When Marcus Brigstocke refers to the comedy festival he is organising in the Alpine resort of Méribel as “unashamedly a big, jolly hockey sticks in the mountains”, there is an inkling that comedy has moved on a little from the politically charged, anti-Establishment, youth rebellion that once led it to be dubbed the new rock'n'roll.

A festival in a skiing resort - the high altar of the British middle classes. It's hardly rock'n'roll, is it? And “comedy, the new Coldplay” doesn't have the same ring.

But while Lenny Henry's recent outburst against comedy's apparent inability to nurture a wealth of black talent led to much soul searching, Brigstocke, a regular on Radio 4's The Now Show and the presenter of BBC Three's The Late Edition, is apparently unapologetic about his celebration of the event's middle-class appeal.

“The thing is,” he says, “I am the one putting this event on and I have long since been known as the posh comedian. This event has come about because of my love of skiing and snowboarding and I have a love of skiing because I am a posh boy.”

This comedy counter-revolution has been going on for a while. Driven by his love of winter sports, Brigstocke began organising small-scale comedy gigs at venues across the Alpine skiing resorts.

Featuring well-known comedians from the British circuit, they attracted audiences consisting mainly of saisonnières - the term used by those in the know for the usually young (middle-class) people spending their gap year working in chalets and bars.

The first couple of years they grew in popularity - not least among the comedians performing - and in the past three or four years the gigs have been organised in as many as 15 different resorts across the Alps.

It seemed a natural step, then, to take this evidently enthusiastic and hitherto untapped market and to give it its own festival - the 15-day Altitude Festival was born.

As well as performers familiar from British television, including Brigstocke, Ed Byrne, Phill Jupitus, Lee Mack and Rich Hall, there will be French comedians, DJs and events, including a mass snowball fight.

Fun, certainly, but also a tacit admission that British comedy is entertainment for and by the middle classes. “Yes,” says Brigstocke. “I think, to be honest, ever since the 1980s and the birth of the comedy that the sort of comedians we are aspire to, it has always been middle class,” he says.

Perhaps. But hasn't it always pretended that it isn't? When the quintessentially middle-class Jimmy Carr's star began its ascent, a wag spent several Edinburgh Festival Fringes writing “Sold Out” in marker pen across his posters, and he wasn't referring to his ticket sales (although, coincidentally, he had).

Mitchell and Webb, latterly of the Apple Mac ads, were chastised roundly for taking the dirty dollar for this rampantly commercial move. Ridiculous accusations in both cases. Neither of these home counties, Cambridge-educated comedians had ever placed themselves at the vanguard of left-wing political comedy and therefore had nothing to sell out from.

Mack agrees that attitudes have changed. “The idea of it being as left-wing socialist as when it started out in the early 1980s has disappeared,” he says. “Twenty years ago we would have refused to do a festival like this. There would have been pressure from other comedians on the circuit not to do it.”

Back then, he explains, festivals such as this were not an option. But now a good circuit comedian can expect to be doing the odd gig for expats in Dubai and Hong Kong and earning good money for it.

In the six years that he has been organising gigs in the Alps, Brigstocke says that he has noticed a change in attitudes. “More and more have come over the years and have said: ‘I would never had gone to a place like this because I thought skiing was for posh twats,'” he says. “It is, but it's also the best feeling in the world.”

Byrne has been a regular performer at Brigstocke's gigs in the past few years. A successful comedian, who regularly tours one-man shows to larger venues, he is fully aware of comedy's place in Britain's cultural make up. “It isn't completely untrue to admit that...” He pauses. “It isn't the largest leap from the state of comedy clubs to say: ‘Right, let's just play to white, middle-class people.'”

He adds: “Sometimes it doesn't feel like it on a Saturday night in Jongleurs in Bow, but I do tours where I play theatres and arts centres and I do the Edinburgh Festival every year and you get middle-class audiences.”

That said, it hasn't entirely lost the political anger that fuelled it during the Thatcher years. Brigstocke, a keen environmental campaigner, is trying to persuade comedians and audiences to travel to Méribel by train rather than aircraft. It is one of a number of resorts in the Alps that is powered hydro-electrically.

Mack, who is booking his train tickets when we speak, is a little nonplussed. “There's part of my brain that thinks I am doing it for ecological reasons,” he says, “and there's part of my brain that is really scared of flying.”

The Altitude Festival, Méribel, France, runs from April 5-20 (www.altitudefestival.com). Tickets can also be bought from www.fnac.com.

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