Mark Muldoon on why he set up the Next Big Thing award... and why winners Tarot prove the need for it

If you’re a comedy fan you’ll have your own examples: comics you feel are unjustly flying under the radar. Acts you steadfastly believe should be far bigger than they are.

It feels fair to suggest that that’s down to two reasons: 1), a comedy scene that, in 2025, could barely be more exciting; more varied; more vibrant. But also 2), a reduction in the opportunities for that talent to break through into true mainstream success.

Cult sketch group Tarot have today been announced as winners of the first Next Big Thing award, a prize created because of this groundswell of comedy talent that isn’t getting the mainstream media attention or accompanying large fanbases they deserve. 

Shows that used to provide a major staging post for new talent - Mock The Week, The Mash Report, Frankie Boyle’s New World Order - have disappeared from our schedules, while Live at the Apollo gets a small fraction of the viewers it was attracting in its BBC One heyday.

In some ways, Tarot feel like quite an old-fashioned act. They create thrillingly in-the-moment sketch comedy - occasionally gross, surreal, full-on - but always clever and spontaneous-wail-level funny. 

The concern is that they exist at a time when their brand of comedy has rarely felt like less of a viable career choice. Costs are rising and opportunities for career progression are contracting, even before you consider that any earnings would presumably need to be split five ways (between writer-performers Adam Drake, Ed Easton and Kath Hughes, alongside their offstage members Ben Rowse and Kiri Pritchard-McLean).

Which is not to say sketch is dying out. Far from it. It just relocated. A vast array of comedians do fantastic business with sketch comedy on social media nowadays. Comics such as Ed Night and (fellow Next Big Thing nominee) Paddy Young seem to have cracked the nut on how to maximise their chances of making a decent career out of all this: tour the country with accessible but unique stand-up personas that could hopefully one day appear on Live At The Apollo or Taskmaster, while uploading sketches to social media that stand to substantially widen their audience. Even if the same material perhaps wouldn’t lead anywhere if performed in an 80-seater room at the Edinburgh Fringe.

For a long time, Tarot have been something of a secret among comedy fans. A thrill you could only witness by leaving the house and attending a comedy venue. That might have been to the detriment of their careers. But their loss has been live comedy’s gain: a perfectly distilled version of everything that’s exciting about a room, an audience and a stage. Whether or not they themselves would work on TV is an interesting question to ponder. But you struggle to think of many acts that are more deserving of a chance to give it a go. 

So while it’s true that nimble comedians have adapted, finding their own audience online, it doesn’t yet feel as though social media has replaced the star quality that comes with a TV breakthrough.

If the comedy industry ecosystem was as healthy as it should be, Tarot would already be huge. There are numerous acts that deserve to be. That’s why this award has been created: there’s a bottleneck preventing many comics from getting the career breakthroughs they deserve. But even disregarding that, live comedy in 2025 is a feverishly exciting scene. That alone is something well worth highlighting.

• Mark Muldoon is the founder of the Next Big Thing award. He writes for Chortle and British Comedy Guide, is a talent scout/former judge of the Edinburgh Comedy Awards, and is on Instagram here.

Published: 11 Feb 2025