Marc Jennings on the best and worst of the Edinburgh Fringe

Marc Jennings is back at the Edinburgh Fringe this year with his show Bread And Circuses. Here he shares what he can't get enough of at the festival, his most embarrassing Edinburgh experience and the worst thing about the Fringe. Apart from the cost of accommodation, obviously…

Edinburgh binge

One of the nicest things about doing comedy is the sense of camaraderie you feel towards your fellow performers.  But what often happens is you’ll not see some of your favourite folk for ages, until you’re randomly booked for a weekend together in Cardiff or somewhere - and then it’s like you’ve never missed a trick.

So what’s great about the Edinburgh Fringe is it’s the one time a year where you and a lot of your colleagues are in the same place at the same time (almost like a normal job!) so despite being intense and hectic it’s almost the closest us performers get to some form of regularity in our year.

Edinburgh cringe

In my first year doing a show at the Fringe, Stephen Buchanan and I did a split bill inside an empty shop space in the Waverley Mall.  All the other shows in that ‘venue’ either moved or just gave up by the end of the run, but we were able to make it through by tempting an audience in each day by giving away free doughnuts to the confused shoppers in the adjacent food court.

That year we wangled some passes to one of the artists’ bars, and on our first night there I spotted a familiar face.  It was the actor Robert Lindsay - and after a few drinks, I sauntered up to him, chatted away about my admiration of his turns as Wolfie in Citizen Smith (which I’d recently watched a lot of for a thing I was writing at the time) and the dad in My Family.  

Then I worked up the courage and said: ‘Robert, I know this isn’t the done thing in these places, but d’you mind if we get a picture?’

He agreed, we took the selfie and I returned to my mates who’d been watching nearby.  Then one of them said:  ‘So what was Angus Deayton saying to you?’  Looking back at the picture, Angus has a knowing glance that says: ‘You’re soon going to find out I’m not who you think I am.’

Edinburgh whinge

I think particularly for new performers it can be hard to figure out how the Fringe ‘really works’.  At the time I started out, based in Scotland, no one really explained the importance of the newcomer award, or that loads of folk do a 45-minute show the year before their ‘debut’, or really any of the industry side of things in terms of getting yourself well-positioned with agents, PR etc to have a fighting chance of getting noticed.

To me this is (or at least was – a lot has changed since I started out) the case for most performers based outside of London, where almost every open spot seems to have more knowledge of the industry than some veterans of the club circuit.  

And in practice, it means a lot of well-intentioned newer acts - despite having loads of potential and having successfully plied their trades in Newcastle or Manchester or Glasgow - do their debuts to little or no fanfare (the phrase ‘if a tree falls in the woods’ springs to mind) and spunk their shot at being seen as ‘the next big thing’ because they weren’t based in London or spotted at a new act competition.  

• Marc Jennings: Bread And Circuses is on at Monkey Barrel 4 at 7.45pm

Published: 13 Aug 2025