About Felt Nowt
Felt Nowt is a North East comedy co-operative and Community Interest Company, run by comedians and volunteers.
We put on shows, support performers, work with communities and create opportunities for people across the region to get involved in comedy.
Because we are a CIC, the organisation exists for community benefit rather than private profit, and the money we make goes back into keeping Felt Nowt running and making more things happen.
We prefer doing things to talking about doing things, so the rest of this page is mostly the story of what we’ve actually done.
It started because nobody could gig
Felt Nowt began in 2020, when Covid closed comedy venues and North East comedians suddenly had nowhere to perform.
So we made somewhere.
We started with live online comedy, including personalised Zoom shows and Felt Nowt Fridays, giving comedians a reason to keep writing and performing while stages were closed.
We experimented with making online comedy feel more like an actual gig, produced shows from venues, played with interactive audiences, made podcasts and video, ran quizzes and created Nowtflix, our own streaming home for North East comedy.
On Christmas Eve 2020, Felt Nowt Productions officially became a Community Interest Company.
Then the venues reopened.
We could have stopped there.
We didn't.
From Zoom to actual rooms
In 2021, as live comedy started to return, Felt Nowt began moving the comedians and audiences we had brought together online back into real venues.
That meant putting on more live shows, creating regular opportunities for performers and starting to build something that could last beyond lockdown.
The principle was pretty simple: North East comedians should have more chances to perform, develop and build audiences here in the North East.
That idea still sits underneath most of what we do.
Helping people get started
Felt Nowt now creates opportunities for comedians at pretty much every stage, from somebody wondering whether they could possibly do five minutes to experienced acts developing full shows.
We run courses and workshops, create new-act opportunities and give performers somewhere to try new material and build longer sets.
We also now run Long Live Comedy, a Newcastle comedy institution that has been giving performers early stage time for around two decades. Chris Ramsey did his first ever stand-up gig there, as did generations of other North East acts.
Keeping nights like that alive matters to us.
Comedy outside comedy clubs
We have never thought comedy should only happen in traditional comedy venues.
Our community work has included long-term work with young people, comedy workshops, performances in care homes and projects designed to bring live comedy to people who might not otherwise get much access to it.
We began working with Shieldfield Youth Programme in the early years of Felt Nowt and have continued developing community work since.
In 2023 we received funding from BBC Comedy for a project aimed at increasing LGBTQ+ representation in North East comedy, working with adults and young people on writing and performance.
Several participants went on to continue performing, create their own nights and appear on professional bills.
Tyne to Stand Up
In 2022 we put on the first Tyne to Stand Up at the Tyne Theatre, bringing together women comedians to raise money for Rape Crisis Tyneside and Northumberland.
More than 800 people came, and the night raised around £7,300.
It went well enough that we did it again. And again. And again.
By 2026, the first four Tyne to Stand Up shows had raised nearly £27,000 for Rape Crisis Tyneside and Northumberland.
It has become one of the biggest things we do each year, and one of the things we are proudest of.
Remembering where North East comedy came from
North East comedy has a much bigger history than most people realise, and we think more of it deserves to be remembered.
We started exploring that history through Jesters: Forgotten Stories of North East Comedy, created with Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums, looking at performers including Leonard Barras, Mark Sheridan, Ian Milne and Wavis O'Shave.
That work grew into exhibitions, archive projects and eventually the North East Comedy Hall of Fame, launched in 2026 to celebrate the people who helped shape comedy in the region.
It is an ongoing part of what we do: remembering the people who came before us while adding a few more names to the story
Taking the North East to Edinburgh
We had been taking North East comedy to the Edinburgh Fringe for a few years, but in 2026 we decided to go a bit further.
Felt Nowt took over The Garrett at The Alchemist for most of August and created our own Fringe venue.
We took 51 North East comedians with us, with a programme including debut hours, established acts, new performers, stand-up, panel shows, sketch, spoken word, improv, game shows and plenty of things that did not fit neatly into any category.
The idea was to make Edinburgh more achievable for performers who might otherwise struggle with the cost and practical barriers of taking a show there.
The project went on to win the ISH Edinburgh Comedy Awards Panel Prize.
We were quite pleased about that.
Comedy made by comedians
Felt Nowt is run by comedians, and that shapes pretty much everything we do.
We know what it is like trying to get stage time, build a set, find an audience, make a show work financially and generally keep going in an industry that can be pretty precarious.
That is why the co-op matters. North East comedians can join Felt Nowt and become part of the organisation, not just somebody who gets booked by it.
It means the people creating the work also have a stake in the community around it, and in where Felt Nowt goes next.
Why “Felt Nowt”?
The name comes from North East performer Wavis O'Shave and his cult character The Hard.
After hitting his hand with a hammer, The Hard declared:
“I felt nowt.”
We liked it.
He kindly let us use it.
So here we are.
What we’re building
The original idea has never really changed.
Felt Nowt came out of lockdown, when comedy stopped and we had time to look properly at what was happening around us.
The North East had loads of brilliant comedians, but every weekend too many of us were getting on Megabuses and trains to perform somewhere else. At the same time, audiences here were missing out. Too many towns and communities were overlooked, and too much good comedy seemed to be happening somewhere else.
That seemed daft.
So we wanted to change it.
We wanted comedians to have places to perform, get paid, take risks and build something ambitious here. We wanted audiences across the region to see great comedy on their doorstep. We wanted people who had never thought comedy was for them to have a way in, and we wanted to remember the people who built North East comedy before us.
We could probably dress all of that up in a mission statement about impact, empowerment and creative ecosystems.
We’d rather put a show on.
Ultimately, Felt Nowt is a group of friends working together, trying to make people laugh and make sure brilliant comedy doesn’t always have to happen somewhere else.
It can happen here. It should happen here. And we’re going to keep making sure it does.