The Stage, the 145-year-old UK weekly for actors, producers and theatre owners, will – for the first time in almost 100 years – soon be under the day-to-day control of a managing director outside the owning Comerford family. Managing director Hugh Comerford, great grandson of the founder, announced this week that he would be retiring in 2026 and would succeed his sister Catherine Comerford as chair of the company. She had previously been managing director for 20 years until 2012.
Hugh Comerford’s first media job had been as a reporter on William Reed’s The Grocer magazine, following which he worked for Thomson, RELX and Emap. He also spent 10 years practising as a criminal barrister.
The post of managing director is being advertised both in The Stage and in its sister publication the 167-year-old The Bookseller, which was acquired in 2020.
The privately-owned B2B weeklies are among the oldest of 21 business and professional magazines which have been continuously published in the UK since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The oldest is Morning Advertiser, for pubs, clubs and bars, which dates back to 1794. Next came The Lancet, Farmers Guardian, New Law Journal, Railway Gazette, the British Medical Journal, Pharmaceutical Journal, and Building. Estates Gazette (in Flashes & Flames this week) dates back to 1858.
The Stage has been published by the Comerford family since its 1880 launch. The illustrious history includes advertising which, in 1956, persuaded wannabe playwright John Osborne to submit his script for Look Back in Anger to London’s Royal Court Theatre. Ads in The Stage also brought together many pop groups including The Spice Girls, Take That, and Steps. Actors Harold Pinter, Idris Elba, Michael Caine, Kenneth Branagh, and Charles Dance all reportedly found their first jobs in the classified pages of the world’s longest-surviving weekly for the theatrical profession.
The Stage has proved to be a natural partner for The Bookseller which has been the business magazine of the UK book industry since 1858, the UK’s tenth oldest “trade” magazine. It’s read by publishers, authors and retailers, and profiled the unknown J.K. Rowling in 1997, before publication of her first Harry Potter book.
Acquisition of The Bookseller has helped to revitalise the £5mn-revenue Stage Media Company which employs some 50 people. Much of the growth in recent years has been digital (of course) but also a fast-growing portfolio of 11 live events including the British Book Awards, The Stage Debut Awards and the new British Audio Awards (“The Speakies”) produced jointly by The Stage and The Bookseller.
The growing emphasis on events, digital subscriptions, inevitable cost reductions and the canny acquisition of The Bookseller are what have marked Hugh Comerford’s eventful stewardship of a family company that’s in good shape in its third century.
