Edinburgh Comedy Festival 'not divisive'

The ‘big four’ Fringe venues – Assembly, Gilded Balloon, Pleasance and Underbelly – today launched their comedy festival programme boasting 553 shows.

It is likely to overshadow the simultaneous launch of the full Fringe programme, comprising a total of 2,088 shows, given the controversy surrounding the move.

Critics – led by Tommy Shepherd, owner of The Stand comedy club, and backed by influential comics as Stewart Lee, Daniel Kitson and Doug Stanhope – have labelled the members of the Edinburgh Comedy Festival a divisive cartel who threaten to break away from the Fringe.

They also say its flies in the face of the Fringe’s inclusive ethos, will damage smaller venues and confuse audiences.

This is the first time the four super-venues have all collaborated to produce a unified brochure, which they hope will eventually attract up to £1.8million in corporate sponsorship – although no headline sponsor has yet been found for this year.

At the launch this morning, Assembly’s founder William Burdett-Coutts insisted: ‘For all the talk of splitting away from the Fringe, that is not the intention.’

He added that ‘we don’t intend to exclude anyone’ and that in future other venues would be invited to join the umbrella organisation now it has been set up. ‘Just getting us four together is an enormous achievement,’ he said. ‘The complexity is enormous.’

He said that commercial backing would enable them to launch a major marketing campaign to attract more visitors to the entire Fringe.

‘In Edinburgh in August you’re in a bubble, where it’s all important – but that’s not reflected across the rest of the country,’ he said. ‘When stand-up started at the Fringe there were one or two festival – Edinburgh, Glastonbury… now there’s 50 a week. t’s harder to get a voice. We have to fight harder to get the public interest.

Pleasance managing director Anthony Alderson agreed: ‘We need to find commercial partners so we can up that marketing campaign, but its going to take 18 months to get the energy and momentum behind it.’

Ed Bartlam of the Underbelly added: ‘Edinburgh as a whole needs a national marketing campaign, and it doesn’t have that at the moment. There are three parties we are still dealing with. Sponsorship of this size takes a long time to raise.’

His co-director, Charlie Wood added that he hoped sponsorship would make it easier for performers to come to Edinburgh, as it can currently cost thousands of pounds to have a show at the festival.

He said: ‘If we can grow our audience and cut our own costs by raising sponsorship, then we well be able to pass on more value to performers, and the Fringe will flourish.’

All the venues insisted there were no plans to split from the Fringe – but said the festival as a whole did not have the structure that would enable big sponsorship to be secured.

Alderson said: ‘We work very closely with the Fringe – we have to, that’s the concrete that binds us together. The Fringe has its hands tied because it has to be everything to all people. We’ve had some very positive meetings with [Fringe director] Jon Morgan, because we have to do more together.’

Highlights of the Edinburgh Comedy Festival programme include Paul Merton, Ed Byrne, Jason Byrne, Jim Jeffries, Barry Cryer and Clive James.

Fringe 2008 – the 62nd festival - features 31,320 performances of 2,088 shows in 247 venues, up about one per cent on last year.

For the first time, comedy is the biggest section of the programme, comprising 32 per cent of the shows, followed closely by theatre with 29 per cent. Last year 1.7 million tickets were sold at the Fringe.

Chortle currently has listings for more than 530 Fringe shows, which will be expanded over the coming days to include the full comedy programme, as well as other shows of particular interest to comedy fans. Click here to browse it. The official Edinburgh Fringe website will have its programme live on Monday.

Published: 5 Jun 2008