3. Preamble
I asked a ‘heckle’ of comedians for the frst thoughts to enter their
heads when anybody mentions the Edinburgh Fringe.
‘A magical beast,’ mused Bob Slayer; ‘Excitement!’ raved Chris
Coltrane; ‘Overdraft,’ countered Ivor Dembina. ‘I think of my
liver,’ said Pete Cunningham, creator of comic crooner Frank
Sanazi. ‘It’s a weird wee bubble of existence that feels like the
centre of the universe when you’re in it,’ added poet (obviously)
Elvis McGonagall.
‘Someone once said to me,’ recounted producer and Fringe
commentator John Fleming, ‘that it’s like standing in a cold
shower tearing up £20 notes.’
These are but a small selection of comments from an array of
Fringe veterans whom I interviewed for this book. Everybody, it
seems, has a different idea of what the Fringe is and what it
should be about.
The following is intended as a distillation of the many and
various views and opinions of those who have gone before you.
Take from it what you will; disagree with us if you’ve experienced
otherwise, but ignore us at your peril...
There have been several books written on the subject of the
Edinburgh Fringe and how to survive it, so why write another?
What makes me an expert or my insights any more relevant than
those of the authors who have preceded me? Well, how many
books have been written about wild fowers, the Second World
War or Princess Diana? And yet still they come, each one claiming
to offer the reader something that their predecessors didn’t: be it a
fresh format, a newly discovered detail or simply the same tale
9
4. told from another perspective. Rather than replacing that which
has already been said, each new take should build on what has
gone before, adding to the subject, making it more accessible to
different readers.
If you’re looking for expert, insider knowledge on how to write
a hit Fringe show, then this is not the book for you. That book has
already been done. If you want to peruse an in-depth history of
the Fringe, to look at lists of past performers and award winners, if
you want a guide to what’s on and where to see it, then, again, this
is not the book for you.
What I’m about to show you is far simpler. Let this book be
your guide to performing at the Fringe without being ripped off,
getting stitched up or having a nervous breakdown. It’s told from
the point of view of people who have been there, done that and
have the scars to prove it. If you want to know how many fyers to
print up, how to get them up to Edinburgh on public transport or
whether it’s a good idea to pay somebody else to do your publicity
for you, then this is the book for you. If you’re confused about the
relative benefts of going with the paid Fringe or one of the free
facilitators, are wondering whether it might be worth booking
your accommodation in advance or leaving it to chance once you
get there, then this is the book for you. If you’ve never done the
Fringe before and you just want to know whether you’re up to the
task or not, then this is definitely the book for you!
This is not the defnitive word on the subject, nor does it claim
to be; how could it be? The Fringe is an ever-evolving beast and
there will doubtless be many more words written and published
on the subject as it continues to change.
In common with my previous book, Quaking in Me Stackheels: a
beginner’s guide to surviving your first public performance (published
by Desert Hearts), this guide’s remit is to present the salient facts
in a succinct and easy-to-reference, pocket-sized formula that you
can keep with you throughout your visit: a checklist to help you to
get the most out of the experience.
So buy it, use it, then, once you’ve put all the advice within to
good use, write your own tips inside the back cover and give it to
somebody else.
Paul Eccentric, August 2014
10
5. ‘There’s a wonderful frisson in the air and everybody’s much
more relaxed and enjoying life a bit more... To be part of it is not
only a thrill, but a privilege.’
National treasure Nicholas Parsons speaking to Lucy Anna Gray, posted
on the British Comedy Guide website, August 2013.1
1
http://www.comedy.co.uk/fringe/2013/features/nicholas_parsons_interview
11
6. A Brief History of the Edinburgh
Fringe Festival
‘The Fringe’, as it is now more commonly known, came into being
in August 1947 as a pre-emptive response to the perceived
shortcomings of the impending ‘Edinburgh International Festival’:
a post-war ‘feel-good’ event that had been billed as a celebration
of eclectic artistic endeavour with an audaciously pompous
mission statement of ‘providing a platform for the fowering of the
human spirit and the enrichment of the cultural life of Scotland’.
However, not everyone was convinced that it would live up to
these grandiloquent claims and so a group of eight enterprising,
independent theatre companies decided to test its advertised ethos
of ‘freedom of expression and inclusivism’ by rocking up to the
party unannounced and uninvited to form their own ‘festival
within a festival’, and thus a true and enduring legend was born.
Riding high on their joint critical and public acclaim, what
would become known collectively as ‘the Edinburgh Festival’
(EIF) became an annual event, with both the main attraction and
its bastard son expanding exponentially over the ensuing decades
to make it the biggest arts festival of its kind anywhere in the
world. And as the EIF celebrated its anticipated reputation for
highbrow exclusivity in the city’s hallowed halls, theatres and
ballrooms, so its low-rent counterpart revelled in its culture of
‘come one, come all’ DIY arts, commandeering pub cellars, church
halls and backstreet cafés as makeshift venues; borrowing what
sound, light and seating requirements it could muster, and rapidly
acquiring a distinction of its own as the place to break exciting and
unique new talents, in the process fulflling the spirit of the EIF’s
13
7. original remit much more closely than the monster that had
spawned it ever would have done!
