July 31 2026 - 10:00am
Another round of BBC cuts, and yet more familiar names on the chopping block. This time it’s Live at the Apollo, which has run for more than two decades and has given exposure to many up-and-coming stand-up comedians.
It was announced this week that the next series would be the last. Viewer numbers have fallen sharply in recent years, roughly halving since 2018 from around 1.3 million to 660,000.
A key part of the story here is the fading of conventional television as a medium. Younger generations simply don’t watch TV in the way people did 15 or 20 years ago. Comedy in particular has changed significantly over the last decade or so, with the rise of short-form video content on Facebook Reels, TikTok and Instagram. Large numbers of people now consume small snippets of stand-up, or sketches, or the curious blend of the two that has emerged in online spaces.
There are thousands of creators on social media trying to carve out a niche for themselves. Many of them are unremarkable, relying on gimmicks or hackneyed observations about the battle of the sexes. Others just repeat memes, or have a limited audience. But whatever you make of the new wave — and in all fairness there is some first-class material out there — Live at the Apollo simply looks very dated now, tailored towards an audience that increasingly goes elsewhere for its laughs.
As well as the aging format, there is another, unavoidable problem with the program: it has become very uneven and often downright unfunny, as its contributors prioritize progressive political messaging over laughs. Jen Brister, who has been both host and guest on Apollo, effectively hectored the audience on LGBT rights for two entire minutes in one of her sets, eventually reaching an underpowered punchline that was greeted mostly by whoops, cheers and applause in place of actual laughter. Such “clapter” is always a dead giveaway that the audience is signaling agreement with the ideological message being delivered on stage, rather than finding an act funny.
Another comedian, Adam Rowe, who appeared on Apollo a few years back, felt the need to follow up a joke about gender with a prolonged apologia to the audience, reassuring them that he did in fact hold all the correct views on the subject — an act of cowardly preemptive self-defense that was met with rather dutiful applause. Perhaps the crowd would have preferred him to just get on with the gags and let them decide whether any of them were inappropriate. Nabil Abdulrashid, who can be amusing, similarly tried to give the Apollo audience an opportunity to pat themselves on the back for their correct thinking, when he embarked on a long anecdote imputing racism to people who didn’t like his act.
There are still very entertaining performers on Live at the Apollo. And there is of course a subjective element to comedy. For instance, I’m sure plenty of sophisticates would find my fondness for Michael McIntyre’s apolitical, mass-appeal observational stand-up a marker of dreadful taste.
But the collapse in viewing figures tells its own story about a show that has become sadly hit and miss, much more so than in its 2000s heyday. I mostly disregard the axiom of “go woke, go broke”, but media organizations do sometimes pay the price for prioritizing lectures over laughs.
