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Self-confessed Millwall fan Addison Cresswell⁷⁶ founded his operation – the longest-established of the three main management empires – in the early eighties. He did it initially ‘for a laugh’ on the grounds that ‘it was better than signing on’. The Comic Strip were touring with French and Saunders at the time, and he put together a rival package for about a fifth of the money under a name thought up by John Hegley.

Off The Kerb’s off-the-cuff beginnings were a long way from today’s multi-million-pound concern. Cresswell ‘ran the business for three years with one phone in a basement in Peckham…There were no answering machines, let alone mobiles – it was all 10p’s and phonecards in those days – and it’d take you a couple of days to track anyone down, because whenever you phoned them up they’d always be out…but then it all got serious, and now every fucker has four agents and a style guru to hold their mobile phone for them.’

He seemed to adjust successfully enough to the expansion of commercial opportunities which transformed the industry he had initially got involved with in the hope of ‘drinking himself silly, getting laid and not starting work till one o’clock the next afternoon’, into the bloated careerist enclave that it is today. In fact, in self-consciously presenting his acts as a stable by schooling people like Jack Dee and Lee Evans in the benefits of wearing ‘a fucking smart suit’ made by his own tailor (Eddie in Berwick Street, Soho), Cress-well might be said to have played as big a part as anyone in the professionalization of the unwashed comedy hordes.

‘I’ve always been a bit more rock ‘n’ roll,’ he observes, when asked about the difference between his approach and that of his two rival agencies (though given his acts’ allegiance to the well-cut whistle, perhaps Motown would be a better analogy). ‘I like people who work hard instead of sitting around moaning and waiting for the phone to ring. I never took on acts that didn’t have any bollocks⁷⁷…Mark [Lamarr] is no angel and Lee [Evans] is a bit of a nutter too, on his night.’

There’s a telling moment in William Cook’s Ha Bloody Ha, where Cresswell says that the thing he most disliked about the comedy scene in the early eighties was that it reminded him of ‘everything I hated about college’. He still exudes that peculiarly refined hatred for the products of this country’s higher education system which can only come from years spent within it.

However much the pre-celebrity CVs of his roster might suggest otherwise, the boss of Off The Kerb insists that he does not consider forswearing a university education to be an essential prerequisite for comedic validity.

‘I just feel that if people want to be comedians, they should do their foundation course,’ maintains this diehard advocate of the school of hard knocks, ‘have some glasses thrown at them on a Monday night in Sheffield or something…The amount of fucking arseholes who’ve just come out of Oxford or Cambridge and straight away they’re waltzing round the BBC – honestly, you can’t move up there for those cunts…I think they should be burned at the stake.’

As if realizing that his own eloquence might’ve got the better of him at this point, Cresswell flirts momentarily with the language of conciliation. ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ he qualifies subtly, ‘comedy can come from anywhere.’