Beneath the Fringe

Lloyd Evans joins the hopeful hordes seeking fame and fortune in Edinburgh

Wonderful, Edinburgh. Isn’t it magical? The artistic world has descended on Scotland’s magnificent capital for three weeks of self-expression and glorious creativity. Or so everyone wants everyone else to think. When people speak of Edinburgh they reach whoopingly for a peculiar grammatic mode, the puerile tense. Delightful, daring, courageous, uplifting, inventive, risk-taking, inspirational, sublime. Yes, maybe. But take off the kindergarten dolly-goggles and you’ll find other qualities, other adjectives, lurking. Vain, greedy, embittered, jealous, self-obsessed, megalomaniac, drunk, stoned and bankrupt.

This is the true Edinburgh. The pilgrims aren’t here to participate in an exuberant outpouring of artistic excellence. They’re hungry. They’re mean and low. They’re after stuff. They want notoriety and success. They want TV contracts. They want to multiply, by a factor of several million, their current quotas of wealth and attention. It’s a mad scramble up here. It always is. Two thousand shows and only one winner. It’s less a festival and more an all-in wrestling match with no rules, no round-calls and no referee. The prize is certainly vast but so are the costs. Most acts expect to return home at least two grand poorer. Breaking even is a rarity. A profit? Forget it. That’s not the point. The point is to get here, to stay the distance and strenuously to quell any nagging doubt that your chances of success are minuscule and the terms of the contest deeply unjust.

Last year the victor ludorum was, by common consent, John Bishop. The amiable forty-something Liverpool stand-up now luxuriates in a prime-time TV show whose title consists mostly of his name. (That’s an important nicety, by the way. Adrian Chiles doesn’t get his name above his new breakfast show, and even Paxo has yet to paint his patronymic on the Newsnight gunwales.)