Although the city of Edinburgh is reputed to boost its coffers
by an estimated £142 million through its annual hosting of the
festival, not all of the city’s residents are so keen to welcome the
sudden infux of people (an average of two million extra visitors
each summer), nor to embrace the added noise, litter or congestion
that it naturally generates. Many prefer to skip town altogether for
the duration of those infamous three weeks, funding their
holidays by renting out their homes to festival comers for ever-
infating prices. As with any runaway success story, someone will
always fnd a way of exploiting the situation for their own ends!
The cost of hotel rooms and guest houses in the city also began to
rise out of all proportion as the festival’s fame spread and the demand
for lodgings grew ever higher, not only squeezing the international
audiences that came to witness the spectacle, but also impacting
heavily on the often self-funding Fringe performers themselves.
In 1951 a group of students from Edinburgh University sought
to help the situation by organising cheap food and lodgings for
visiting Fringe performers at the city’s YMCA and a couple of
cheap ’n cheerful hostels also appeared, to alleviate the strain. The
university itself even chipped in by offering vacant halls for
reasonable rent, and so on the beast expanded.
By 1958 it had become apparent that this ragtag, headless
enigma needed some form of central consolidation and so the
Festival Fringe Society (FFS) was formed, a board of directors
elected and a new era begun. The FFS was to provide for the frst
time a proper centralised box offce and an information hub as
well as the frst Fringe programme, listing together all of the
various independent productions that made up the Fringe, to the
beneft of performers and punters alike. But despite this new face
of apparent conformity, there was to be no change to the central
tenet of the festival, that productions would be neither vetted nor
censored and that anybody would be free to perform anything
they wanted, provided they could fnd somewhere to perform it
and a way to fund it.
Between 1976 and 1982 the number of shows travelling to the
Fringe doubled, buoyed in part by the headline-grabbing successes of
former shows such as Dudley Moore, Peter Cook, Alan Bennett and
14
8. Jonathan Miller’s Beyond the Fringe (which, incidentally, was not a
Fringe show, contrary to popular myth and legend, but a full-blown
EIF production). Beyond the Fringe went from humble beginnings on
the streets of Edinburgh in the early sixties to sell-out runs in London
and Broadway, inciting ever more bright young hopefuls to food in,
expecting to be springboarded to superstardom by mere association.
By the mid-1990s word on the street was that the Fringe was
becoming exactly what it had been created to ensure against. It
was becoming increasingly expensive to hire venues through the
professional bodies that had appropriated their use for the
duration of the festival, some of which had even begun to audition
the acts that they would be ‘promoting’. A revolution was required
to champion the Fringe’s core values; to facilitate the return of
power to the truly independent innovators.
In 1996 this revolution arose in the form of the PBH Free
Fringe. Participants of this new element of the Fringe would not
be expected to pay the huge upfront fees to secure their venues,
nor would they have to pay out in advance for aided publicity, nor
even for a tiny, forty-word advert in the mammoth, telephone-
directory-like tome that the Fringe programme had by now
become, as the Free Fringe would produce its own. And as a two-
fngered salute to escalating ticket prices, these shows would also
be free to the public! Nobody was likely to make any fnancial
gain from this approach, but then who ever had at the Edinburgh
Fringe anyway? It isn’t about making money; it never has been.
It’s about learning your craft as an artiste, building a reputation
among your peers, trying new things that you may never get the
chance to try anywhere else. But the Free Fringe’s status as ‘a
fringe within a fringe within a festival’ was to be short-lived when
in 1998 the Fringe fnally broke away from its parent to become an
offcial Edinburgh event in and of itself.
The Edinburgh Fringe is a truly unique experience and one
that really does have to be seen to be believed, with events being
staged in every nook and cranny of the city throughout the days
and nights of the run. I’ve personally come across shows being put
on in a confessional booth, a caravan, and even a lift in a building
going between foors. But the Fringe and its estranged partner, the
EIF, are not the only events happening in Edinburgh during the
summer months. Get yourself up there and prepare to be blown
15
9. sideways by the sheer scale of what is collectively known as ‘the
Festival’ but is in fact a confuence of several separate festivals,
each coexisting in the same space at the same time. As well as the
EIF and the Fringe, Edinburgh also plays host to a jazz and blues
festival in late July, and the Edinburgh International Book Festival,
Edinburgh Art Festival, a flm festival, a comedy festival, a festival
of politics, the Mela festival and the world-famous Edinburgh
Military Tattoo all run simultaneously throughout August!
