So only a week to go now. I am quite looking forward to going home, but nowhere near as much as usual. I guess the fact that I have kept myself fit and busy means that I am not quite the physical wreck that I would normally be by this stage. I had what looked like my smallest audience of the festival tonight, though there were around 80 in supposedly, which isnÂ’t too terrible. I was speaking to the cast of Ben WillibondÂ’s show who follows me in the same venue and they had a slightly smaller audience than that. I had assumed with the excellent reviews that they have garnered that they would be selling out easily, but although they were getting respectable numbers it hadnÂ’t been going as well as a critically acclaimed show would have done a few years ago. With
Talking Cock I got five or six good reviews in the first weekend and then sold out from there on in, but Edinburgh doesn’t seem to work like that anymore. The problem seems to be too many massive 750 seater shows (literally) sucking off the audience that would usually have found its way to the smaller venues and newer acts. There are quite a few big names coming up to the Fringe nowadays and doing a run of shows in these gigantic venues and because of their TV star appeal, people are bound to go and see them rather than stuff they haven’t heard of before. This seems a sad and potentially fatal development for the Fringe. If I was in charge of the Fringe I would ban people from doing this – after all if you can sell out a 1000 seats in Edinburgh every single day then you could presumably do that anywhere at any time and should just do a tour if you want to cash in in this way. I am all for people coming back up here once they are on telly and I suppose commerce dictates that they will want to sell as many tickets as possible, but I would prefer them to perform in more modest sized venues – Pleasance 1 has 350 seats and that used to be the place where the bigger acts could do their thing without taking away too many punters – and to do stuff that is maybe a bit more experimental.
On the positive side it does at least get people down to the venues and might mean they try and see some of the other shows, but clearly this isn’t happening enough and with the increasing expenses of putting on a show I feel it is unlikely that many people will be able to come up and lose shed loads of cash for the necessary three or four years before they get good. Maybe I am being an old fogey and maybe I am being hypocritical (we did do a few big shows back in the 90s with Lee and Herring – though to be honest we never got close to selling these out), but it does seem to be a worrying new trend.
