Mock the Week comedian Ian Stone brings Looking for the Wow to the Library Theatre on Friday 11 December at 7.30pm. Tickets £21.25, concessions £18.25.

Stand-up comedian Ian Stone is bringing his tour show, Looking for the Wow, to Leighton Buzzard Library Theatre on Friday 11 December. The show starts at 7.30pm, with doors at 6.45pm, and tickets are £21.25, or £18.25 for concessions, on the theatre’s Central Bedfordshire box office.

The tour was due to finish in June 2026. His publicists say it has played more than 40 towns and cities across the UK and has been extended to December “due to popular demand”, which is how the Library Theatre came to be on the list.

Tickets and times

  • When: Friday 11 December 2026. Doors 6.45pm, show 7.30pm.
  • Where: Leighton Buzzard Library Theatre, Lake Street, Leighton Buzzard, LU7 1RX, in the main auditorium.
  • Price: £21.25 standard, £18.25 concession.
  • Booking: Central Bedfordshire Ticketsolve. When we checked the box office feed on 13 October, 97 of the 153 seats were still on sale.

What the show is about

The premise is in the title: Stone goes looking for the bits of life that are better than the routine. In his own words:

“I love that people are coming to see the show, so I thought why not do more of them? There has to be more to life than the humdrum and the routine. Why can’t we sneak in a hint of awesome, a tad of amazing, and maybe a smidge of wonderful? Where you get it is your business.

“A forest canopy opening onto a huge vista would be enchanting for some but my ancestors wandered in the desert for forty years, I think we’ve been outdoors enough. Others get their fix from the spiritual, but I’ve been harbouring a grudge against God since my mother stopped me going to Arsenal after my Barmitzvah, forty-nine years ago. ‘God will be watching,’ she said. Well, at least He got to see the game.

“The point is, life could be so much better, so I’m on the lookout. Come and join me on the hunt.”

Ian Stone, smiling, in glasses and a dark jumper against a blue background
Ian Stone, whose Looking for the Wow tour reaches Leighton Buzzard on 11 December. Photo: supplied by JV Publicity for Ian Stone

Who Ian Stone is

Stone has appeared on Mock the Week and Never Mind the Buzzcocks, and won the Spirit of the Fringe Award in 2023, according to his publicists. They quote The Guardian calling him “seriously funny” and say The Independent ranked him among the top ten stand-ups in Britain.

Arsenal runs through more than the show. He presents Handbrake Off, a twice-weekly Arsenal podcast for The Athletic, which his publicists say gets 50,000 downloads an episode, and the theatre’s listing adds that he co-hosted the Rock ‘N’ Roll Football show on Absolute Radio with Ian Wright for five years and is a regular on Times Radio. His book, To Be Someone, came out in 2020. More about him is on his own website.

What it means for you

This is a 153-seat room, so it is a close-up night of stand-up rather than an arena show, and on 13 October around a third of the seats had already gone. If you want a comedy night in town before Christmas, book through the council’s box office rather than waiting for the door. For everything else on in the run-up to Christmas, see our Leighton Buzzard What’s On this month page, the Christmas lights switch-on and the Christmas market.