Interview with Glee comedy club owner Mark Tughan

Comedy fan Mark Tughan has built up a chain of highly respected comedy clubs around the country over the last 25 years. As The Glee prepares to launch in Glasgow, we chat to Mark about the club's history, the importance of loving comedy, and the stress of taking on of the biggest companies in the world in a court battle.

Hi Mark. How did you get involved in running comedy clubs?

I was born and brought up in Belfast, and took a year off after school and did various menial jobs in London. A friend of the family rang me up one night and took me to The Comedy Store. That was 1986 I believe. The Comedy Store at the time was in Leicester Square, and it had milk bottle tops to make the glittering backdrop. I started going regularly from that point on and the kind of acts I saw there were the likes of Jo Brand and Kevin Day. I remember Harry Enfield was doing Stavros and stuff, and I was just absolutely taken by this thing.

Fast forward to the early 90s, I had done three years at Nottingham Uni and I was into a career in banking. I was an investment banker and still going to places like The Comedy Store. That was my way of relaxing at the weekend; getting a crowd of mates together and taking them to this. At the time, even in the early 90s, The Comedy Store was still a little bit underground. You'd queue up for ages and ages to get in.

One night, chatting with friends, the conversation turned to, "Is this happening anywhere else? Is this happening outside London?" I soon ascertained that it wasn't really happening outside of London and, cutting the long story short, The Glee became the first purpose built club outside London. We opened the Birmingham venue in September 1994.

When I first arrived, there was Malcolm Bailey doing something in a pub called The Bearwood, and he was booking people like Jack Dee and Jo Brand, and Frank Skinner of course. There was stuff going on in the odd pub function room here and there. Not just in Birmingham but elsewhere, but there was still no purpose built comedy clubs.
Birmingham was not, for all sorts of reasons, an instant hit. I was 26 years of age at the time. I did everything wrong in the 'can you make balls of this?' playbook. Year one we lost far more than we forecast to lose. Year two we pulled it back to some extent, but it was only in year three that the club itself became profitable.

It was Cardiff that came next. Cardiff was 2001 and actually Cardiff was an instant hit for us. As you can imagine we had six or seven years of experience by this point.

Nottingham and Oxford - which were the ones that came along in 2010 - were not instant hits, they were incredible slow burners. But to give you a bit of colour with that, you have to remember that in 2009 Glee [the American musical comedy drama series] was on TV and in 2011 I was knee deep in a lawsuit. The confusion over the name: it was real, otherwise I wouldn't have sued.

So Nottingham and Oxford were not instant hits at all, but they are hits now. If they weren't trading well and profitably, I wouldn't been doing Glasgow.

As to why there was a huge gap between Cardiff, which was 2001, and obviously Nottingham and Oxford which was 2010, the simple answer to that was Jongleurs. They went from one, two, three clubs in London, to 17 clubs at the peak before going, obviously as we all know, spectacularly bust in around about 2009. Throughout that whole period, 2001 to 2009, I just sat there going, "There by the grace of God, I've got two clubs, Birmingham and Cardiff, they're both trading fantastically but Jongleurs are 'it'. I'm never going to catch up. I'm never going to survive a foot race with them." I stayed at two... they got up to 17, but it went wrong for them. It feels to me like the tortoise and the hare, doesn't it? It's taken us 24 years now, 25 years essentially, for us to get our fifth club going.

It's really interesting that, back when you started Birmingham, you stuck with it, even though it was initially looking like a failure...

As anyone who's ever worked in comedy knows, there's something obviously hugely addictive about being in this industry. I will still drive in to my Birmingham venue on a Saturday night and all the way in on the journey I will be nervous. I'll get butterflies and will not be relaxed until I've walked in and soaked up the atmosphere of the room. "How's it going? Are the comics relaxed? How are the audience, are they settled down or are they restless and is there a few heckles and stuff like that?"

I've always said to myself the day that I decide I've had enough of this is prompted by an evening drive in where I don't get nervous anymore, because if I don't get that sense of huge anticipation, I'll know that I've stopped caring and it'll just be a 'is it going to be a good bar take?' thing.

I'm not satisfied until I've gone in and I've seen the smiles on people's faces and I've chatted to a couple of acts and I've seen them do at least half to two thirds of a set and I've seen the evening settled in, if you catch my drift?

Absolutely. People say Jongleurs failed because they started to pay more attention to the bar sales than the comedy. The love wasn't there.

You've hit the nail on the head. The one thing I think that we learned from that whole debacle really is that comedy clubs are not Nando's, they're not Pizza Express's.

If you want to call it a roll out, I am rolling out some extra clubs, but very much uppermost in my mind is this idea that they're not Nando's, you can't just go, "Well, I'll have one there, and I'll have one there, and I'll have one there." It's just so important to get the detail right. Like I say, I think one of the reasons for our success over the years is the show comes first to us. I'm a reluctant publican, I'm a reluctant seller food - the show has to come first. If a by-product of a bloody good show is that you sell quite a lot of beers and soft drinks and wine and quite a lot of burgers and pizzas, then so be it. But the show has to come first. That's why people come!

So next up is Glasgow. How long has that been in the planning?

It's an old Jongleurs site, so I was always aware of it. I had visited it, I knew it was available all this time. I kept track of it, for years. But I was physically and financially unable to do anything whilst I was still engaged what turned out to be a six year legal action with 20th Century Fox. In a way I regret not doing it in the wave of clubs that we did in 2010. I should have really done Nottingham, Oxford and Glasgow but I was cash constrained at the time.

