Main headliner Trevor Lock has supported comedy giants Stewart Lee and Russell Brand – becoming a regular on Brand’s BBC Radio 2 programme. His live comedy show Trevor Lock’s Philosophy Society at the Ku Bar on Leicester Square, London, sold out every night. He has also appeared on TV, most notably in BAFTA nominated show Star Stories.

Hog Wild’s co-headliner Brian Gittins is the comic-in-residence at the Knock2Bag comedy club in Shepherd’s Bush, London. One of the most original comics on the circuit, he bears a remarkable resemblance to the actor David Earl who appeared in Extras and has supported Ricky Gervais’s stand-up shows.

Blasting a geyser-ful of glamour over the proceedings, Georgea Blakey is a chameleon-esque chanteuse whose satirical character-based cabaret act has been winning standing ovations on London’s comedy circuit. Her ‘Kate Middleton/James Bond/ Lionel Bart medley’ provides an uproarious take on the dilemmas facing a princess-in-waiting who must tiptoe through the minefield of British snobbery.

From a little village just outside Kettering, James Acaster is a young stand-up comedian who travels the country harvesting stories about his own imperfections and the various misfortunes that befall him. He’s enthusiastic and engaging and forever searching for the world’s little joys.

Picking up prizes like pennies on the street, Joanne Lao already has four to her name including Laughing Horse big Big BIG New Act Competition 2007 and Up the Arts Dead Elvis New Talent Award 2007. At the 2007 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, she was the 2nd runner-up in the highly prestigious So You Think You’re Funny Fringe competition.

“Strong, quick-fire” (Time Out) Paul Ricketts’ black, suburban humour on everyday, topical and satirical subjects has left a mark wherever he has performed, from the dizzy heights of the London Comedy Store to Nottingham’s Just The Tonic, the Banana Cabaret and beyond.

Adam Preston has performed at The Comedy Cafe, The Bedford in Balham and Electric Mouse Big Ben in Westminster, where his observations on the deterioration in the manners of urban squirrels has gone down surprisingly well. He will be the show’s Master of Ceremonies.

“Brian Gittins is a true original, and breathtakingly funny with it.”
The Guardian

“With James (Acaster) anything can happen.”
Music for Squares

“Excellent musical comedy – I even remembered the words!”
Andrew Neil, The Daily Politics Show

“(Paul Rickets is) a really funny comic”
Ed Byrne

Links:

• Trevor Lock’s Website
• James Acaster’s Myspace page

Video:

Trevor Lock musing on Baby Jesus and Father Christmas.

Brian Gittins on his rise and rise to comedy stardom.

Born in London in 1951, Richard first released The Doctors of Madness on an uncomprehending public in 1975. He founded the hugely influential mixed media Cabaret Futura in 1980, and has subsequently worked as an actor, appearing extensively on stage, in films and on television – including Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, Inkheart and Men Behaving Badly. As a writer, he’s a regular contributor to publications as diverse as the Guardian, Tatler Culture and Travel, and Vogue.

In 1989 to 1990 he toured the world in a Russian version of Hamlet, directed by Yuri Lyubimov; then, in 2003, toured the UK with award-winning dance theatre company Protein Dance – contributing as an actor, musician and writer. He worked with Marianne Faithful (2004 – 2007) on the Tom Waits/ William Burroughs/ Robert Wilson collaboration The Black Rider, and recently performed with the producer/arranger Hal Wilner – alongside such luminaries as Tim Robbins, Shane McGowan and Suzanne Vega.

Now comes his solo show, An Accent Waiting to Happen – so dig your heels in for a Strange trip. Richard will be singing songs, telling stories and reading from his memoir Strange Punks and Drunks and Flicks and Kicks, which was published to critical acclaim by Andre Deutsch in 2005. Strange days have found us…

www.richardstrange.com

“Strange must surely be the funniest man in London…It is impossible to spend any time within his looming majesty without being engulfed in gales of health-inducing mirth and a sense of fraternal bohemian bonhomie long lost to our crassly commercial times.”
Adrian Dannatt, The Art Newspaper

“18 years after first meeting him, just thinking about Richard still reduces me to a state of near hysteria…and terror. He restores one’s faith in the ability of the human spirit to soar.”
James Nesbitt

Links:

• 3am magazine interview with Richard Strange
• Richard sings ‘The Headless Horseman’ at Jarvis Cocker’s Meltdown Festival

Video:

Richard Strange’s video for his latest song, ‘The New Academy’:

The Cannes premiere of ‘Mister Lonely’ (2007):

Performed by Joe Dunthorne, Ross Sutherland and Tim Clare, Found in Translation is the result of an attempt by the three writers to take up the challenge of the Univocalism – a poem written using only one type of vowel and one of the many constraints used by the bizarre writing movement, The OULIPO, who were a small group of leading French poets and mathematicians who flooded their work with rules and restrictions as a way of breaking into their subconscious minds.

