Article

Comedy

Culture

22 August 2023

5 min read

Edinburgh's grim endurance test of character

How a comedian survived the Fringe and kept going back.

James Cary

James is a writer of sit coms for TV and radio.

Three actors stand on a stage, in costume, surrounding a metal conical structure.

Expensive prop? Check. Just Out of Reach performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2008.

EFFC, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

This article was first published 22 August 2023.

The Edinburgh Fringe Festival is probably the greatest arts festival on earth. And it’s getting bigger every year. In 2001, 666 groups presented 1462 shows in 176 venues, selling 873,887 tickets between them. By 2017, everything had doubled. 3398 shows at 300 venues sold 2.9 million tickets. Even Covid19 couldn’t burst the balloon. This year, the Fringe is as big as ever. How does it keep on growing?

I have a controversial theory based on my experience as a Fringe performer. And it’s not about the insatiable demand for tickets, but the strange supply. Let me explain.

Every year, tourists arrive in Scotland’s capital to sample an exciting buffet of comic and dramatic treats, alongside a smorgasbord of bizarre spectacles. It’s a hit-and-miss affair, for sure. But most punters know that most shows are, well, a punt. The fringe programme contains comedians, theatre troupes and performers you’ve never heard of performing something that’s rather hard to get one’s head around, until one’s seen it. And sometimes not even then.

The average Fringe goer might well take in half a dozen shows over a long weekend. One might be a favourite Mock the Week comedian of the telly in a venue that seats 800. But the rest are small, intimate, dank spaces that may be uncomfortably packed, or embarrassingly empty. Again, that’s all part of the experience. Add some beers, some unfamiliar street food and just enough sleep to function, and that’s the Edinburgh Fringe experience.

Spare a thought for the thousands of performers you leave behind. There are the ones trapped in that outré fringe show which runs until the end of the month.

Except it’s only one side of it, oh Fringe goer. As you jump on a train from Waverley station and return to the office with a sore head and some good stories about some weird outré theatre that really didn’t work, spare a thought for the thousands of performers you leave behind. There are the ones trapped in that outré fringe show which runs until the end of the month, doomed to perform the same deeply flawed show twenty-seven times, like Sisyphus rolling his rock up the hillside.

If you’re a fringe performer, and I speak from the experience of having performed or produced various shows at the Edinburgh Fringe between 1996 and 2017, things are rather different.

The Edinburgh Fringe is not a talent show where the obscure but gifted performer finds an audience, acclaim and fame through sheer hard work and pluck. That is the experience of a few, but for most, the Fringe is more like running a marathon in the rain wearing an amusing but extremely absorbent fancy-dress costume. It is a test of grim endurance.

It’s not just an endurance of physical stamina, although the odd hours, the alcohol and the ill-advised street food all take their toll. Ultimately, the Edinburgh Fringe is a month-long examination of character. You will experience emotions and feel frustrations that only happen in this annual cauldron of dysfunctional ambition.

It’s not about the show. The 60 minutes spent on stage in front of the barely adequate lights is the straightforward part of your day. The show, even if it’s improvised, is broadly the same each time. How you spend the other 23 hours is real test.

You might think that the task is simple. Every day, you leap out of bed, eat a hearty Scottish breakfast, grab your stack of flyers, and go out and spread the word about your show. No?

Here’s the problem: within a week or so, you’ve worked out that your show is not what you thought it was. What seemed to be an hilarious off-the-wall idea back in February, now seems like a joke worn thin, that technically didn’t quite work in the first place. You are not in contention for an award. Your show doesn’t have any ‘buzz’. Your temporary friends console you that you’re being penalised by doing something different. Or you’re in the wrong slot. Or in the wrong venue. Or getting the wrong audience… when you get an audience.

The expensive prop from your show that is carried around the streets to sell tickets now feels like an albatross around your neck. Your costume hasn’t been washed for over a week and probably never will be. And every punter you speak to has already booked to see the hot new show that has captured the zeitgeist. Oh, and the Cambridge Footlights. And that comedian who was on Mock the Week. Or as it Live at the Apollo? And then they’re going out to dinner with some friends.

At that moment, you remember how much this is costing you, the largest amount of your budget going to your temporary landlady who is currently sunning herself in Malaga having rented you her broom cupboard.

And then it starts to rain.

There’s something about the Edinburgh Fringe that keeps performers coming back year after year. Next year, it’ll be different. And it isn’t.

It appears that I have not made my case for the continual expansion of the Edinburgh Fringe. I have demonstrated a thousand reasons to abandon Auld Reekie and never to return. But let me tell you about what happens next to our hapless performer.

In the short term, the embittered, disenchanted performer may give in to the seven deadly sins, justifying all kinds of self-destructive and narcissistic behaviour. Terrible food, too much booze and ill-advised liaisons. But this is Edinburgh where everything is multiplied many times over. It’s not the seven deadly sins, but seventy-seven deadly sins.

