Edinburgh will host its first annual Edinburgh Comedy Festival this August in conjunction with Scotland’s legendary Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
The month-long comedy event will feature 253 different shows across 55 different stages taking place over 27 days, and will be held at the four largest Festival Fringe venues; Assembly, Gilded Balloon, Pleasance and Underbelly. Fringe comedy regulars such as Paul Merton, Ed Byrne, Bill Bailey and Jim Jeffries will combine with promising new talent such as Sarah Millican, Tom Allen, Matt Green, Sammy J, Dan Nightingale and Tom Wrigglesworth all eager to excite and entertain the 875,000-odd expected visitors to the festival.
To many regulars of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, these four venues have hosted much of the comedy that is a main staple of performances showing at the Fringe. The early careers of some of the UK’s most established comics such as Rowan Atkinson, Eddie Izzard, French and Saunders, Peter Kay and Russell Brand featured significantly at past Fringe’s in Edinburgh. I am sure many people are scratching their heads as to why the Edinburgh Comedy Festival has diverged from the Fringe?
The directors and promoters of the ‘Big Four’ venues all agree that their newly birthed festival collective is motivated by a dedicated commitment to bringing greater exposure to comedy and to Edinburgh. They also state that it is driven by a desire to battle rising costs of venues and performers participating within the Fringe. That by launching their own ‘festival within a festival’ and by raising some of their own sponsorship, it can do a lot to keep costs down, thereby guaranteeing the continued safety of the Fringe, especially in the face of many other summer festivals springing up across the UK, many of which host a comedy/live performance section of their program often in direct competition with Edinburgh’s lineup.
Yet financially, is running comedy at the Fringe as economically grim as the ‘Big Four’ make it out to be? Figures have been loosely talked about of an increase of approximately 15 per cent each year in overheads and costs for productions held at the Fringe. This is no lie. But this increasing cost applies to ALL Fringe events, not just comedy. It could also be argued that a stand-up comic production would have substantially less production costs when compared to say, a theatre production replete with extensive sets, cast, extras, stage-hands, lighting techs and so on. Also, most are well aware of the substantial growth of live comedy over the past few years, with comedy ticket sales increasing across the Fringe by almost 60 per cent in the past five years alone, making it the genre that has enjoyed the largest growth across the Fringe’s events over the last decade. In 2007 alone, comedy events on at the ‘Big Four’ venues accounted for over 50 per cent of all Fringe ticket sales.
Concerns have been voiced that the four venues have banded together both to squeeze out smaller venues, and to heavily market themselves for an even greater, and entirely exclusive, slice of the pie of those that come to visit Edinburgh’s Fringe and partake in the comedy on offer.
Tommy Sheppard, owner and manager of The Stand Comedy Club, has been one of the longest speaking opponents to the breakaway Festival idea since it was announced in late March this year. He reportedly was approached to participate in the new festival but is said to have declined to operate under the new banner. Sheppard said recently: “The Edinburgh Comedy Festival doesn’t exist. It’s purely a marketing exercise by four of the venues.” Sheppard reports that when he was spoken to, the collective were said to be seeking a £650,000 sponsorship deal. Liam Ruddem, reporting for the Edinburgh Evening News last week, said a sponsorship target of £1.5 million was closer to the mark. Yet as of last Friday 6th June, Tom Dibdin from The Stage News reported that the Edinburgh Comedy Festival had yet to find a sponsor, although it was in talks with three potential suitors.
Pleasance director, Anthony Alderson told The Stage that the new financial venture would be open to all venues on the Fringe staging comedy, not just the Pleasance, Underbelly, Assembly and Gilded Balloon, which have set it up. He vehemently denied that it would be difficult for small venues which stage only one or two comedy shows to join. “If we provide another place for people to put listings, then surely that is a good thing,” Alderson said. “It is a bigger advertising space.
With money on the scale of that being talked about, and comedy being as popular as it is, who’s to say that this isn’t the first warning signs of an impending complete split from the Fringe? Some say the first shot was fired when a separate press launch was initiated by the organizers of the Edinburgh Comedy Festival on the evening before the official Edinburgh Fringe Festival press briefing, thus releasing all the details of the comedy events showing as part of the breakaway festival some 14 hours before all the official Fringe brochures, newspaper releases and associated information was due to hit Scotland’s streets.
Anyone who has been to the Fringe, or has lived in Edinburgh, knows that the details of artists and performers appearing at the Fringe is often a secret until the set day where it is all announced and the information then floods the country. Nica Burns, promoter of the if.comedy awards warned the Edinburgh Evening News by saying, “If this is just a way of marketing the four venues, then fine, but if it turns into more than that, that would be a great shame in the context of the Fringe as a whole. Any proper breakaway would not be a good development. ”
Her voice is not alone. Brazen American comic Doug Stanhope, in an attempt to undermine the media circus surrounding the Edinburgh Comedy Festival and to bring to peoples attention how much a comedian can potentially lose financially during a run on the Fringe, is performing for one lucky punter, a single gig that will last 16 hours and will take place on August 23rd. The price for that one ticket you ask? £7,349… or £7,348 for pensioner/concession. Stanhope believes this figure is the equivalent of what the average comedian stands to lose playing at the big four venues that have joined forces to form the Comedy Festival. His manager, Brian Hennigan, wrote in the Edinburgh Evening News that the festival seemed “only to have a commercial goal and no definable artistic or cultural merit”.
The good news for the common punter though, is that the Fringe is still alive. And, you can still see all the great comedic acts that have always been a regular part of the festival, and still at much of the same venues. Albeit, marketed a little differently, and sure, there may be some stirring or discontent in the wings at the long-term future of the Fringe festival as a whole, but for the immediate time-being it’s business as usual. And that business is in making people laugh.
With current ticket sales of over 820,000 tickets, the 2008 inaugural Edinburgh Comedy Festival will be the largest comedy festival in the world. Organisers of the festival stress that they will continue to be part of the Fringe for years to come, even if many detractors believe the writing is on the wall for a full and complete breakaway in future years.
Comedy at the Fringe, once the forgotten side-line of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival many years ago, has now grown into a sizeable force to be reckoned with. And if the wheels did set in motion a committed and complete breakaway from the Edinburgh Fringe, then that alone would no doubt become the single biggest threat to the ecology and survival of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival – the very same festival that the big four comedic institutions of the Assembly, Gilded Room, Pleasance and Underbelly were born from. Only time will tell.
