David J Black

The chemistry between the official Festival and the Fringe was, at times, diplomatically awkward, yet the relationship had benefits for both. With brilliant talent like Robin Williams, Billy Connolly, Rowan Atkinson, Miranda Hart, John Cleese, and Rory Bremner, the Edinburgh comedy circuit enriched the ‘visitor experience’ so much that visitor congestion began to become problematic.

We had come a long way since these first eight fringe adjuncts of 1947 had turned up of their own accord. In 1981 the concept of an ‘uncurated’ Fringe was breached when William Burdett Coutts established Assembly Productions and applied a degree of quality control to those performing under his roof. But then, like Topsy, the fringe just grew and grew, with stand-up comedy proliferating.

The unique selling feature of the Fringe was that anyone could do anything, provided they could find a venue and a sofa to surf on. By degrees, this freedom would be lost. Assembly Productions had served a purpose – you could be sure its shows would be of decent quality, while still taking a risk on the independent fringe – but with the plethora of corporate events organisers and an orgy of commodification the shoestring independents were soon overshadowed.

A comedy ‘big four’ took over. Assembly, the Gilded Balloon, and the Pleasance were joined in 1996 by Underbelly (or ‘Plunderbelly’ to some) all of them running sequential shows in multi-venue complexes on a time-and-motion basis. To this might be added the all-year Stand Comedy Club. They had the money to advertise, online ticketing systems, and the commercial clout the small independent groups lacked – and it showed. An army of commissioning editors and TV producers attending the Edinburgh Television Festival, established in 1976, gave the Fringe the character of a hire fair, with young hopefuls desperately touting for their big break.

By the time of its 50th birthday the Fringe was becoming a catwalk for aspirant comedians of varying abilities. This set the pattern for the next quarter of a century. While there would certainly be many rising stars, with one, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, becoming honorary president of the Fringe Society, and some perfectly good stand up performers, there was also much formulaic mediocrity. This was hardly surprising, given that the original eight Fringe shows of 1947 had swollen to an unmanageable 3,800 by 2024. Quantity was beginning to overwhelm quality.

There are now well founded fears that, like the dinosaurs, the Fringe might collapse under its own weight, particularly in this new era of spendings cuts, when arts supporting bodies like Creative Scotland are having their budgets drastically slashed. The hordes on the street provoke complaints of overtourism. The hollowing out of the city’s historic centre thanks to a proliferation of Airbnb investor flats in what were formerly residential homes has detonated a demographic time bomb in an old town cleansed of much of its community. A culture of overcharging for accommodation is pricing out both patrons and performers, other than those with substantial means.

Despite the stresses and strains, the Fringe remains hugely popular with those performers who can find a venue and the crowds who pour in to see them. The Official Festival, too, is playing to audiences of between 90 per cent and 100 per cent, and the Book Festival, while it will never match the atmosphere of its original Charlotte Square location, has welcomed capacity crowds, we are told.

Whether this can be sustained in the face of Creative Scotland cut backs and unwarranted attacks on corporate sponsors such as Baillie Gifford is a matter for debate. State support for the arts, across the board, could be approaching meltdown. Companies might well be reluctant to enter into sponsorship deals if this exposes them to critical scrutiny, ill-informed or otherwise. As the costs associated with putting on anything more than a solo performer show escalate, and the price of accommodation rules out the less well heeled, the impromptu experimentalism of earlier Fringe festivals will inevitably give way to the formulaic and commercially safe.

Nor is the official festival immune to disaster. Chief executive Francesca Hegyi has predicted a “house of cards” collapse unless support for the arts is forthcoming from the Scottish government sooner rather than later, and has called for a “crisis summit” on the future of arts funding in Scotland in the wake of attacks on key sponsor, Baillie Gifford. At 0.5 per cent of total spending, she points out that Scotland devotes about a third of the funding on arts and culture of other European countries.

Could things have been done better? Of course they could. Take the 2023 official Festival programme in its black and acid yellow livery. This carried the somewhat hesitant strapline “Where do we go from here?”. While it may have been poached from the title of a book by the inspirational Martin Luther King, it certainly, in itself, didn’t convey a sense of confidence or imply any sort of faith in the future. The 2024 mantra, “Rituals that bind us” is little better. Isn’t it just a little bit vacuous? Apart from anything else, what does it actually mean?

In the 1960s the visual imprimatur of Edinburgh Festival was a design by the French artist, writer, and film maker Jean Cocteau. It was known around the world, and is now a collector’s item. For some inexplicable reason a decision was taken to remove such artwork from official Festival literature. Where designs by such artists as John Byrne, Alasdair Gray, or Pat Douthwaite could have presented a cultured face to the world, the bureaucratic preference for iconoclastic blandness won out. Was this the face Scotland should have been presenting to the world?

Sitting in the Book Festival’s garden under the turrets and spires of a newly created ‘Futures Institute’, and reflecting on why a venture with such a name should be housed in a building constructed in 1870, a seditious thought occurred. Edinburgh Festival may be as glorious and magnificent as Augustan Rome – but, as with Augustan Rome, can we really take its future for granted?

The chances are it will continue to exist in some form, but what might that be? Some sort of predictable cultural trade event with all the old spontaneity squeezed out? A clamjamfry of stand-up ubiquity in which the gems of real talent will be drowned out? Perhaps it’s not so much the healing of post-war Europe which should be concerning us these days as the healing of our own declining nation.