Amy Annette on ideas to fix the festival

The consensus is that the Edinburgh Fringe is at breaking point, having grown so big that costs – especially for accommodation – have skyrocketed, pricing out all but those with the deepest pockets. We're asking participants if they have any ideas to make the festival better, and here producer turned comedian Amy Annette shares her thoughts...

So the question asked is: how would I ‘fix’ the Fringe? What a question. A conundrum. Could I, maybe, suggest that asking comedians how they’d fix the Fringe is an example of the very issue at the core of the Fringe?  

Even the most privileged comedian (me) is on the back foot, when it comes to asking for change. What does it mean if a comedian asks for lower accommodation costs, accessible venues, lower Fringe Society charges, etc. Surely nothing? 

Because as long as I’ve been hanging around, these have been issues that squeeze at the Fringe, but as the years have gone on, the squeeze has gotten tighter and tighter. 

We live in an era of every Internet Uncle doing their own ‘research’ so I myself have gone away and led a cursory investigation into the difference between pyramid schemes and multi-level marketing, MLM (and yes, now I’m getting a lot of ads about making millions from home). I’ll happily admit what no Internet Uncle ever will - I still don’t fully understand it all, but, even in my confusion, I can definitely see that there’s something of the ‘mid about the Fringe. 

Comedians surely are an MLM’s dream - an endless resource of somewhat desperate freelancers hoping to make it big without doing a 9-5. And what, when it comes to Fringe, is the product being sold to us? Outside of the room itself… it’s opportunity, stage time, audience, getting better at the craft… all wonderful but, like all too good to be true offers, there isn’t an actual promise of anything for your money. 

You’re accessing an opportunity and you can never fault the seller if YOU don’t make it work. It’s the perfect MLM? Of course talent and skill is at play but some people can pay more to be in a paid venue, hire PR and not work full-time in the months up to the Fringe as you preview (me, again), And each comedian brings in an audience, an audience of potential future sellers… I mean comedians.

The huge positive of this question is that it starts from a place of understanding there is a problem to fix. I think a few years ago this question might have been ‘Is the Fringe broken?’ or, when I first started coming to the Fringe, the much more pressing at the time , ‘How can I stop my boot cut jeans getting mildew on them in the various cave-based bars of the city’. 

Aside from being privileged (and a potential new recruit to some very exciting MLMs I researched) who am I to go all Internet Uncle ‘well, actually…’ Truther on you? What do I know? Let’s be clear, not much

 But I am lucky enough to be old enough to remember when the Fringe was relatively a looser proposition for a comedian. You could split an hour and make money on the bucket that covered your accommodation. You could afford to hire another comedian with more personality to flyer for you, or a young person who had no idea how badly paid they were being (me, again.) 

Yes, if the stars aligned the Fringe could be a career-changer, sure, but all around there was more of a feeling of people trying new things (of course, not always rewarded at the time.)  Long-time followers of my comedy career (my mother) may remember my first foray back in 2010 when a young Amy Annette first went to the Fringe, helping to produce the HOTTEST genre of comedy at the time - sketch comedy!

 ‘This is the future,’ Amy cried, as she hit play on Billy Joel’s ‘We didn’t start the fire’ between sketches. She knew that sketch comedy would never die! But then it turned out that the financial implications of sketch (same fee, more people) meant that, like that pot plant you forgot to water, it didn’t exactly die… but it also wasn’t… alive. 

But young Amy had no inkling of that future. She committed to a life of attending the fringe each summer, once as a PR assistant (she was bad at that, but she enjoyed going to a Fife caravan park with Al Pitcher for Forth FM), multiple times as a producer (high point: finding paper plates for Aisling Bea to draw on so audience members could have a fan in her dangerously hot room. Low point: getting so stressed when a BBC producer hadn’t been able to get into a show that she briefly had oily blind spots in her eyes). 

As she moved through the various sides of the comedy industry she saw friends and peers succeed, she enjoyed being a part of their story. She also saw the more negative aspects of being in comedy - TV people getting comps to shows but turning up so drunk they immediately passed out, or, brilliant comedians doing shows to small audiences in huge nightclub rooms. 

But she decided to persist. She could see that, still, against all odds, Edinburgh remained one of the few places to find a new audience and ‘be seen’. Like a thrice-married bride still wearing white (and good on you, girl), she signed up to do her ‘debut’, even though she’d been at the Fringe in some capacity for the last 12 years.

I think probably every member of the MLM that is the Fringe (or is it a Pyramid? I still don’t know) feels increasingly that they are being squeezed. From the producers, to the programmers, to the press and the landlords… well, probably not the landlords. I’m sure there’s a Netflix documentary I could watch on what happens when the bottom rung of the scheme starts to push back? Does it end well for anyone?

I think we all have a sense that there are problems to fix at the Fringe, but I’m not sure I know what we’re actually working towards…. The same situation but more affordable? Or something all-together new?

Two caveats.

 1. I do feel I should be clear and say that while I have a lot of empathy for all the individuals involved, I think there has been abdication of responsibility from the industry that relies on Edinburgh to serve them up new talent. I know there is a lack of budgets across the board but it seems self-defeating to let this well of new talent dry up. Newer comedians, some of whom, in part encouraged by the industry asking for ‘a diversity of talent’, are telling everyone they simply can’t afford to be at the Fringe. 

2. I don’t want to be too rosy tinted about the 2010s. Yes, I felt there was a more relaxed energy but the comedians who were the beneficiaries of that more creative space were predominantly white and male (and god bless them and their boot-cut jeans). It’s a shame that the amazing and needed change in the make-up of the British comedy scene has occurred at the same time as a constriction of money and opportunity, but even back then I remember comedians being hamstrung by contracts and production deals that pushed them into precarious financial positions and meant they would live in the debt incurred by their show for years after. 

So, like all trips down memory lane from internet-addled uncles – this has been a completely flawed journey of an article.  OK. Thank you for coming to my TED talk. I don’t know how to be funny about this. Please attend my show it’s very stupid and not at all like this. And, god bless the remaining boot-cut boys – please hire me.

• Do you have any ideas on how to Fix The Fringe? Email any suggestions to feedback@chortle.co.uk 

Published: 24 Jul 2024