In fact, wait. ‘The Seventy Seven Deadly Sins’? Is that an idea for a show for next year? You start to design the flyer in your head. In the midst of your frustration and exhaustion, you’re already planning your return next year.

Here’s where the wisdom of the ages kicks in which explains my theory. In the Bible, there is a wonderful proverb from King Solomon which runs thus: “As a dog returns to its vomit, so fools repeat their folly.” There’s something about the Edinburgh Fringe that keeps performers coming back year after year. Next year, it’ll be different. And it isn’t. But maybe the year after it will be. And so every year, alongside the newcomers, the old timers return with a new show. And the fringe grows a little bit more every year.

Actually, the first half of that proverb sounds like a great title for a Fringe play. And after my years of experience, maybe it’s time I went back…

Column

Books

Character

Culture

Time

19 June 2025

4 min read

The true myths we tell about how we got here

Memoirs are the stories that make us who we are

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Jon Tyson on Unsplash.

I’ve been asked to write a memoir. It’s because I’ve been an Anglican priest for 20 years and it’s been quite a ride – deployed to a tube station when the terrorist bombs went off on 7 July 2005, served the Archbishop of Canterbury as the child-abuse catastrophe unfolded, been the religion editor of a national newspaper and helped countless people to die and to marry as a rural parish rector.

So, I suppose it meets the minimum criterion that a memoir shouldn’t be about me so much as the events through which I passed. But it also raises questions about what a memoir is for, as well as what it’s about. I wonder about its purpose and that leads to choices of style.

I had in mind a hybrid fiction model, in which the only made-up character was me, heightening the drama of it all by being maybe bisexual and a cokehead (neither of which I have been) who encounters all the real and interesting people that I have. That might at least make it a bigger challenge for libel lawyers.

A publisher at lunch this week persuaded me that this is a very bad idea. Commercial fiction is where the action is and literary fiction (even if I could do it) is dead. It has to fit in one of the silos that people will buy – crime, romance, fantasy and so on. And I’m an old, white man, to boot.

But memoir is a good stable, she said, and it didn’t need to be a dull, linear narrative. In fact it mustn’t be that. I’m beginning to think it must be a drama and, as such, as creative an act as fiction.

So, not history. Or maybe, like history, it depends on how you look at it and how we remember. As someone quite famous remarked recently, recollections may vary. And we all have an agenda in relating them. Memoir is not a record, it’s about experience, emotion, interpretation and score-settling (I’m looking forward to that last bit).

The most obvious exemplar of this is the political memoir, which lately has ticked towards being written by the spouses of politicians. Salacious revelation seems to be the currency here, all the better if a former prime minister is alleged to have said he’d like to drag you into the undergrowth and give you one.

Memoir is also the embarrassing uncle of autobiography. It amounts only to what we remember, as we wave a glass about in the pub.

One rather hopes, for reasons of aesthetics as much as decorum, that this indicates that memoir is as much about what times were like as about being a simple record of them. This makes sense as I face the prospect, for example, of relating being with a 26-year-old mother of two as she died.

If it’s such an essentially subjective exercise, then memoir is a poor country cousin of history. Some have made it consciously so in their titles – Clive James’s Unreliable Memoirs and Python Graham Chapman’s A Liar’s Autobiography come to mind.

Incidentally, memoir is also the embarrassing uncle of autobiography. It amounts only to what we remember, as we wave a glass about in the pub, rather than the marshalling of peer-approved facts. This is what makes it so sensationally subjective. I remember standing alone in a boorish institution, heroically speaking truth to power. You remember a blithering idiot. The difference is I’ve got a publisher.

In this sense, memoirs are the stories that make us who we are. Or, naturally, who we’d like to be, or like to be seen as. In ancient Greek terms, we deploy our mythos rather than our logos, our allegory rather than our empirical reality.

But, again, these stories make us who we are. And not just the stories we tell. The stories of our nations are similarly formative. The stories that the world’s major faiths tell also define us, whether we believe them or not.

The Christian gospels are memoirs. The first three of them attempt to describe what happened. The fourth, John, is rather more allegorical. But they all, in the Jewish tradition of storytelling, in one way or another seek to describe what it was like to be in the insurgent Nazarene movement, as much as what actually happened.

Matthew, the tax-collector, writes for his audience of Jews. Luke is concerned with what it all means for the poor – and not just those economically so. Mark, first out of the trap, wants to consider what it all means for non-Jews. Their recollections may vary. But it’s reckless to suggest that this invalidates their testimony.

My memoir will contain no gospel truth. But there’s no point in embarking on an exercise that is only about what happened over 20 years of priesthood. It has to be about what it was like too.

I think that its epigraph may read: “Nothing in this book happened. Everything in it is true.”