I’m a comedian – here’s where Peter Kay went wrong in ‘garlic bread’ row

You don’t have to look too far on Elon Musk’s X to find people claiming that, in ’Two-Tier-Kier’ Starmer’s Britain, people are being locked up just for speaking their minds (or usually, to be fair, for being racist). And now this free speech culture war has even infiltrated our comedy shows, with a man from Manchester claiming that he was ’treated like a terrorist’ for being asked to leave a Peter Kay gig after he repeatedly shouted the words ‘Garlic Bread’ to the point Kay asked for him to be removed.

Maybe we really do live under a police state?. The man, Philip Peters, told the Daily Mail he couldn’t understand being removed from Manchester’s AO arena, and  is now demanding an apology from Peter Kay himself after he was apparently left bruised by the door staff who evicted him on the car share star’s instruction. As a working comedian myself, you might expect me to be instinctively on the side of Kay, that I was cheering him on as he urged security to kick Mr Peters in the face and calling him a ‘p***k’.

But I’ll be honest, on my own tour, where I’m playing to venues of a couple of hundred and still flogging spare tickets on the day, I can only empathise so much. Now many will see my name as the writer of this piece and think ‘WHO?!’, but that’s the point – I see comedy at the sharp end, and that’s why I’m offering this perspective. While most of you might never have heard of me, Peter Kay is selling out hundreds of shows at venues that host 20,000 people.

To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video. Up Next. So actually, while I should be backing my fellow comedian, I have much more in common with the bruised and fed up Mr Peters than I do the creator of Phoenix Nights, though I like to think I wouldn’t shout catchphrases in front of 2 people, never mind 20,000. When I go to the kind of venues Peter Kay plays, like the O2 Arena in London, I go as a punter rather than a performer.

But truth be told, I don’t really go at all, because, take it from a stand up, live comedy doesn’t really work in those rooms. As a working comedian who will never be given the opportunity to play rooms like the O2, and a comedy fan, I genuinely feel for both Kay and Mr Peters in this situation because, put simply, this isn’t how comedy was meant to be performed. It’s not on Kay, as I’ve seen plenty of other performers struggle in similar instances.

I’ve seen some of the best comedians the UK has ever produced suffer in large venues,  struggling to deal with an audience of adoring fans who have gone too early, arrived drunk, thought that they were helping their hero on by shouting out their favourite bits, then putting the comedian in the tricky position of having to ask someone to essentially stop enjoying themselves so much. As comedians, it’s our job to make you laugh, so that’s a pretty hard thing to tell someone!.

And whether he likes it or not, Garlic Bread is Peter Kay’s ‘thing’, his hit, his equivalent of Paul McCartney playing ‘Hey Jude’ and yet, as he put it in his statement, being used to disrupt this particular show. It’s an unenviable position for any performer to be in. But from the punter’s perspective, he’s a huge fan, he’s likely shelled out hundreds between tickets, travel and drink, and his crime is what, exactly, excitedly shouting out his favourite punchline?.

That’s why they are both right in their way, but also why I believe it’s the circumstances that are the problem. Ultimately if this was in a 300 seater venue, Kay could have acknowledged it properly, made eye contact with the bloke, shut him down and moved on. In a venue this size, with people constantly getting up and moving, and the distance between stage and audience making it impossible to properly engage, you can’t fix a situation like this.

Of course hackers are annoying, for both the other audience members and not least the comedian, but the truth is, in my experience,  they’re rarely trying to genuinely ruin anyone’s night. And in an era where most people watch stand up comedy through the prism of viral crowd work clips on TikTok and Instagram, it’s fair to assume that a lot of people think this is the point of a comedy gig. ‘Come out, give the comedian a bit of stick, and if you’re lucky, they might even give you a bit back! Maybe someone might even film it!’.

This is the depressing reality of stand up in 2025 – loud, social media focussed, and in bafflingly large arenas that cheapen what comedy is all about. So while I continue on my own little tour, earning in months what Peter Kay likely earns in seconds, not even selling out my much smaller rooms while he entertains tens of thousands, perhaps there’s some comfort for me. As I sit alone in the budget hotels after good gigs or indeed bad ones, the shows with crowds that helped and the ones with the odd heckler, I’ll be able to think ‘well at least I didn’t have to kick anyone out for shouting ‘Garlic Bread’.