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I’ve made the decision not to go back to the Edinburgh Fringe this year. As you may have spotted I found last year’s Fringe quite upsetting and stressful - not the shows themselves which I was very pleased with, but everything else. I don’t like how it’s become a festival that only people with a fair amount of wealth can attend, both as participants and audience. It should be for everyone, as it felt like it was back in 1987 when I first went there. But accommodation is so expensive that even attending the Free Fringe requires quite an investment unless you live in the city or can sleep on someone’s floor, or are prepared to commute from another town. It’s been heading this way for a while and even in the 1990s performers would likely incur a couple of thousand pounds of debt (I used to lose about £10,000 on each of my plays, which obviously had a higher budget due to having a large cast), but now, for anyone who isn’t selling a couple of hundred tickets a day (or at the Free Fringe, which I think is still a good option for performers and audience, but still not free of the other expenses) £10,000 is probably about what you’re likely to pay out.
We were able to make it work financially, because the podcasts we did generated income from downloads, but I am not really thinking of myself in this (at least in this part of it). It just felt wrong and I didn’t like the atmosphere or the fact that the 18 year old me would have been unable to attend under these conditions or at least have had to do so under even more unpleasant circumstances than sleeping on the floor of a Masonic Temple. As much as there are negatives about the Fringe, which I will write about in the next paragraph, it was an incredible force for learning my craft and moving on in my career and making friends and finding collaborators. And being able to go back every year to improve and experiment has been key to the limited success that I have enjoyed. If we lost money we were likely to get a job from the Fringe that would pay back some or all of the debt. Nowadays I just don’t think it’s possible for anyone without a rich mum and dad or means of their own to come back year after year and the explosion in the number of acts means the chances of it leading directly to more work are slim.
All that feels wrong, but I hope that somehow younger comedians will find a way to make it work - though we really need the Fringe bosses and Edinburgh council to make the necessary changes- I have made the decision for the sake of my mental health. Although the festival is responsible for so much that has been good in my life, pretty much right from the start it’s also caused me an inordinate amount of stress and trauma and I think I need to process all of that properly before I return. From the baptism of fire in the Oxford Revue in 1988 (and even in 87 there was much to process) through all the years of losing money, my disastrous attempt to stage a play in 2015 and tumultuous relationships and drunken madness and loneliness and just the few days every festival where I always got incredibly depressed. Last year the show was lovely and even though there were no traumas I found it too exhausting and imprisoning and it set me back on all the steps forward I had made with diet and fitness. I just realised that I didn’t have to do it and that I didn’t need to put myself through it and that maybe I was going up partly to prove something that was only an issue for myself. Or at least I didn’t HAVE to go. I didn’t HAVE to put myself through the ringer.
So I want to take a break and hopefully not even have to go up at all (Catie is doing a show and so there’s a possibility that I might have to be there for a couple of days - and I don’t want to deprive the kids of the opportunity to go). It would be a shame if that was permanent, but I think I have stuff to deal with first. And all the stuff about the expense and the elitism of it still makes me feel sick and I don’t know if I want to participate until there have been at least some attempts to address this.
It’s weird because I still believe it’s the best festival in the world and as much as people suggest other places where you can do shows, none of them have what Edinburgh has in terms of scale, length and being surrounded by inspiring people.
I suspect, when it comes down to basics, it may just be that I am getting too old for it.
It’s likely all I would have done this year would have been my podcast - and the expense would have been covered by the adverts - but it struck me the other day, why bother with the expense part? I can equally do RHLSTP at the Fringe without having to spend anything and still produce the podcasts. I can just interview people in Edinburgh from my attic. Doing the Edinburgh Fringe from home seems almost too perfect. Plus I can charge myself £10,000 to live in my own house and thus make a handsome profit.
So I think I will do a few remote RHLSTPs (maybe even live on Twitch or gfsboxoffice) so we still get those fun shows (albeit without the live audience, which is an important part of the experience) and I won’t fall off a mental cliff and have to hoover up family bags of giant chocolate buttons to get through it. Will it be triggering to still be involved? I don’t think so. Is it me getting my fix of the Fringe and would it be better to step away entirely? It feels different enough to not be an issue, but if it is an issue I can not do it at no cost to myself. It’s a win win (I think)
And I wonder if a virtual Edinburgh Fringe might be the way for comics without the necessary funds to participate. Though acknowledge that a virtual Edinburgh would lack most of the point of doing it.
It feels like a weight lifted, as much as I am really keen to try and get a new stand up show together. But as I proved with Happy Now? It’s possible to do that without going to the Fringe.