Ross Sutherland was born Edinburgh in 1979 and now works as a writer, poet, freelance journalist and a tutor in creative writing. Described by the Scotsman as “sublimely twisted” he was included in the Times’s list of Top Ten Literary Stars of 2008. Ross has co-written eight live literature productions, including the critically acclaimed Poetry Boyband, which was Time Out Critic’s Choice of the Year 2005. He has four productions touring in 2009 including Found in Translation, Infinite Lives, The Dead That Never Lived and The Shallowing Shovel. A regular at Port Eliot and Glastonbury, Ross’s debut solo collection of poems Things To Do Before You Leave Town was published in January 2009.

Joe Dunthorne is a writer and poet and his debut novel Submarine is published by Hamish Hamilton. His poetry has been published in Poetry Review, Magma, New Welsh Review and the Manhattan Review. His short stories have been read on BBC Radio 3 and 4 and published in Vice magazine.

Tim Clare is a writer, stand-up poet and musician. His autobiographical book about thwarted ambition and growing up, We Can’t All Be Astronauts, will be published by Ebury Press in mid-2009. He has written for the Guardian and the Times, and has performed his work on Radio 1 and 2. In 2005 he presented the Channel 4 series How To Get A Book Deal. He’s a regular performer at many festivals including Glastonbury, Leeds and Reading, and Latitude.

The three will perform Found in Translation at this year’s Port Eliot Festival, a stand-up poetry show described by the Londonist as “a recipe for madness.”

“Part lecture, part poetry reading, and 100% brilliant, Found in Translation is a work of pure, unadulterated, genius.”
The Daily Info

“A fantastic writer—his prose contains both the bumbling charm of Jon Ronson and the splenetic bile of Charlie Brooker.”
The Bookseller on Tim Clare

“It is remarkable how much genuine life and surprise Joe Dunthorne brings to his perfectly pitched debut novel Submarine.”
Submarine review in the Observer

“In his free-wheeling lyricism, caustic wit and brilliantly surreal turn of image, Sutherland is a truly contemporary original. His poetry rejuvenates techniques as disparate as collage, memoir, sound experiment and formal appropriation in vigorous but finely wrought lines. Refreshingly fearless and bleakly funny, Things To Do Before You Leave Town collects works that shock and delight in performance but reveal their true depth on the page.”
Luke Kennard on Ross Sutherland

Links:

• Tim Clare writes in the Guardian: ‘Everyone does not have a novel inside them’
• Found in Translation review in the Daily Info

Video:

Watch a clip from Found in Translation:

Arthur Smith was born in South London and continues to call it home. Famed for his stand-up shows, such as Arthur Smith Sings Leonard Cohen and An Audience with Arthur Smith, he has also appeared in Doctor Who and Red Dwarf, and took over as narrator for the TV series A Life of Grime after the death of John Peel.

But it is his live performances which best capture his brilliance, as he moves effortlessly from the observational to the absurd. After nearly dying from Pancreatitis, Smith went teetotal and this experience provided the material for Arthur Smith’s Last Hangover, a live show that was later broadcast on Radio 4. In 2005 he turned down a Perrier lifetime achievement award, stating that, “Comedians rather dislike the Perrier Awards and the public aren’t interested. Basically, they wanted to tell me I was old and cool; well, I know that already, and anyway, my ego is bloated enough.”

A regular favourite at the Port Eliot Festival, Arthur will be performing Groovy Old Men with Michael Eavis and Peregrine St Germans at this year’s festival.

www.arthursmith.co.uk

“Smith stands out among his generation for a willingness to keep pushing himself and experimenting with new forms of comedic expression. This tour offers audiences another chance to see why today’s hottest young comics still see him as an inspiration.”
James Kettle, The Guardian

Links:

• Interview with the Telegraph
• Podcast: Arthur Smith sings Leonard Cohen
• Podcast: Alex Bellfield in conversation with Arthur Smith

Video:

Arthur Smith on Room 101: Part One

Arthur Smith on Room 101: Part Two

Arthur Smith on Room 101: Part Three