PBH Free Fringe act sacrificed on a road paved with good Edinburgh intentions

Sit back with a good supply of tea for this blog. Extensive, exhaustive and possibly exhausting quotes are included. People not living inside the bubble of the Edinburgh Fringe might be advised to look elsewhere.

The whole Cowgatehead saga at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe is too complicated to go into yet again. Read past blogs for clarification but beware your head may explode with details.

Suffice it to say that the Freestival organisation believed they had rights to programme acts in the Cowgatehead venue at the Edinburgh Fringe and Peter Buckley Hill’s PBH Free Fringe ended up with those rights resulting in, by one estimate, an overall financial loss to performers of £77,000.

This could have been avoided if the various parties had met to sort it out and (in my personal opinion) PBH himself was a bit slippery though not telling any direct porkies with careful use of the present tense and an implication but not a statement that a meeting had never at any point been agreed with the Kenny Waugh involved in the fiasco. This being the Fringe, there were three people in one family all called Kenny Waugh.

Anyway…

On 18th August, I posted a blog headlined BAD SIGNS AT THE EDINBURGH FRINGE criticising the awful signposting at the PBH venue Cowgatehead as well as at C Venues and Just The Tonic’s Mash House and Caves.

I wrote:

The What’s On Where posters and signage in The Counting House is fairly good, which is not standard at the Fringe.

The Cowgatehead venue – fought over and proudly won by the PBH Free Fringe – is a disaster. The tiny doorway onto the street is barely visible and not even clearly identified as the Cowgatehead. Once inside, there is a vast bar and music area unrelated to the Free Fringe rooms and you have to spot that you have to double back, go down steps and then turn corners and go up stairs to get to the upper storeys which have venue spaces called things like UP2L. Even if you get vaguely near the rooms, the pieces of paper with their identification numbers/letters tend to be on the outside of the doors of the rooms so that, near performance times when doors are left open, they are hidden from sight.

This policy of putting names on the outside of doors which, when open, are completely invisible seems also to have been followed by C Venues at their Nova building – and probably in their other buildings, as C Venues have always been notable for appallingly bad or non-existent signage within their buildings. There are giant bleedin’ signs outside proclaiming what the venue is. Good. But, once inside, you have to guess, explore and try to find someone who knows which floor or room a show is in. There ARE some small notices, but hidden on walls amid an overwhelming visual patchwork of brightly-coloured show posters.

There should be a prize (perhaps there will be) for worst signage at the Fringe. Just the Tonic might win. As of last night, there appear to be no signs of any kind to any performance rooms in their Mash House venue. And the interior of their Caves venues – particularly for the shows they admirably ‘saved’ from the Cowgatehead debacle – are utterly incomprehensible. I half expect to find a Minotaur in there.

There was no reaction from C Venues or Just the Tonic.

But yesterday, Frank Galbraith of the PBH Free Fringe commented on one of my Facebook pages:

You need to go to specsavers you blind tnuc

and posted the photo below.

The venues on the Cowgate in Edinburgh (Photograph posted on Facebook by Frank Galbraith)

I replied:

“The narrow doorway on the left was not clearly signposted a the time I wrote the piece. It is now signed clearly with the door usually closed, giving no access to Cowgatehead. The entrance to Cowgatehead is the larger one on the right, clearly identified as St James’ Gate Brewery. To access Cowgatehead from this entrance, you have to go into the St James’ music space, turn sharp left, go down into a narrow stone gap with a piece of paper identifying it, do a 360 degree turn up stairs and then find the Cowgatehead rooms on the floors above the St James’ Gate space below which you initially went under.”

Full Facebook interchange

Frank replied: 

“I do have to admit that the external signage could have been more visible during the first few days. However, this hasn’t deterred on average 2000 people per day attending shows on the lower 2 levels and entering the venue via Cowgate. We also have a further 900 per day entering via George IV Bridge doors for the shows on the top level. Not quite the disaster you are attempting to portray.

