The Irresistible Lure of the Edinburgh Fringe

It calls out to every Fringe performer, past and present, no matter how much you block your ears.

Many comedians are in an abusive relationship with The Edinburgh Fringe Festival. I’m still a recovering Fringe comedian myself, having written, performed and directed shows at the Fringe numerous times since 1996. The first two years were as part of The Durham Revue, my university’s sketch troupe in which we enviously watched The Cambridge Footlights fill a large theatre every afternoon for a month with minimal time spent in the streets giving out flyers.

In truth, the Cambridge Footlights show was funny, not least because it contained the now stupendously successful comedian John Oliver, who took Jon Stewart’s Daily Show by storm, before hosting his own HBO smash show, Last Week Tonight.

This deep resentment at rival Fringe shows continued into my post-university days when I was finding my voice as a comedy writer. In 1999, my show Infinite Number of Monkeys was pipped at the post of the Perrier Best Newcomer Award by a show containing Ben Willbond, of Horrible Histories and Ghosts fame. I’ve subsequently worked with Ben many times on Recorded for Training Purposes and Thanks A Lot, Milton Jones. He’s lovely and very funny.

I think 1999 was the year that I was standing in the street giving out flyers for my show next to a shy young Kiwi promoting his own show, The Flight of the Conchords. It was playing a small 50-seat room at the same venue as my show, The Gilded Balloon. My friend Ashley thought it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen. I didn’t believe him. And I didn’t go and see it, even though I could have done so for free.

Within a couple of years, however, I had established myself as a moderately successful comedy writer for BBC Radio 4, creating the sitcom Think The Unthinkable starring another friend made at the Edinburgh Fringe, Marcus Brigstocke. I was also writing a Radio 4 sketch show partly based on Infinite Number of Monkeys. The BBC Radio 4 show was called Concrete Cow which starred Rob Webb, and the subsequently Oscar-winning Sally Hawkins. At the time, she was considering being in a Mike Leigh film. My producer, Adam, and I told her not to bother. It sounded boring. Stick with comedy, we said. Good job she didn’t listen.

From those Radio 4 shows, I ended up writing episodes of My Hero and My Family, then more Radio 4 shows, with Milton Jones and Miranda, and then back to TV with Miranda and then Bluestone 42, and it was 2016 before I’d look at the calendar. The Fringe was a distant memory.

But here’s the thing: once you do the Edinburgh festival, you keep wanting to go back and prove to your contemporaries, the media, the industy and, I suppose, the Fringe-going ticket-buying public that you’re funny. You want to win Edinburgh.

Except by the time you have honed your talents and skills to do that, you’re too busy to do take a month off to do the Fringe because you’re getting paid work in the industry you’ve been longing to work in since the age of 11.

I actually returned to the Fringe with shows in 2013 (The God Particle) and 2017 (A Monk’s Tale). And I’m considering 2024. But then again, I always think I might do the Fringe next year. Anyway, I write about the addictiveness of the Fringe over at Seen and Unseen. Why not go and have a look?

You can watch The God Particle – honed at the 2013 Edinburgh Fringe – and then video-captured at the Merlin Theatre in Frome, here.

And A Monk’s Tale, the comedy about Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, which ran at the 2017 Edinburgh Fringe, is here:

By getting one or two of these things, you’ll be supporting this weekly substack, my career in general and - who knows? - an Edinburgh Show in 2024.