What is Success on the Fringe and Beyond?

Thoughts on the beginning of this year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe

I will miss being at the Edinburgh Fringe this year.

Pic: Festival Fringe Society

I think last year was my most artistically, psychologically, and critically successful year. It took a while top get there, about three decades.

I performed two shows a day, both of which I was proud of, and I worked out the perfect social life. This was avoiding all showbiz bars and showbiz trappings and sitting in the bar of the Cameo cinema after a night of performing, often on my own with a good book I had picked up that day as I weaved the bookshops and charity emporiums of the sloping streets.

I think it is important to know why you are going, and now I know.

I am solely to create new things, to find ways of working and reworking ideas in the same spaces for a month and, hopefully, getting an audience.

I am old now (55 but looking 70) and in this decade I started to get on with my mind. I am fully aware that the Fringe will make little difference to the business side of my life or create new opportunities within that realm. Despite the success of The Infinite Monkey Cage, I get one TV outing every two years - Pointless Celebrities, Celebrity Mastermind and House of Games. Whatever I create is created for the audience that are in the room that moment, not for the TV executive or TV producer who may be in (they won’t be) and the hope that this a new beginning, a leap towards primetime or a cultish late night slot, long since evaporated with a sense of relief. The jazz singer and art critic George Melly once described the relief he felt when his sex drive left him, he said it was like being unchained from a wild bull (I think Plato said similar, but I’ve read more of Melly than him). I feel the release from the idea that TV maybe one of the roads on the map of your career may be a similar sensation to the loss of the bull.

I am in the fortunate position where, at least for now, I can sell just enough tickets in just enough venues to make a living. Sure, it might be nice to have the sightly higher numbers that can be encouraged by relentless TV exposure, but as long as there is an audience, there is a show to make. I am fortunate that I like working. I need to make things. Performing live is not a means to an end, it is the end.

Robin performing at last year’s Fringe

There are two things that Neil Innes said that I often repeat to myself and also to other people.

“Before you become rich and famous, you should find out who you are, because you might find out that you are someone that doesn’t want to be rich and famous”.

When I was younger, I think I might have liked to be famous, or at least I imagined I would. Now, I know it wouldn’t suit me. I like ambling about, meeting people as weird as me on trains and in cafes. I am still happy to take the bus. I am Thatcher’s loser - GOOD.

Michael Palin also reported that Neil Innes said that he liked playing to about 200 people because he felt that when it became more than that the connections started to fragment. For me, the intensity of the c connection that can happen in a gig in a little library or small seaside theatre is genuinely exciting and the ability to just hang out in the bar afterwards is a delight.

I realise now that when you have invested so much in the fringe, you really should spend some time working out why. What do you really want from it? Interrogate what you think you need to leave the fringe with and see if you really, really want that.

There will be some at the Fringe who will be thinking every day - will TV be in, will the critics be in, is today the day where everything changes and I can be as omnipresent as Jimmy Carr. For most, this will not happen. For most, a major newspaper will not review you and you won’t make the list of best “things”.

The wonderful Neil Innes

Trying to remove the importance of outside criticism and focusing on the interior sense of achievement can be hard. My evening show last year, which began with me screaming and punching a melon, existed because of a failure twenty years before with a show that ended with me screaming and punching a melon. The original show almost destroyed me on many levels, but it was that flop that started to help me understand what I should be doing.

The rest is the usual boring advice.

Don’t hang around with people who never recommend anyone else’s show on their social media.

Don’t be one of those people that never recommends people on social media.

Don’t go up to people and say, “could not disagree more with that terrible review you got in The Guardian”

Realise that most reviews will be barely registered by anyone else than you.

Remember that, unlike the rest of the year, some people will have seen nine shows before yours that day and if the audience is lacklustre it might just be that they are exhausted from being entertained.

If you only have three people in, don’t berate those people, go and berate the rest of the city afterwards for not coming to see you.

Eat vegetables.

Remember that comedy is such a big industry now that some people may come and see you and sit stony faced . This doesn’t mean that you are rubbish, just that you are not their cup of tea. Whoever thinks that comedy is an objective thing is a fool and a solipsists.

Simon Amstell

Simon Amstell once proudly got a two star, a three star, a four star and a five star review and was somewhat disappointed not to get a one star review to complete the set.

Be really nice to your venue staff and bring them sweets or cakes every nope and again (ensure some vegan alternatives if necessary)

Realise that you will not climb up Arthur’s Seat.

Got to Portobello and look at the sea.

Outside of flyering, don’t keep banging on about your show.

Know that most people coming to see you want you to enjoy yourself too.

And to go back to the beginning - comedy is so much more than television or a Netflix contract, work hard to work out what you really want from it.

Recommendations

Hannah Platt, Catriona Dowden, Marjolein Robertson, John Hegley, Jo Caulfield, Gavin Webster, Martin Mor, Seymour Mace, Ada Campe, Simon Munnery, Ian Stone, Jonny and The Baptists, Mhairi Black, Tom Ballard, Michelle Brasier, John-Luke Roberts…