Funnily enough I was being reminded constantly by comics of good places to go and potential sites that I could check out. So when I was able, I made and inquiry about Glasgow, found out that it was still empty and there was a landlord that was very keen to have a chat with me. Ironically I made an offer and I got turned down. The landlord at the time - this is going back 18 months, two years - decided to proceed with a buffet restaurant. Nine months later, they got back on the phone and said, "Are you still interested?".

For me Glasgow obviously represented a huge commercial opportunity, because you look at all the places that we could go, the really big cities, Glasgow is one of the biggest. It doesn't have a lot of competition, it's got The Stand - which I think we can co-exist really really nicely with. The only issue for us is it's 300 miles up the road, but you've just got to get over that. In actual fact I'm quite enjoying it, I get away for a day or two every week, I get up to Glasgow and watch it get refitted.

The other thing for us is, I know you're British Comedy Guide, but we're also music venues as well. Glasgow represents quite a significant opportunity to bring our niche brand of seated singer songwriter, folk groups, acoustic type music gigs to a city like Glasgow. It's been certainly very successful for us in Birmingham. My music promoter, his eyes just lit up when I said to him, "Have you ever thought about Glasgow?"

Your capacity in Glasgow will be 800?

We won't be doing 800 for comedy, no. For seated it's going to be 400, and I think standing, although that's the official capacity, and it's actually slightly higher than that on the licence, I don't think we'll ever be putting quite as many as 800 in there. But for standing music gig could be six or seven hundred.

Exciting. Can we talk about the court case a bit more? Were you aware when you launched the battle how long it'd go on for, and how stressful and all-consuming it'd be? In hindsight, would you have gone ahead if you had known what was ahead?
I was made really quite aware of how expensive this could be and how long this could last. But, it's still true to say that the expense was easily busted, as was the three to four year time horizon that I was advised by some very good solicitors.

I dealt with the same lawyer for the whole six years and he said to me, "You know Mark, I've been doing this for 30 years and I have never, ever come across a case quite like yours. In the sense that you are up against a defendant that literally gives no ground." He said he prosecutes litigation for all sorts of giant brands, but he has still never come across an organisation quite as hostile as Fox was to me.

I was advised that it could be hell, but it was still an eye-opener as to literally how much they fought. They lost hands down in the High Court and appealed - of course people expect an appeal - but they lost the appeal. They lost the appeal in two goes as well, then they went from the Supreme Court - unbelievable! And you know what they were looking for at the Supreme Court? Not only were they going for the regular appeal to try and overturn the decision, but they were also going for a referral to the CJEU, the European Court. They were throwing everything they could at it, and every expense they could possibly put in there, they did. They tried to make it as expensive as possible for me, in the hope, I think, that I would essentially go bankrupt.

In answer to the question would I do it again? I would do it again tomorrow, but I would do it again tomorrow in part based on what I know the result was... and I can't tell you what it was! [It was settled on confidential terms]. You'll just have to infer from the fact I was satisfied with the ultimate outcome.

It was nice to see an underdog win, if you don't mind us calling you that.

Thank you. I appreciate the sentiment actually, because not everyone takes that view. I've had it expressed publicly to me "You're a bit of a chancer. It's your chance to attempt to get rich on the back of something like that." It's true that I feel adequately compensated for what happened, but at the end of the day I just didn't want to rename and I felt there was a really big point of principle that you just can't do that. You just can't play 'We're five thousand times bigger than you and therefore you can just go away'. I wasn't prepared to be bullied like that.

But it's true it nearly broke me financially. In terms of the workload and the stress, the worst bit of it was the first three years. Once I'd won at the High Court - with the lawyers saying that the High Court was very much a 50/50, it could have gone either way - and we got to the appeal court, we were really sure we would win. They settled 10 days before we were due to go to the Supreme Court, and I think that basically says it all.

Funnily enough I do think Disney coming along and knocking on the door of Fox may well have been probably a bigger catalyst for them to settle than anything else. I think this had become an embarrassing piece of litigation for them, so when Disney came along looking to acquire the Fox Studios somebody quite possibly very senior at Fox just issued the memo, "Get rid of all the crappy, embarrassing litigation that we're involved in."

Sounds like, in part, Glasgow has Mickey Mouse to thank for the fact they're about to get a new venue...

We've taken out the raised areas so the whole thing is a one level auditorium, apart from a small raised area at the back. We're bringing in a famous Glee moveable bench seats. If there's 400 the bench seats are pushed all the way back, if there's only 200 in the bench seats come forward a bit so it doesn't feel like you're in a vast auditorium. There's lots of curtains and things on the wall, there's a bloody good lighting and PA rig going in.

The kitchen is being nicely refitted. Food is obviously going to be a really big part of the wider Glee offering. But again, we're just following the main trends since the smoking ban - food for us went from essentially a bit of an after thought to something which is a very key component of the offering. A lot of customers want it. We had to up our game.

At the moment we're starting small, it's the usual Glee Club format of compère; act one; interval; compère; act two; interval; compère; act three; everybody goes home. We're not doing Jongleurs style discos after the show.

We haven't got any music gigs just yet but we're talking to lots and lots of promoters as we speak about getting some music gigs in. And we've actually got a couple of drag shows programmed as well.

We're starting conservatively. It's Fridays and Saturday nights with the odd tour show on Thursdays and music gigs hopefully on Thursdays and Sundays. But there is an intention to get the place open on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays probably later this year, with a rough aim for October time. I just don't want to open three nights a week until I know I can fill it.

I do have high hopes actually that Glasgow can match Birmingham in terms of number of gigs it does and number of nights that it's open. It's a very, very similar capacity.

Sounds great Mark. Best of luck with the launch!

To find out what is on at the club, visit glee.co.uk