Jongleurs, the chain of comedy clubs where Graham Norton, Arthur Smith and Jack Dee made their names, is to disappear from Britain’s high streets — temporarily.

The sale last week via a pre-pack administration of Regent Inns, the pub operator that licenses the Jongleurs name, triggered a change-of-control clause under which full control of the Jongleurs brand will revert to Maria Kempinska, its founder.

Intertain, the new vehicle set up to acquire the majority of Regent’s outlets, has secured a temporary renewal of its licence with Ms Kempinska to use the Jongleurs name until January 2. It will then relaunch the ten venues under a new, as-yet unnamed comedy brand.

But Ms Kempinska, who launched the first club in Battersea, South London, in 1983, told The Times that she was already looking for sites in Newcastle, Liverpool and Brighton as a platform for creating a new chain of Jongleurs clubs. She said that these venues would be “more adventurous, more creative and more spontaneous” than the Regent operations.

John Leslie, the chief executive of Intertain, said the changes at Regent had presented an opportunity to the company to revamp its own offering and source its own acts. “The Jongleurs licence held by Regent was quite restrictive. This is a big opportunity for us to develop the format.”

Under the terms of the pre-pack administration, Mr Leslie’s new group was able to offload 20 of the most onerous of Regent’s 80 outlets, many of them Walkabout bars. Those left in the hands of the administrators include the five Jongleurs clubs in Southampton, Nottingham, Bristol, Oxford and East London, all of which have been closed. Asked if she might seek to acquire any of these venues, Ms Kempinska said: “Not at the moment.”

Ms Kempinska went into comedy after her father refused to let her pursue a career in psychiatry. She started teaching drama in youth clubs, which led to her promoting a poet at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Inspired by what she saw at the Fringe, she approached a pub in Battersea that she remembered as having a huge upstairs room where she used to go roller-skating. After securing a £300 overdraft, she launched Jongleurs in the room on Friday nights.

In 1990, by which time her husband, John Davy, had joined the business, Ms Kempinska teamed up with Regent Inns, the owner of the pub, to expand Jongleurs. In 2000 the couple sold their 51 per cent share of the business to Regent for £8.5 million.

• Globe Pub Company, the tenanted pub group founded by Robert Tchenguiz, has emerged from administrative receivership via a sale to a new operation, EBP Pub Company, controlled by FEOH Investments, another Tchenguiz-run vehicle. Heineken is providing £180 million finance in a deal where the brewer will take control in the third quarter of next year.

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