For 25 years Jongleurs has been the stage on which tomorrow’s TV stars have proved themselves. Paul Merton, Rory Bremner, Graham Norton and Ruby Wax all learnt the art of stand-up at a venue that was created using a £300 overdraft by the daughter of Polish refugees.

For 25 years Jongleurs has been the stage on which tomorrow’s TV stars have proved themselves. Paul Merton, Rory Bremner, Graham Norton and Ruby Wax all learnt the art of stand-up at a venue that was created using a £300 overdraft by the daughter of Polish refugees.

Maria Kempinska opened the doors of the first Jongleurs club on a February evening in London in 1983. The bill was a mix of comedy and cabaret followed by dance, drink and food. It was an instant hit. On her first night, she had 400 people trying to get in.

Her timing was perfect. Mother-in-law jokes on TV were finally starting to fall flat, as comedy became more serious and political. Other than the Comedy Club, which had room for a maximum of 100, there were few platforms for the new breed of stand-up, other than in the back of pubs.

Jongleurs was on a different scale. Using an old roller-skating rink above a pub in Clapham, Kempinska could seat 300, as well as giving them something to drink and ending with a disco.

Kempinska had learnt early how to put on a show. She grew up on a council estate in Watford, speaking Polish as her first language. At 11, she won a scholarship to the local convent school, where every Lent she put on a cabaret to raise money for charity. The nuns might not have wholly approved, but Kempinska had found her calling.

After school she became a drama teacher, then worked in advertising, taking theatre classes all the while. For the first two years of Jongleurs, she ran the club on Friday nights and continued to work during the week as an actor’s agent.

‘At the beginning, it was really exciting. You didn’t know what anyone was going to say. It was great fun, though I was flying by the seat of my pants. I just knew that I had to sell all 300 seats. It’s not like a play, when you know after a night whether you have a formula that’s going to work or not.’

By its nature, alternative comedy was anarchic, so Kempinska knew that if her bill had any chance of running smoothly, she had to speak to her acts directly. Even now, she likes to know exactly how a show is being produced. ‘In a live performance, you can’t afford to make mistakes,’ she explains. ‘I like people reporting back to me. I expect hundreds of calls a day.’

Staging it right

She chose the name Jongleurs, a medieval term for wandering minstrels, partly because it was tricky, so she thought people would remember it, and partly because it would be recognised internationally.

‘I have always thought in bigger terms without knowing the steps. My biggest difficulty, however, has always been breaking things down to make it all happen. I know the possibilities, but I struggle with how I get there. I am a great one for using other people’s templates. Just show me the route.’

Through a friend she met John Davy in 1985, who became first her business partner and then her husband. He had a background in retail and together they started to put in place a framework for the business.

She had already started to build up demand at Christmas, putting on shows in other venues during the season. ‘The question was whether we could get enough comedians to sustain a second club. Yes, we could in December, but could we do it full-time?’

Her approach was ‘build it and they will come.’ ‘We are a nation of comedians. England has the best sense of humour ever. Comedy is in the blood. As we opened more venues, more acts came out of the woodwork.
‘We had to devise a system to help them perform to the best of their ability and let them practise. That was the mechanic that we had to put in place. How else could we know that they were going to be good enough?’

Laughing all the way to the bank

From the start, the pub under Jongleurs in Clapham, the Cornet, had liked Kempinska’s mix of stand-up, dance and drinks. Takings at the bar shot up and the relationship grew to the point where the owners of the lease, Regent Inns, agreed to fund the building of new venues.

Eventually, a joint venture called Across the Miles was formed in which Jongleurs held a majority stake of 51 per cent. ‘They put up the venues, we would put on the acts,’ explains Kempinska. ‘It was still a financial stretch for us, though Regent helped with loans.’

There are now 17 Jongleurs in the UK, selling a total of 600,000 tickets a year and taking £15 million at the door. Only Manchester made a slow start. ‘It wasn’t because Lancastrians don’t have a sense of humour,’ clarifies Kempinska. ‘The venue was just in the wrong place.’

By 2000, the business was worth £30 million and Regent made an offer to buy the stake held by Kempinska and Davy. Was it a tough decision to let go and pocket the £8 million on offer?

‘Not at all,’ says Kempinska. ‘The thought that anyone would want to buy an entertainment business like this was unexpected. If someone is interested, then you have got to seriously think about taking up the offer. You have no idea whether you have reached the crest or not.’

Kempinska now mainly looks after the brand and makes sure audiences fully enjoy their experience of coming to a Jongleurs show. Back in the experimental 80s, comedy could be raw, she says, but now each show has to be slick. ‘You can’t roll it out unless you make it formulaic. Otherwise you are suddenly running a venue which is going off on tangents and upsetting people.’

There is no other business where negative feedback is so instant and so crushing. ‘There’s nothing worse than putting on a comedian and watching the show fall flat. It happens less than one per cent of the time, but you want to avoid the pain at all costs. So yes, we are ruthless in the way we present who appears. But no, we are not ruthless in how we treat our performers. As professionals, you don’t have to be.’

What Maria did next

Stand-up is an industry in its own right now with more than 50 clubs in London alone. Although Kempinska no longer runs venues directly, she continues to put on shows at Christmas and for businesses.

‘You have people begging you to book Peter Kay or Ricky Gervais for £50,000 for half an hour. It’s a phenomenal amount of money, but you have to spot exactly the right person for a particular show. We do not represent any of these comedians. We will put forward a number who could do the job.’

As part of the deal with Regent Inns, she retains the intellectual property in Jongleurs. Her priority so far has been to build the website into ‘the world’s leading comedy portal’, but she is now concentrating on producing content for mobile phones and TV.
She also holds the rights to develop clubs internationally. ‘My aim is to create comedy centres all round the world and for Jongleurs to become a worldwide name.’

Two weeks ago, she was back in Poland, looking at a site in Warsaw. ‘The value of what we have learnt and our infrastructure is second to none. We should be able to deliver comedy and look after performers anywhere in the world.

‘The Poles have a great sense of humour,’ she continues, ‘but it will be like going back 25 years and starting all over again. Of course, comedy is a natural release for anywhere that has been the slightest bit oppressed, so once we have proved ourselves, you never know, we might look at Russia next.’