This was my 15th year of attending the Edinburgh Fringe both as a punter and producer. Over the years, Funny Women has produced shows at all of the major venues, Fringe Central and the Free Festival. We have even performed on the concourse at Waverley Station!
This year’s festival celebrated an almost clean sweep of women winning awards with Heidi Regan winning the BBC New Comedy Award, Maisie Adam winning So You Think You’re Funny and both Hannah Gadsby and Natalie Palamides taking the accolades at the LastMinute.com Edinburgh Comedy Awards for Best Show and Best Newcomer respectively. Women were truly on top with even more brilliance and nominations for past Funny Women Awards winners and finalists, Jayde Adams, Desiree Burch, Elf Lyons, Lauren Pattison and Harriet Braine.
This year we set ourselves the monumental task of running 27 different shows a day at the Gilded Balloon Teviot. I am eternally grateful to Karen Rosie who took on this challenge and created a fantastic comedy hub with show previews, chats, panel discussions and performances from women right across the Fringe and beyond. We entertained almost 1,500 people and this was a fitting warm up for the forthcoming heats of the 2017 Funny Women Awards taking place throughout October and November. Watch this space for more details next week.
Karen Rosie, SMP Monica Lennon and me collecting for #PeriodPoverty
I love to see the happy faces of the bright shiny young things who are clearly experiencing the festival for the first time. They haven’t had their enthusiasm diminished, yet, and flyer with glee! That said, thanks to all the flyerers who didn’t ply me with unnecessary paper. There was a time when I used to take them because I have been in their shoes trying to sell our shows. I fully support the call for a flyer-free Fringe even though I know that this still plays a key role in encouraging the all-important walk-up an hour or two before your show. If it was banned city wide we would be forced to find alternative ways to market our shows.
I was told reliably that the good people of Edinburgh ‘hate’ the Fringe and indeed it does feel a little like that when major roadworks uproot the city for the whole of August rendering traffic to a standstill. Nobody minds walking but if you run the risk of being mowed down by frustrated driver or fall down a pothole, you begin to believe that the locals do hate us Fringers!
Yet there are benefits to those who live in the city hosting the world’s largest arts festival. Along with the hundreds of new, weird and wonderful shows that roll into town every August, so follow the big names and star attractions, who the locals get to see on their very own doorstep and often at very special rates. Surely the pay off is worth it?
This year’s Fringe celebrated its 70th anniversary and broke records with 53,232 performances of 3,398 shows in 300 venues with 2.7 million tickets issued. We can barely scratch the surface but we’ve written 40 reviews of shows performed by women. Given our limited resources, this is no mean feat and thanks to our website editor, Kate Stone, for curating the reviews and writing many of them herself. We’re always looking for new writers and reviewers so do get in touch if you want a platform to explore your writing skills.
I even got to spend time in the Scottish Parliament building as a guest of SMP Monica Lennon at the launch of her consultation into Period Poverty and our Funny Women Fest audiences donated over £500 in cash plus a sack full of sanitary products to support her cause which we gave to The Homeless Period and The Monthlies, part of Project Naked in Edinburgh.
I also produced a short mid-fest run of Ayesha Hazarika’s show State of the Nation, in the lovely Museum theatre run by Gilded Balloon. I learned all about ‘group think’ and the Barnett Formula and enjoyed watching her audiences roll about laughing with her tales from the pink bus of female politics and how she did Ed Milliband’s make-up. If you missed it Ayesha is continuing to tour the show around the country this autumn, more details here.
A strange highlight was our visit to the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary after Ayesha sprained her ankle badly. She fell downstairs while talking on the phone after celebrating her show’s four-star review in the Scotsman, proving that a spot of female multi-tasking doesn’t always pay off. The visit to hospital turned into a surreal version of 24 Hours in A&E meets Ab Fab as she was attended by two attractive junior doctors for whom Ayesha was their first ever comedy patient! Read her hilarious account of what happened in The Scotsman – after all she’s the funny woman, not me.
The Fringe is an event in several parts and has continued to expand and change over its 70 years. With the advent of social media and the focus for acts to get reviews in order to be taken seriously by venues and bookers, there is more than a whiff of the trade show about it all, particularly in the last week when the television executives roll into town for their own festival and the awards nominees are announced. The BBC even run their own condensed version of the Fringe from the grounds of the George Herriot School and there is a tremendous pressure on performers to get seen and heard on all the broadcasting platforms.
So a big shout out to all of those who we didn’t manage to review or see during the fest. We did our best and so did you! It is a tremendous achievement to take part in Edinburgh at whatever level. In the true sense of a ‘fringe’ none of the big stuff actually really matters. What does matter is that you did it, and so did we!
To nominate a show for our Funny Women Awards Best Show category, as seen or performed at the Edinburgh Fringe or any other festivals, please visit our Awards pages here. Deadline is 31st December 2017 and the winner will be announced at our charity gala final in March 2018. Date to be announced.
