Comedian Passes Exam to Open Britain’s Least Efficient Pub

Joe Lycett has passed an exam so he can open a pub for one hour a week. Even an establishment operating on the timetable of a particularly unhurried village post office must, it turns out, have its paperwork in order.

The 38-year-old comedian will run an east London pub on Fridays during The Lycett Arms, a six-part live television series for Channel 4. The pub will open for only an hour each week while the episodes are on air, making last orders less a nightly ritual than an almost immediate administrative necessity.

Despite the deliberately limited trading hours, Lycett had to become fully accredited to serve alcohol before the programme could go ahead. He completed a training course and sat an exam, obtaining a level 2 award for personal licence-holders. A joke pub, British bureaucracy has firmly established, remains a pub.

Each live episode will place a celebrity pub manager alongside Lycett for a trial shift. The Lycett Arms will also be paired with a real pub elsewhere in the UK, allowing the programme to highlight the people and places keeping the country’s drinking establishments going.

Lycett said the series was intended to “celebrate our British boozers” at a time when both pubs and live entertainment are struggling.

“The live performance sector, if you want to call it that, is under great threat, and the pub industry is as well,” he said.

“And I think anything we can do to celebrate our British boozers is a good thing because yes, they provide a watering hole and, as I’ve said, I do think they’re really good for society at large.

“It’s good to have a public house where the public can come in and mingle with one another.

“It’s good for people who are lonely. It’s good for people who need to connect with their community.”

For Lycett, that attachment is personal. He said he moved to his area of Birmingham because he loved its local pub, which remains somewhere he can reliably find a familiar face.

“I moved to my area of Birmingham because I loved the local pub and I still do, and when I go in there, there’s always someone that I kind of know and can sit and have a drink with,” he said.

“I think it’s been a place of great solace for me over the years, and I think pubs closing in places kills the local area.

“And so we definitely want to champion those amazing boozers around the country, and it’s a sort of a spiritual place for lots of people.”

The result will be six Friday openings, six live broadcasts and a succession of celebrity managers undergoing trial shifts in public. After each hour, The Lycett Arms will close again until the following week, having achieved the unusual feat of requiring more licensing preparation than actual weekly opening time.