A Grade II Balham landmark that hosted a famous Victorian murder inquest – and became one of the world’s great comedy clubs
The Bedford in Balham holds eighteen hundred reviews and a 4.2 – a large, fair sample – and it is a genuine landmark of British entertainment: a Grade II listed Victorian pub that hosted a notorious murder inquest, and that became, in its iconic round Club Room, one of the most important comedy clubs in the world – the stage on which Eddie Izzard did his very first gig.
The grand old pub
The Bedford, originally the Bedford Hotel, has stood on Bedford Hill in Balham since the 1870s, and was rebuilt in about 1931 in a handsome neo-Georgian style with Arts and Crafts and Art Deco touches. It is a grand, substantial Victorian-and-inter-war pub, Grade II listed for its architectural quality, with a splendid round Club Room that has become one of the most famous comedy spaces in the country. It is a large, multi-roomed entertainment pub, offering live music, comedy, dancing and more across its various spaces.
The Balham poisoning
The Bedford has a genuinely dark historical footnote. In 1876, the pub hosted the coroner’s inquest into one of the most notorious unsolved murders of Victorian England: the death of Charles Bravo, a young lawyer who lived nearby and who died an agonising death from poisoning. The case gripped and scandalised Victorian society – a wealthy young man poisoned, with suspicion falling on his wife, her former lover, and a housekeeper, amid a lurid tangle of alleged affairs and secrets. The inquest, held partly at the Bedford, failed to determine who administered the poison, and the Balham Mystery remains genuinely unsolved to this day, one of the great cold cases of Victorian crime. That the pub which now rings with laughter once hosted the inquest into an unsolved poisoning is exactly the kind of dark historical detail this survey treasures.
Banana Cabaret
The Bedford’s great fame, though, is comedy. In 1983, a group of comedians – including Paul Merton, Mark Steel and Nick Revell – discovered the pub’s splendid round function room (one of them reportedly stumbled upon it when lost on the way back from the gents) and decided to start a comedy night there. They called it Banana Cabaret, and it grew into one of the longest-running and most respected comedy clubs in the world – the longest-standing comedy club in a single venue anywhere, running for over four decades in the Bedford’s iconic Club Room.
The roll-call of comedians who cut their teeth on the Banana Cabaret stage is staggering – a substantial proportion of the biggest names in British comedy. Michael McIntyre, Jo Brand, Jack Dee, Lee Evans, Catherine Tate, Stewart Lee, Sarah Millican, Rob Brydon, Micky Flanagan, Lee Mack, Sara Pascoe – a huge number of Britain’s most beloved comedians honed their craft here. Most famously, it was on the Banana Cabaret stage that Eddie Izzard performed his very first gig – the beginning of one of the most celebrated comedy careers of the age. The club became, in one comedian’s phrase, the “North Star” of the London comedy circuit, a genuine cornerstone of British alternative comedy.
The springboard
What made Banana Cabaret so important was its role as a springboard – a place committed to nurturing new and emerging talent, giving unknown comedians their first breaks and watching them grow into stars. Generations of comics got their start, found their voice, and launched their careers in the Bedford’s round room, before going on to fame. It was one of the great nurseries of British comedy, and the Bedford will forever be associated with the laughter of the last four decades and the careers it helped to launch.
The pub
A large, historic, entertainment-focused pub doing a fair 4.2 across a large and real sample, a Grade II Balham landmark that hosted a notorious Victorian murder inquest and became, through Banana Cabaret, one of the great comedy clubs of the world.
Verdict
Large, historic, and genuinely legendary in British comedy – the Bedford, where a Victorian poisoning was investigated and where Eddie Izzard, McIntyre and half of British comedy first took the stage.
Catch a comedy night or a band in the famous round room, and raise a pint to the Bedford – crime scene of the unsolved Balham Mystery, and launchpad of more comedy careers than almost any stage in Britain.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
