Forget posters, I'm giving away a DVD

Richard Herring's Fringe gamble

Richard Herring is to forego posters advertising his Edinburgh Fringe show – and use the thousands of pounds he saves to give all his audience members a free DVD.

The billboard arms race is one of the most significant factors that makes the festival so expensive for comedians – but Edinburgh stalwart Herring reckons they no longer have much impact.

So he is spending the £3,000 that would normally go on posters to produce a free DVD called 10, which will contain more than two hours of material from his nine previous Fringe shows. The gift marks his 10th successive festival performing solo stand-up – although he has had shows at the festival since he was a student.

Herring said: ‘It’s partly just that it seems like a nice idea to give my audience a present and thank them for the support they’ve given me over the last 26 years in Edinburgh.

‘But the other impetus was discovering that it cost me £3,000 to put up big lamp-post adverts. Posters like these are so ubiquitous that I don’t think they have any impact any more. And they’re all covered in four and five star reviews, which are usually from some obscure website or paper which isn’t fooling anyone. If we all stopped doing it then we’d save a lot of money.

‘I thought, this year why not spend this £3,000 on something that people might actually want and give a gift to the people who actually want to see me rather than create an eye-sore annoyance to people who don’t?

‘I think we’re throwing our money away and if other acts have three grand to spare for PR, then there must surely be more imaginative ways to spend it. Or they could just keep the £3,000’

Included on the DVD will be routines such as Someone Likes Yoghurt, Valentine’s Day Ferrero Rocher, Why Liberals Are More Racist Than Racists and The Deconstruction of the Genealogy of Christ.

Here he describes his idea in more detail: