Edinburgh Fringe should be a place for artists to grow – but working class people are priced out

Before I get to my main point, allow me to ask a favour: Please do not spend the month of January complaining that it is going “so slowly”.

Same every year… whining that time isn’t moving fast enough, followed by February and the rest of the year teaching you a lesson by moving at a speed that carries you through to next Christmas. Enjoy the leisurely pace before the car chase to the end of another year, straight from “it’s so slow” to “where did it go?”.

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January is also the month where writers and performers start announcing their ambitions for the Edinburgh Fringe festival. I will be returning with two shows. Ice Cream for a Broken Tooth is about seeking the joys that carry us through the pain, based on a photograph of me at the age of three, sat with traditional ’70s bowl cut, slurping into an ice cream cone in the hope it would help me forget about smashing my front tooth on a stone step.

Three-years-old was my clumsiest of clumsy years. I tore out a tendon while playing kiss chase with the Baptist minister’s daughter, and I cut my chin open on the blunt edge of a sandpit. This sandpit would later startle me when I dug down and discovered a toad. It was as big as my head and I ran screaming.

(It wasn’t as big as my head, but in that moment of shock it could have been a Ray Harryhausen monster.)

My other show will be a jaunty saunter through the universe and the possibilities that our minds open up. 

I was excited by this, but then a sadness crept in. On social media, I saw an increasing number of performers declare that the Fringe was no longer a possibility, it was just too expensive. Rents have gone up and up. You may find you have to spend £3,000 for four weeks in an inauspicious room in an inauspicious flat. 

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While performers wish to create and experiment, the infrastructure wants to fleece them. This festival should be a chance for people to grow, to find new voices, but the financial risks are too much. This means more and more working-class voices are excluded. When voices are excluded, future possibilities decrease. How does art move and grow when many are fenced out of taking part.

There are brilliant ideas like the Free Fringe. You don’t have to pay to see the shows but you can donate at the end. When this first began, I noticed a return of some of the audiences who had been priced out, but all the other costs ramping up has seen them thin out again. 

This is not just a problem of the Edinburgh Fringe. It extends across the arts, where to get your first foot on the ladder you frequently need a safety net. Eventually, we’ll find ourselves in a world where the only voices are Jimmy Carr and Jack Whitehall. 

I am writing this so far ahead of time because action can surely be taken. When a city makes so
much money from an event, surely something can be created that leads to an increase in affordable accommodation? 

Of course, I am writing this for Big Issue, and unaffordable housing is an all-year-round problem. All those empty properties which could be made accessible for those living on the streets and refugees in overcrowded squalor, but where’s the financial reward?

Whatever the postwar dream was, whatever Nye Bevan, Jennie Lee and all the others hoped to build, we have returned to a world of robber barons. Tragically, the oily salespeople bamboozle enough of the public and are given so much airtime by a media that seems to have a crush on the likes of Farage, that we see achievement without cash prizes as madness. 

The impoverishment of society, not just in art but in our very standard of living, is something to do battle with. Let January and the rest of the year move slowly, let it give us the time to prepare and to fight against the bloodletting and the monochrome. 

Robin Ince is a comedian, broadcaster and poet. His book Bibliomaniac (Atlantic Books, £10.99) is out now. You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on Bookshop.org, which helps to support the Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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