Monday 28 August 2017

Edinburgh Fringe - 15 bumps down the slippery slope


The most common complaints about the Edinburgh Fringe are that is too large and unwieldy, and that Comedy dominates it to the detriment of other artforms. This is quite possibly undeniable. But how did it get to be so? Let me have a look, possibly unscientifically but hopefully objectively, at some of the steps along the way that have led to the Edinburgh Fringe as we find it today.

1947 – Fringe and Festival start.

 The word ‘Fringe’ however, hasn’t been coined yet.

1948 – The term ‘Fringe’ is coined

The term ‘Fringe’ is coined thus by Robert Kemp in the Edinburgh Evening News: “Round the fringe of official Festival drama there seems to be more private enterprise than before.” This term goes on to develop the meaning of Alternative Theatre. Fringe Theatre is then exported from Edinburgh to London, and to the rest of the world, by the likes of Joan Littlewood who brings a company up in 1949.

1958 – First Free Fringe

Yehudi Menuhin creates the Free Fringe. Or tries to. Menuhin hires the Embassy Cinema in Pilton and wants to make admission free. A legal technicality prevents this, meaning the one-off performance was staged at a shilling per ticket, still well below the price of the Kings, the Lyceum, or the Playhouse. The place was packed, and he knew he’d succeeded in reaching non-Festival punters when "to Menuhin's delight, they clapped in all the wrong places."


1960 – Beyond The Fringe.

Part of the official Festival, as we all know, but establishing the implicit link between Fringe and comedy forever more. The Cambridge Footlights, The Oxford Revue and other University groups had been coming to Edinburgh with their amateur shows from the start. It was in the 1960s that Edinburgh began to be a showcase for their talents.

1966 – David Frost comes to town.

You can blame David Frost for many things, and bringing together of Edinburgh comedians and the telly is one of them. He had come up as a Cambridge Footlighter in the early 60s, and used many Oxbridge talents on his shows. Now a major TV celebrity, he started staging late night chat shows and cabarets at Edinburgh and attracting national press coverage.  In a talk to the Fringe Club, there was a call by John Calder (creator of the forerunner of the Edinburgh Book Festival) for "two Fringes, professional and amateur", suggesting that "the Fringe had taken over drama from the official Festival."




1970s – Fringe officially “too big”.

We know it’s too big, because everyone keeps saying so. In 1976, Cordelia Oliver writes in The Guardian, “The Edinburgh Fringe grows grosser every year like a fat old cat going to seed and not giving a damn. The official Fringe programme lists at least two hundred companies…” Two. Hundred. Companies. By 1979 that had grown to over 359 companies, in 2016 the total is listed as 3269 shows. In 1977 the retiring Festival director bemoans the TV coverage, revolving around a Russell Harty hosted chat show, saying “ it was principally the Fringe and every allusion to 'serious' programmes was carefully avoided.” The Fringe, and by the sound of it comedy, was taking over.

1978 – The multi-tenanted venue.

When William Burdett-Coutts hired The Assembly Rooms and divided it up into smaller performances spaces, then curated a programme of events to take place there, he single-handedly created the template for much of The Fringe from then on. A multiplex of entertainment, only possible with such a sitting-duck audience pool to draw on as was to be found in Edinburgh in August. Other venues working on a similar principle were The Wireworks (1978 – 92) on the Royal Mile – built by comedians, Rowan Atkinson drove the JCB to lay the foundations – and The Circuit (82 – 86) in a marquee on the crater of a demolished building which would go on to become the new Traverse Theatre at the back of the Usher Hall.  Those two venues were short-lived, but they were soon joined by two with a longer lifespan.


1981 – The Perrier Award.

Won initially by The Cambridge Footlights, whose revue was given a TV version as a result, making overnight stars of Fry, Laurie, Slattery and Thompson, this publicity-hungry award went on to become the centrepiece of Edinburgh’s annual month of comedy promotion.

1980s – The Alternative Comedy Boom.

The Pleasance began life as a curated multi-tenanted venue in 1984, the Gilded Balloon joining it in 1986. With the Assembly  completing The Big Three, they were home to a lot of comedy. There’d been a boom in TV comedy, largely led by the newly born Channel 4, whose Head Of Comedy Seamus Cassidy made Edinburgh an annual fishing trip for talent. At this time two big agencies – Off The Kerb and Avalon – came into being, and made Edinburgh and the contest for the Perrier Award, the hub of their comedy-to-TV promotion game.


1989 – Edinburgh Nights.

BBC TV had given sporadic coverage to the Edinburgh Festival and Fringe since the 1960s,  but from 1989 it became an extension of Newsnight’s Later arts programme, under the name Edinburgh Nights. Presented by Mark Lamarr from the mid-90s it reached great heights of popularity and publicised the Edinburgh Fringe as never before.



1990s – Comedy Is The New Rock & Roll.

