Laurence Clark on how the festival got child-friendly

When I first started doing the Fringe it was not a particularly child-friendly environment.

I still have vivid memories from 2006 of sitting with my then two-year old on my knee, crying his eyes out in the middle of the Pleasance Courtyard. It was pouring with rain, as is typical of Edinburgh, but as I sat dripping wet in the doorway, the staff calmly informed me that the licensing laws of the time did not allow children into any of their buildings - not even the foyer or box office where there wasn’t a drop of alcohol in sight! 

Since I couldn’t think of anywhere else nearby undercover, wheelchair accessible and accepting of small children, I had no choice but to wait out the downpour under one of the archways.

But the Fringe is so much more child-friendly nowadays. There’s a plethora of quality children’s shows and venues, at least in the daytime, are specifically catering for families. My older son even once described the Fringe as ‘better than Christmas!’

 I think this is because there is so much more to see and do there. Also whenever we go to see shows at home, we are invariably sat on the back row, which seems to be the generally accepted place to put wheelchair users. Of course, children don’t want to sit at the back, away from all the action and where it’s difficult to engage with what’s going on. They want to be down the front in the thick of it, ready to enthusiastically volunteer if there’s any audience participation to be had. So the temporary nature of Fringe venues actually works in our favour, as very often the only accessible place for us to sit is right on the front row.

These days I don’t do the fringe every year as the upheaval affects the whole family. Taking previews into account as well, it pretty much wipes out the whole of the school summer holidays, meaning we have to meticulously plan our childcare in advance, since as well as spending time up there with me, their various grandparents also help out. But the real bummer is the effect it has on our family holiday.  With the summer written off and fines being imposed for taking children out of school during term time, the May half-term week is now pretty much our only window.

My kids have slowly developed an interest in comedy and asked about a year ago if they could be part of one of my shows. As it happens, I was already developing my new show An Irresponsible Father’s Guide to Parenting, so it seemed only fair to include them since it’s partly about them. But I struggled for a long while with how to meaningfully achieve this, without it coming across as contrived, tokenistic or manipulative.

Then something else happened. Several years ago when we were having our second son, my family and I were filmed for a BBC documentary about being parents who have cerebral palsy called We Won’t Drop the Baby - the title was not our idea! Recently it was put onto YouTube, which meant that complete strangers from all over the world could now effectively look into our family home and type their considered, well-informed comments about us underneath!

I got told that having kids in my position is just irresponsible by someone calling themselves "pantyflash". Talk about people in glass houses! Besides if I was irresponsible, then it’s got nothing to do with having cerebral palsy! In fact, it’s probably more to do with things like balancing his wife's crutches on his son’s baby walker to make him look like a Dalek!

Someone else asked how could I even make the baby when I’m in a wheelchair and can’t hold anything properly? Of course, the simple answer to that is I did it the same way as everyone else, namely got drunk and forgot the condom!

Someone called ‘Little Bunny Bunny’ even said that I shouldn’t have been born or allowed to reproduce! Has there ever been a greater disparity between such a nasty opinion and such a cutesy name?

So the way I found to include my kids on the show was to incorporate film of them reacting to some of these comments, which are completely personal to us, and saying what they thought of them.

This means that, unlike every other Fringe I’ve done where I’ve been worried about what reviewers are going to say, this time around I’m more concerned with the reviews of my two boys!

• Laurence Clark: An Irresponsible Father’s Guide to Parenting is on at Assembly George Square Theatre at 17:40.

Published: 17 Aug 2018