Journalism

The Edinburgh Festival by Richard Herring

The first time I went up to the Edinburgh Fringe was in 1987. I slept on the floor of a Masonic Lodge with around 50 other stinking students (there was no bath in the Masonic Temple – odd that!). Every lunchtime I performed with a sketch group called “The Seven Raymonds” (there were six of us and none of us were called Raymond and from thence the humour arose) to audiences of up to six people. We locked ourselves in a cage outside the Cathedral as a publicity stunt. It didn’t work.
Fifteen years later I am preparing to take my nineteenth show to the Festival. I will be staying in a luxury flat(which might have TWO bathrooms), I will be performing at 8.30pm to (hopefully) 150 people. If I am locked in a cage at any point during the festival it will be in secret for my own amusement.
But you know what? Despite all that, do you know which Edinburgh experience I prefer?
It’s the second one, obviously. The one with the luxury flat and the audience. Are you paying any kind of attention to what I am saying? .

But for me this is what makes Edinburgh the greatest festival in the world. As a punter you have so much to choose from (and you can literally take a punt on some unknowns in an empty theatre- thanks to the people who came to see me in 87 incidentally.. and sorry), as a performer you have a chance to experiment. I have performed stand-up, sketches, plays and a musical about Rasputin based around the music of Boney M. I have given away a car to an audience member, nearly had a fight with the guitarist from Del Amitri and appeared completely naked on stage. What an eventful day that was.

And there isn’t another festival where all this would be possible. You don’t need to have done your show before, you don’t have to be invited, you don’t have to know the right people. As long as you can come up with an idea, some money and find an empty room somewhere in the city, then you’re in.

All this makes overnight success a very rare phenomena. To make any kind of impact on a festival this size you have to come back year after year before anyone starts to take any notice. And to be honest you have to come back year after year before you get any good. That’s why the festival works. You build an audience as you build experience. This isn’t Pop Idol (thank God).

But the quest for an audience does give the festival an oddly paranoid atmosphere. It’s easy for comics to get things out of perspective in the heightened emotional environment. If you’ve worked on a show for a year, no-one’s coming and then you get a bad review then you feel like throwing yourself off Waverley Bridge. (mainly just to make the reviewer feel guilty! “That’ll show him! Ha ha ha……oh!”)Because it is your own money going down the plug hole.

Conversely if someone else gets a bad review (even a close friend) there is always a part of you that is delighted. How you will laugh at him behind his back! But in most cases it’s a good natured mockery that comes out of empathy (and relief that it isn’t you this time). Generally comedians are very supportive of one another and (once you’ve proved yourself) accepting. And one of the good things about the Fringe is it is a chance to spend a month in each other’s company and really get to know each other.

This is one of the reasons I don’t really like the concept of Awards. It turns a festival into a competition. And how can you judge the surreal comedy of Eddie Izzard against the up front rudeness of Frank Skinner and say one of them is “better”? I don’t like awards because they’re stupid and divisive and I never win them. What do you want you bastards? Blood?

The Perrier short-listed shows will all be worth seeing, but there will be another dozen shows out there that are easily as good. The fun of the Fringe is finding them for yourselves, even if it means occasionally having to spend an hour in the company of the Seven Raymonds.

So why do I keep coming back. It costs me thousands of pounds, I am already well known in the industry, I have nothing tangible to gain. I think my main motivation is that it’s a marvellous opportunity to spend a month getting pissed and talking to girls. You can ignore everything else I’ve said. That’s the crux of it. Wa-hey!