Baddiel and Newman off the telly sold out Wembley Stadium and the revolving door between stand up comedy and Edinburgh and TV success seemed firmly established.  The list of Perrier Newcomers alone is a roll call of names that remain giants of TV comedy today, from Tim Vine & Harry Hill to The Mighty Boosh and The League Of Gentlemen.  In 1999 600 companies give 15,000 performances at The Fringe (these not-quite-the-same figures make comparisons hard. We do know, though, that the total number of performances in 2016 was 50,266. So, by some measure or other, the Fringe grows by over 200% in a little over 15 years).

1996 – Bridget Jones Diary.

In Helen Fielding’s novel, her eponymous hero and her London friends go to the Edinburgh Fringe for the weekend, setting into cultural concrete, more firmly than a decade of Edinburgh Nights had done, The Fringe as a thing one did if one was one of the fashionable crowd.  A slice of their experience: "Arthur Smith's Hamlet is completely booked up, so we could go to the Coen brothers instead at five, but that means we'll be too late for Richard Herring. So shall we not go to Jenny Eclair ... - chuh! I frankly I don't know why she still bothers - and do Lanark, then try to get into Harry Hill or Bondages and Julian Clary. Hang on, I'll try the Gilded Balloon. No, Harry Hill's booked up, so shall we skip the Coen brothers?"

 In the same way that was happening to Glastonbury, gentrification was coming to Edinburgh. With it, ever-increasing prices.

2000s – Explosion (and burning down) of venues.

2000 – C Venues, 2002 – Underbelly, 2007 – Udderbelly, and from then on we have Zoo venues, Space Venues, Greenside, Southside,  and every side inbetween. The multi-tenanted venue, devised by Assembly in 1978, became the repeated model across Edinburgh seeing an expansion which, thankfully, redressed the balance away from the domination of stand up comedy, but greatly increased the number of performers and shows competing for a finite audience. My own venue, The Gilded Balloon, survived burning down, and being sponsored by a tobacco company. In so many ways, we weren’t in the 1980s any more.

2006 – Free Fringe Returns

Free Fringe, Free Festival, and later Heroes and others, developed new ways of funding shows, taking performers away for the Pay-To-Play Fringe model by now established in the curated venues, and again increasing the number of shows on offer. Now more was free than ever before and, ten years on from Bridget Jones, everything from food to tickets to accommodation cost twice as much as it ever had.

2012 – The Olympic Year.

Feeling almost like the bubble had burst, the Olympics in London coinciding with the Edinburgh Fringe had a devastating effect. As Richard Herring put it,  the Olympics “sucked the punters out of Edinburgh like someone opening the door on a spaceship.” We all recovered and came back the next year.

2017 – Lots of moaning. So, business as usual.


Which brings us to the present day. 2017 was a year when I read more negativity than I can remember reading before. From the chair of the Cockburn Association (me neither) saying the Fringe is “choking the city” and urging some restraint or changes, to Tommy Shepard of the Stand continuing to suggest the Fringe should move to earlier in the summer so as to minimize the clash with the Festival and Tattoo, and to coincide more with the Scottish school holidays. More observations collected below.

Has my look back at the timeline of the Fringe helped our understanding? Probably not, but it's helped me stop running the whole thing over in my mind, in preparation for my return with a brand new show in 2018 where I look forward to continuing to be part of the problem. If I can ever be part of the solution, do please let me know.

UPDATE 2022 - See author Kev F's (aka The Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre) at the 2022 Edinburgh Fringe from Aug 3 - 13 in Scottish Falsetto Socks: Eurovision Sock Contest








The Award Winning* Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre are Superheroes at The Gilded Balloon at the Edinburgh Fringe from August 1st to 26th 2018 - ON SALE NOW! 

*Winners of the Bath Comedy Festival Lovehoney Best Joke Award 2018


(From original blog post 2017: The Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre do a tiny bit more Shakespeare in Halifax (Oct 26), Wolverhampton (Oct 28), Nottingham (Nov 4), and Goole (Nov 17) this autumn, returning with a brand new show in 2018. Stay tuned.)

EDINBURGH TALES

Big Four Venues (Gilded Balloon, Assembly, Underbelly, Pleasance) announce record-breaking ticket sales across the festival, with 1,520,435 tickets sold, an increase of 15% on Fringe 2016. 

"2,696,884 tickets issued" The Edinburgh Fringe's record-breaking stats

The Pleasance's record-breaking 2017 stats

Underbelly's record-breaking 2017 stats

All the 2017 Award winners, from Fringe Firsts to Comedy Awards to Significant Contribution To Sustainable Practice (there are a lot of awards these days)

Lyn Gardner on whether free tickets mean a critic must review your show

Gender Bias across Fringe reviews, from Howl Sanctuary


"You can't expect too much for a thousand pounds a week, right?" - Richard Herring ends the Fringe on a positive note.

Hits & Shits as seen by West End Producer #Dear

"I watched the same play 22 times" - Author Anne Penketh's first time on the Fringe

A festival to me is a celebration and not a competition" - Douglas Deans on his one man show at Zoo

Full financial breakdown of Andy Quirk's Free Fringe shows

Comedians on the physical effects of the Fringe, a week later

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