Liam Farrelly wins Frog And Bucket's 2021 new act competition
- Liam Farrelly has won Beat The Frog World Series Comedy Competition 2021
- Jenny Hart was runner-up, with the panel prize going to Ashish Suri
Liam Farrelly has won the Beat The Frog World Series Comedy Competition 2021, the new act contest at the Frog And Bucket comedy club.
Farrelly was previously a runner-up in the So You Think You're Funny? competition in 2018, and nominated for the Best Newcomer prize in the Scottish Comedy Awards 2020. He is also a BBC New Comedy Award 2021 finalist, with that show set to take place on Wednesday night.
The Beat The Frog final took place last night (1st November) at the Manchester-based venue, hosted by Danny McLoughlin. The trophies were handed out by the club's manager, Jessica Toomey.
Jenny Hart (pictured below, on the right), whose act is described as "wrong comedy from a dark and twisted mind", was named the runner-up by the judges.
Meanwhile Ashish Suri, whose biography describes him as "a tourist turned immigrant from India", took the panel prize.
The club confirms: "We are pleased to announce that the assured Glaswegian comic Liam Farrelly won the 18th Beat the Frog World Series competition, with gloriously twisted trans comedian Jenny Hart as runner-up and a special panel prize going to the pin sharp Indian comic Ashish Suri."
The other Beat The Frog World Series finalists this year were David Arnold, Aaron Atkins, Martina Cotichella, Sam Serrano, Lovell Smith, Rob Thomas and Stuart Thomas.
Previous winners of the competition include Brennan Reece, Rob Mulholland and Carl Hutchinson. Last year's winner, Dan Tiernan, performed a headline set as part of the show.
Explaining more about the format of the competition, the club says: "The gong style new act night Beat the Frog grew out of The Frog's Raw Night where wannabe comedians would get up on stage and give it a go. Now at Beat the Frog every Monday the competitors are fighting to stay on stage for the full five minutes but at the top of the show three audience members are supplied with red cards to hold up if they don't like the act and when all three are up you're croaked clean off the stage. At the end a winner is selected from all those who 'beat the frog'. The World Series pits all those who have won throughout the year against each other to find the victor of victors!"