I was a little bemused by this because I had said the signage not the number of punters was a disaster – and also very surprised by these very concrete audience figures in a venue with no visible close supervision. So I replied:

My admiration on the use of hidden security cameras filming and counting people entering the venues and on the stairway to Cowgatehead from the outer entrance. Must be a Fringe first. Genuine admiration for the use of the technology to gauge punter numbers.

Frank replied:

Haha.. you must know big brother is everywhere. Actually we take average performers audience numbers, we trust implicitly the reports our performers give us, then deduct 10%!!!

I have to say this to-and-fro did not change my opinion of the factual slipperiness of the PBH Free Fringe.

The PBH Free Fringe also has a highly dubious contract of untried legal validity which says acts performing in their venues cannot perform at free venues run by other organisations on the Fringe. This appears to be to be a clear restriction of the right to trade. Others may disagree.

I encountered the illiberal nature of this a few years ago when staging the annual Malcolm Hardee Comedy Awards at the Counting House venue. This venue is run not by the PBH Free Fringe but by the Laughing Horse Free Festival.

I wanted to end the 2-hour free show (in which all donations are given to charity with no deductions of any kind) by having The Greatest Show on Legs perform their signature Naked Balloon Dance. This act lasts 3 minutes. One of the long-time Greatest Show on Legs performers was that year performing his own show at a PBH venue and was told by PBH that, if he performed in the three minute act during the 2-hour Counting House charity show, then he would have his own show on the PBH Free Fringe terminated.

This seemed to be a bizarre combination of paranoia and staggering… erm, well… the opposite of laissez-faire liberalism.

That was then. This is now.

Well, what follows actually happened yesterday.

Since the start of the Fringe – over two weeks ago – comedian Stephen Carlin has been appearing as one of four performers in the play Routines at the Laughing Horse Free Festival venue Three Sisters at 3.45pm and in his own solo comedy show The Gospel According to Stephen at the PBH Free Fringe venue Canons’ Gait at 7.15pm.

This is the conversation I had with Stephen last night…

Stephen Carlin talked to me last night on neutral territory

“So what happened?” I asked.

“One of the flyering team for Routines flyered PBH,” he told me. “Then, when I was on stage performing Routines and my phone was off, PBH sent me a text message (at 3.50pm):

“Hello Stephen. I have in my hand a flier for a Laughing Horse show with your name and face on it, for a full run. Can you please explain? Thank you. PBH.

“There there was a second text message sent at 5.20pm saying:

“Hello Stephen. I have had no reply to my previous text message. It is clear from the evidence that you have broken the Free Fringe Ethos and Conditions by being a permanent and billed part of a Laughing Horse show. Your Free Fringe show is therefore terminated with immediate effect. Regards PBH.

“I did go down to the venue tonight,” said Stephen, “just to thank the staff and there were a few people who turned up who couldn’t get in last night because it was sold out. Last night, we had BBC 4 Extra recording it for a feature – They got probably my last ever PBH performance because I think you get excommunicated by PBH. It’s a religious-titled show – The Gospel According to Stephen – so, in a way, it seems only right I should get excommunicated.”

“What is the show about?” I asked.

“It’s a stand-up show basically inside my head. I get to be right for one hour. I am wrong for 23 hours of the day but for this one hour in the day I can give my thoughts on various aspects of life and be correct.”

“Have you any idea,” I asked, “how much it has cost you? – It’s complicated by the fact you were doing two shows.”

“I think it cost maybe about £1,500 or so overall.”

“And you’ve made some money back…”  I said.

“I haven’t broken even yet, so I was kinda hoping in the last week to break even.”

“What,” I asked, “have you been doing since you were excommunicated from the true path of light?”

“Since then,” said Stephen, “I’ve had offers from Laughing Horse, Freestival and Bob Slayer. So, from tomorrow, I’m going to move the show to Bob Slayer’s Heroes of the Fringe at The Hive. But I can’t perform it on Friday and Saturday, because the room’s already booked then.”

“Same time of day?” I asked.

