Why the best things in life are free

Bobby Carrol on the attraction of a Fringe without entrance fees

I’m doing a free entry show this year at the PBH Free Fringe. Over past five I’ve done a few. I think it is easy for acts, reviewers, promoters to dismiss them. So I’d like to present a bunch of unexplored defences of the Free Fringe phenomenon.

First, the free shows encourages a massive extra comedy-savvy audience to come to Edinburgh; the performers. 

The Free Fringe is often criticised as taking away punters from the paid show. Yet what about  the sheer  amount of newer performers in Free Fringe doing double or three handers who would never come to Edinburgh merely to watch?

After they do their hour show in the afternoon, they walk out into the sunlight with a bucketful of money and time to kill. What do they do with this spare time and unexpected money? Chances are they pay to go see solo shows by bigger names or acts they’ve met when doing middle spots around the country and liked. 

And who could be a better paying audience member for those tricky themed Edinburgh hours than a punter who has some background in comedy? If it wasn’t for all the drama students, new acts and fellow comedians I know a lot of debut and second Edinburgh hours at the Big Four venues might be empty.

If it was not for the Free Fringe there are at least 1,000 potential audience members with daily cash in their pockets that those bigger shows would be deprived of. So don’t insult them or devalue them.

Secondly, doing a gig a day will make new acts better acts. Only the most delusional acts will fail to improve from doing the comedy boot camp that is the Free Fringe.

Day in, day out of performing  will mean in September you can tell which middle spots went to Edinburgh and which did not.  And a middle spot not dying on their arse in September makes every comic’s job easier at gigs.

A consequence of this is that most delusional of acts get a harsh wake-up call. The Free Fringe is a great leveller. Outside of August a lot of newer acts find stage time weeks apart, to rooms not properly set up for comedy, on bills where sometimes the freak and unusual shine and the only laughter to be heard is valueless response from other acts spurred into volume by either support or schadenfreude. 

That’s not a learning experience. It is a process where it is easy for the unfunny to make excuses for their consistent but intermittent flunks. And it’s even easier for a poor act to make excuses about their failures when like a stopped clock they manage to do well every dozen or so gigs over a long space of time.

Not so on the Free Fringe. There is no recovery time for you to forget a death or put a positive spin on your loss. If you’ve flyered in the rain for an hour, got a room of real locals and Fringe-goers in, who are completely uninvested and can leave at any point, it makes dying every day a lot more poignant.

It is harder to make excuses for your failures when you’ve sacrificed your holiday time, two months’ rent, a fringe entry brochure fee and yet you find people staring at you in awkward silence every day, day after day, for a month. When you can no longer look in the eye the the two fellow acts you met half a dozen times before you decided to go up and do The Free Three LoL-lypops at Venue 457 together. When the nice group of normal, friendly, don’t-give-a-shit-about-your-feelings Glaswegians over on a day trip shake the other two acts hand then turn to you and gleefully say ‘best of luck...’ Well...

I’m guessing more budding “comedians” are nipped by the relentless reality check that is the Free Fringe than leave Scotland with more bookings and great reviews to sell themselves with. Pro acts often joke about the need for a mass cull of open spots. In its own inadvertent way, the Free Fringe is the too much rope that many hang themselves with.

Another plus of the Free movement is how it has shined an exposing light on just how expensive the paid venues are and how corporate comedy is becoming. Performing at the Big Four is rigged with upfront fees and percentages of ticket sales that make it improbable for all but the biggest names to see August as anything but a tax write-off.

And those big names can sell more tickets in a day than three or four debuting acts could hope to sell for a whole Edinburgh run, previews included.

The Free Fringe has offered an alternative to that is embraced by many newer acts but also by those who see the current model of the official Fringe (a telling oxymoron) as unsustainable.

That the recent Chortle news report of Michael McIntyre’s premium-priced work in progress dates in Edinburgh was closed by two paragraphs comparing the cost of Free Fringers doing pay-to-enter previews in London suggests that the Free Fringe creates a constant comparative point for all the big business developments at Edinburgh.

Positive expansions like The Stand, The Shack, Bob Slayer’s excellent Alternative Fringe project seem to be motivated by offering performers a pragmatic deal somewhere betwixt the negative prejudices’ towards the Free Fringe and the inaccessibility of the most corporate oligopoly of paid venues.

As the Free Fringe matures and becomes more established it demands this middle ground which is now being filled by respected promoters.  The success of Peter Buckley Hill’s once  hairbrained Free Fringe scheme has flourished into various new alternative gambles away from the loaded dice that used to be the only game in town.

And the final advantage of free shows is creative freedom.

It is hard to see Edinburgh as anything but a trade show if everyone taking part has to invest £5,000 to £20,000 upfront.

The Free Fringe allows performers to experiment, take risks, perform without fear of doing anything more than taking their audience on their journey. Then ask the audience to assign value to that experiment afterwards. And as the audience has given nothing but their time if that experiment, risk or journey proves to be... ahem...a bit shit.... the audience can stand up and leave at any point. – which they would be less likely to do had they invested £5 to £40 for a ticket.

The Free Fringe means the public are uninhibited by a financial commitment. If their first Free Fringe show is an awful load of rambling bollocks chances are they’ll stick to paid shows in the future. And if the Free Fringe shows exceeded their expectations by being professional, funny and exciting, as many are, punters have been known to throw the daily fiver, tenner or twenty in the bucket.

There’s nothing more exciting after walking off stage expecting to scrabble through change then seeing the eye catching red of a fifty quid note winking up to your from within the coins. Rare, but it does happen - as when a hundred punters take a chance, it only takes one percent of them to love your comedy to give a free show genuine value.

And that kind of massive, generous, instant validation never ever happens nor will ever happen at a paid venue.  I bought new decent trainers on my first day of the festival a few years back. It was all thanks to a bucket  split with another act from a show that started at two in the afternoon. with a routine considered “too dark” by promoters when I was a new act.

So please come and see my 2012 show – as Daddy needs some new shoes.  

  • Bobby Carroll: Low Voltage is on at the Royal Mile Tavern at 19.20 during the Fringe.

Published: 17 Jul 2012

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