Edinburgh fringe veterans share survival tips with debutants
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- Frank Skinner told debutant Cecily Hitchcock that his 1987 fringe saw a biggest audience of nine people and one day with nobody at all, adding that the festival has become far more "professional" — comedians now openly hand out business cards, something that "in the 90s, you'd have been torn to pieces" for.
- Joe Pasquale is making his fringe debut in his 60s in "11½ Angry Men," a spoof of "12 Angry Men," after phoning the director to say "you do know I can't tap-dance?" and being told he had four months to learn.
- Stephen K Amos, with 23 previous fringes, said Edinburgh "feels even more corporate-y now" and that younger comics "can't afford it" because "everything's gone through the roof."
- Ania Magliano, an Edinburgh comedy award nominee, admitted to debutant Ele McKenzie that she still runs a Google Alert on her own name "which completely goes against my Zen Buddhist state," despite a toilet-meditating pre-show ritual.
- Sepideh Kaav, a Berlin-based Iranian comic, said performing sex material is easier in English than Farsi because "we don't have a comfortable, everyday way of talking about sex" in Persian.
- Fiona Allen, the Smack the Pony actor who took up standup in her 50s, urged Kaav to "just do you," calling Edinburgh "a club full of open-armed, like-minded people."
- Gregor Fisher, the Rab C Nesbitt actor, last appeared at the fringe 45 years ago — staging "The Servant of Two Masters" "out of the back of a van" when venues were still church halls.
Why it matters: The paired interviews reveal a concrete generational shift: across ages, performers agree the fringe has grown more corporate and costlier — Skinner noted that once-taboo business-card networking is now standard, and Amos said younger comics simply "can't afford it." For late starters like 60-something Pasquale (crash-course tap-dancing) and Kaav (tackling sexual taboos in her second language), that professionalization simultaneously widens who can debut and raises the financial bar for everyone else.
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