“No. the show at the Hive is at 10.10pm; the Canons’ Gait one was at 7.15pm.”

“Can you,” I asked, “put stickers on your flyers with the new place and time?”

“I think the good old stapler is going to have to come out.”

“Are you a member of Equity?” I asked.

“No.”

“The PBH contract,” I suggested, “surely has to be illegal because it’s a restriction of trade. Any opinions about PBH? I think it’s a case of the road to Hell being paved with good intentions. A good man who wanted to help the acts who ends up financially screwing them.”

“I think,” said Stephen, “in many ways it’s indicative of a lot of revolutions. It starts off idealistic but then you get to a point where people start getting cut out for breaching parts of dogma and then the people it has set out to help are actually being badly affected. The System starts coming before the people. I think it’s a well-trodden historical path.”

“Well,” I said, “given the Animal Farm analogy, is it the case that PBH is standing on two feet now?”

“I don’t think anybody can sue us for that,” said Stephen. “He is standing on two feet. The question is, if I speak to other blogs, would you denounce me?”

“I haven’t yet started a religion,” I said.

The god-like comedian Ken Dodd is more mugger than con man + he got a standing ovation in Bournemouth

Morecambe and Wise were not famous.

Yes, they were justifiably famous in the UK. But go to some village in western China and ask them who Morecambe and Wise were.

M&W are and always were total unknowns except in the British Isles.

Fame is relative and mostly regional.

To save my life, I could not tell you who the world water ski champion is. But presumably he or she is a Big Name if you follow water skiing.

The world is full of champions, each famous in their own little world.

I see quite a lot of club comedy and what is still called alternative comedy. Some of the acts are called comedy stars; some may even think they are stars. Audiences even flock to and fill large venues to see some of these people who have appeared in TV panel shows.

But they are not big stars even in the UK. They are minor and transient cults with a few disciples. Admittedly they have more disciples than Jesus did when he started but, just because you can get more than twelve people to listen to you in a room above a pub in Camden Town, don’t start thinking you are more famous than the Son of God.

Unless you are known and regarded in awe by a random 50-year-old housewife in a bus queue in Leamington Spa, you are not famous in UK terms. If you can fill a big venue at the Edinburgh Fringe with 23 year old fans for 27 nights, you are not famous. You are a very minor cult.

Last night, I saw Ken Dodd’s show Happiness at The Pavilion Theatre in Bournemouth. Ken Dodd is unquestionably famous in the UK and the venue was filled with a well-heeled middle-of-the-road, middle class Middle England audience of the type TV commissioners mystifyingly ignore. This audience was the great TV-viewing audience en masse on a rare trip out to see a live show.

Upcoming shows at The Pavilion include The Gazza and Greavsie Show, Roy Chubby Brown, Joe Pasquale, Jethro and Jim Davidson. Never, never, never underestimate the Daily Mail. Their readers are the mass audience. Admittedly Dylan Moran and Russell Kane also have upcoming shows at The Pavilion, but the phrases “sore thumbs” and “stand out” spring to mind.

London-based American comedian Lewis Schaffer has a routine in which he says his ex-manager told him he will never become famous unless, like a currently ‘famous’ alternative comedian, he can be a true professional and tell the same jokes in every show and repeat each show exactly.

Last night, the first half of Ken Dodd’s 5-hour show proved the danger of being too experienced and too professional a performer if you are on a long tour.

There was an audibility problem.

This was partly because the sound system at The Pavilion was occasionally indistinct – certainly where I was sitting, centre right in the audience – and partly because Ken Dodd, after 55 years in showbiz and on his seemingly endless UK tour, has been doing the same routines and telling the same stories for too long. He came on stage and spoke what, for the first part of the show seemed to be a script which he had got so used to he didn’t actually perform it: he just threw the words out. He galloped and gabbled through the words and syllables with the result perhaps a quarter of what he was saying was indecipherable.

And this was an audience with possible inbuilt hearing problems where I half expected the colostomy bags to break during the show to create a tsunami that could have washed the entire population of Bournemouth into the English Channel.

