Over the course of its history, Footlights has earned a singular reputation for producing some of the country’s most talented and well-loved comedians, most of whom took part in the Summer Revue and National Tour. 

The Cambridge University Footlights Dramatic Club was formed in 1883. Initially it performed popular Victorian burlesques, farces and operettas. But by the 1900s its members had resolved to present only original material and, every “May Week”, performed revues made up of comic sketches and songs. 

However, it is the number of illustrious writers and performers who have emerged through Footlights during the last fifty years that has secured the Club its fame. In the Fifties, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, Michael Frayn, and Eleanor Bron all began their careers with Footlights. Cook and Miller went on to join Oxford’s Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett in the revolutionary ‘Beyond the Fringe’, which changed the British comedy landscape forever and laid firm foundations for the Club’s future success. They were followed, in the Sixties, by Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden, and Bill Oddie, who would later form the Goodies, and John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Eric Idle, who became half of the massively influential Monty Python, not to mention David Frost, John Bird, John Fortune, Miriam Margoyles, Clive James, Germaine Greer, Trevor Nunn, and Nicholas Hytner. 

In the Seventies, Douglas Adams, Clive Anderson, Griff Rhys Jones, Jimmy Mulville, Rory McGrath, and Jan Ravens all passed through the Club. And in 1981, the Summer Revue, ‘The Cellar Tapes’, won the Edinburgh Festival’s inaugural Perrier Award. Its cast included Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson, and Tony Slattery. In the second half of the Eighties and the first half of the Nineties, Footlights unleashed the architects of ‘New Wave’ comedy (David Baddiel, Nick Hancock, and Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis, who, with Rob Newman, went on to create The Mary Whitehouse Experience), and a number of familiar television personalities (such as Mel and Sue, and Armstrong and Miller). 

More recent Footlights alumni include Sacha Baron Cohen (Ali G), David Mitchell and Robert Webb (stars of Channel 4’s Peep Show), Matthew Holness and Richard Ayoade (stars of Channel 4’s Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place and winners of the 2001 Perrier Award), and an array of the most exciting and popular stand-ups on the circuit, such as Alex Horne, Simon Munnery, John Oliver, and Mark Watson. 

Comedy has changed a great deal since 1883. And Footlights – a club specifically designed to reshape with every year – has continuously proven itself capable of not only keeping up but setting the pace.