At a festival where everyone’s losing money, and some can’t afford to come in the first place, how do you talk about your wealth and privilege? (Far less invite people to laugh about it?!) I’ve seen fringe shows address privilege in the past. Jack Whitehall, Ivo Graham, Will Smith (The Thick of It’s co-writer, not the slap-happy megastar): these acts broached their poshness, but seldom looked beyond the superficial class signifiers. And even then, they were doing so before the cost-of-the-fringe crisis reached, as it has in the last few years, boiling point.
To pull it off now, you’d need a lot of charm, or a conspicuous slice of moral seriousness. In his new show, I Deserve This (★★★★☆), Finlay Christie has one, and in hers, Olga Koch Comes from Money (★★★★☆), Koch has the other. I first encountered Christie at the fringe two years ago, as one of the first wave of stars arriving on stage from TikTok. He won the prestigious So You Think You’re Funny prize aged just 19, and amassed industrial quantities of online followers in his early 20s – so there was always something gilded about his rise, even before he introduced generational wealth into the mix.