When an established act, instead of saying “Ladies and gentlemen” says “lay-ge-me” and all the other words and phrases are gabbled and elided indistinctly in much the same way, he is not performing an act, he is going through the motions on autopilot. He has heard the jokes 1,000 times; the audience has not (well, not most of them).

His saving grace was an astonishing gag rate of perhaps one potential laugh every ten seconds. And the material is gold. You couldn’t go wrong with that material. But Doddy was getting laughs because the jokes (when heard) were good, not because of any technical skill in the delivery.

There are very few successful gag tellers in modern alternative comedy – Jimmy Carr, Milton Jones and Tim Vine are exceptions not the rule. Most successful alternative comedians nowadays tell stories: not necessarily funny stories, but stories told funny.

Ken Dodd mostly told gags in the first half and funny stories in the second half (in which he found his feet more). But it struck me that his slightly more old-fashioned (or let’s say traditional) approach was very similar to inexperienced circuit comics today.

He told stories as if they were gags, with token links between each story, but with no over-all arc. If he told ten stories, the first and second might have a token link and the seventh and eighth might have a token link, but there was no over-all progression, no shape, no thread to the stories. So the over-all effect was like getting beaten round the head with gags by a mugger for five hours, not drawn into a personal fantasy world by a con man, which is what a stand-up comedian is.

It struck me Doddy’s unlinked gag structure was very like comics new to the current comedy circuit who have some material but can’t stitch it into a unitary act. They can do 10 or 15 or 20 minutes but are not yet capable of putting on a 60 minute Edinburgh Fringe show.

I suppose the transition from beating people into submission with barrages of gags rather than bringing them into your own personal world with smoothly-linked stories is a relatively recent development which Doddy has no need to embrace because he has so many gags and stories which he can throw at the audience from his years of experience.

Because he is so experienced and so good, I could not tell how much of the second half was scripted and how much he was just plucking and throwing in gags and stories from a mental storehouse.

One ad-lib which surely must have been planned and, indeed, ‘planted’ was a piece of banter with the audience in which Dodd asked a woman “How many children do you have?”

“Eight!” came the unexpected reply.

Dodd professed bewilderment at this and meandered for a couple of sentences about her husband, then asked:

“Have you sewn up the gap in his pyjamas yet?…. (pause)… You know what they say… A stitch in time saves…” (Immediate audience laughter – though strangely not as much as it deserved)

This cannot possibly have been an ad-lib. It had to have been planted in the audience because he feigned bewilderment at the initial reply of “Eight,” which he would not have done in the way that he did if it were not a lead-up to the punchline.

There were also glimpses of an unexpected (to me) Ken Dodd – a ventriloquist act with a Diddy Man doll that almost verged on being post-modernist and a sequence in which he was doing a series of very passable regional accents and which went into a whole non-Ken-Dodd realm.

Small numbers of the audience left during the single interval – including the friend I went with, who had been exhausted by the first two and a half hours – she went paddling in the sea by the pier and then found a strange Greek Orthodox priest intoning his way through a Paschal Celebration in a small chapel watching by an old woman with a bell and an old man in a shabby grey suit. He had started at 10.00pm – about halfway through Doddy’s show – and was still intoning, watched by his two fans, at 15 minutes past midnight after Doddy’s show had ended and we went to see if he was still going strong.

Whether Christianity or Ken Dodd’s shows will last longer is a moot point, but they probably have the same fans.

At the end of Ken Dodd’s Happiness show, people rose from their seats to leave while still clapping and, partially blocked from leaving by other people possibly with mobility problems, this turned into a standing ovation and a sudden flutter of flashes as people with mobile phones snatched quick photos of the god-like Doddy on stage.

The standing ovation in both the stalls and the balcony was warm and heartfelt and passionate but perhaps was more for being a national institution than for the show itself.

It was an event as much as a show.

Much like Jesus preaching to the converted, in retrospect, it will be loved, treasured and much talked about and the Master’s fame will spread, though perhaps neither further nor wider nor to western China.