On Monday I traversed the igneous peaks of the Pentland Hills from Edinburgh to Stratford-upon-Avon, having finished a run of my current standup show, Second Best Living Standup After Bo Fucking Burnham, at the fringe, which isn’t as good as it used it be in the 1980s, back when I wasn’t so old and jaded and deaf.
There had been a lot of talk about how the fringe was finally finished. Accommodation was too expensive because of the privatisation of former student digs and the Airbnb explosion; a financial and cultural narrowing of access to the arts was reflected in a social and cultural narrowing of performers and audiences; big business had fully colonised the spaces between producer and consumer, and profits never trickled down; the cost of living discouraged risk; Brexit bureaucracy discouraged European talent and visitors; and cynical rightwingers turned up on cue to fan culture war flames. But all these criticisms were true of Britain generally, and the fringe was just another choking canary in the toxic national mine. And if I’m going to watch the Britain I loved expire slowly, I’d rather do it from the top of the Royal Mile in August, with a bottle of Orkney whisky in one hand and a flyer for a puppet show about tetraplegic sex workers in the other.
