t need f**king both of ya”. For anyone that doesn’t know – Adam and John are both Scousers.