If you want to know more about these festivals, then there are
a plethora of books, blogs and websites out there charting their
histories in much greater depth than I have room to do here. If
you’d like to know how to survive the experience of putting on a
show without going bankrupt or having a nervous breakdown in
the process, then lead on, Macduff; that’s what I’m here to explain!
16
10. Why Do You Want to Go to the Fringe?
So, you’re an artiste. You’re a comedian, a poet or a playwright; a
singer, a contortionist, a dancer or a fre eater; a fre walker, a
puppeteer, an underwater escapologist; you do a bit of mime;
you’re a naked snake charmer or simply a teller of tall tales (delete
as applicable). But you could do any of that in your own home
town; why do you want to go all the way to Edinburgh to do it?
(Unless, of course, Edinburgh is your home town.) It’ll be a
nightmare; you do realise that? You’ll lose a lot of money. At the
very least you’ll end up with blisters and a sprained ankle from all
those cobbles and stone steps, or a severe case of ‘fyerer’s
fashback’: a mental condition similar to a recurring dream, caused
by too many hours spent forcing a smile whilst standing in the
rain delivering the same tired old spiel to the thousandth
uninterested tourist of the day in order to convince them to be
your sole audience member for your middle-of-nowhere, middle-
of-the-night, must-be-seen-to-be-believed-show. You know this
because you’re not the frst fre juggler, chainsaw swallower or
speciality drag act to make the trek to the biggest, most famous
gathering of talents (fair and dubious) on the planet.
There has been a hell of a lot written about it over the years
that should really have put you off, but no; you’re going to do it
anyway, aren’t you? You’re going to do it despite everybody’s best
advice. You’re going to do it because it’s considered an artiste’s
rite of passage, that’s why: because you want to be able to say that
you did it, because you think that maybe people will take you
more seriously if you do. (Nothing wrong with that; that’s why I
did it the frst time.)
17
11. If it doesn’t matter what anybody says to you because your
mind is already made up, then there are a few things that you
need to know: tips from those who have gone before you and who
learnt them the hard way; advice that may just help you to make a
success of your show, despite the odds.
It is a serious question, though, and one worth dwelling on
now before you start the process of applications and show
planning.
Why do you want to do this?
Are you going because you want to get spotted by an agent
and catapulted to unmitigated success, or are you just doing this
for the experience? It makes a difference, you see, in how you
approach it.
If the answer is the former and you’re serious about that, then
this may just be a bigger venture than you realise. Can you afford
what it might cost you to advertise your show properly and to
really compete with ‘the big boys’? Where are you going to fnd
the money, and can you afford to gamble that much?
Taking a show to the Fringe is a daunting endeavour, whatever
your answer. You may have spoken to people who have been
before you, heard their doom-laden tales of debt and stress-related
eczema, and may already (even just this far into the book) be
reconsidering your options. But don’t forget: you are never truly
alone at the Fringe. There will be thousands of old lags on hand
willing to help you through and to offer experienced advice, and
yet thousands more who will be going through exactly the same
frst-timer problems at the same time as you! And it would be
remiss of any guide to the Fringe not to mention the work of the
Fringe Offce, whose dedicated and experienced staff are on hand
all year round to offer advice on all aspects of the festival, whether
you’re a paid-up member of the society or just a worried
participant.
The best advice that anybody can give you at this stage,
though, is if you haven’t yet been to the Fringe as a punter, then
get yourself up there and experience it from that angle before
you even consider taking your show! The experience will be
invaluable in both your planning and your preparation.
Once you’ve been there and had your ‘it’s bigger on the inside’
moment, the next thing you have to do is decide what kind of a
18
12. show you intend to present. This may sound a bit patronising; this
is, after all, unlikely to be your frst ever performance, and by the
time you’re considering a trip to the Fringe you should already
have a reasonably honed act with a fairly clear idea of what you
want to achieve with it, but it’s worth reiterating the enormity of
the event that you have chosen to participate in and it’s important
that you choose the best method of conveyance for both your
show and your budget. If you have already been to the festival,
then you will have a clearer idea of the relevance of this statement;
if not, book your ticket and go next time.
Done that? Fun, wasn’t it? And it didn’t put you off? Fair play.
So here we go, then...
There are three ways to take your show to the Fringe. Each
has its merits and its disadvantages.
Without knowing exactly what you intend to do, all I can do
here is lay out your options in a factual and unbiased way, as I
intend to do throughout this book.
These are:
To align yourself with one of the ‘paid’ promoters.
To align yourself with one of the ‘free’ promoters.
To go it alone.
Before we get into the nitty-gritty of life at the Fringe, let me
introduce you to some of the characters that you’ll be meeting
with a genuine excerpt from my 2013 Fringe diary.
19
