Free radicals

For the past five years, a quiet sort of turf war has been simmering in Edinburgh. On the one side we have PBH’s Free Fringe, celebrated alternative to the commercial mainstream since 1996 and innovator of a radical economic model for performers, venues and audiences alike.

On the other we have its challenger, the Laughing Horse Free Festival which, in 2006, emerged as a splinter group after two years of collaboration with the Free Fringe, and quickly went on to outgrow its more established rival. The two factions remain obstinately separate even though, to the casual observer, they have virtually the same MO and a common goal at heart – free gigs for the crowds, free venues for the performers and a fair deal all round.

Whatever differences exist beyond that, their struggle for supremacy has seen the free scene explode of late, creeping into the cracks and corners of anywhere with a bar, a mic and a few boards to tread.

What began 15 years ago with a single show below the Canon’s Gait pub has now grown to monstrous proportions, and together the two comedy-led festivals comprise more than 11,000 performances of more than 650 shows across 45 venues. At this rate, it may not be too long before the free movement engulfs the Fringe.

“I can see the majority of the Fringe running under our principles at some date in the future,” says Free Fringe founder Peter Buckley Hill. “I don’t know what that date is – I am not Nostradamus. But it’s very much catastrophe theory, flipping from one stable state into another. And we will flip into the stable state whereby free shows will be the norm and paid-for shows the exception.”

Such a bold prediction is perhaps typical of the 63-year-old comic, an unapologetic idealist whose commitment to the free cause was commended in the form of the Edinburgh Comedy Awards 2009 panel prize.

“Of course famous people will still have the option of charging because the market will bear that charge,” he explains. “People who have worked hard to get to the top of the tree are entitled to reap the rewards of that. If the public are willing to pay £35 a ticket to see Ricky Gervais at the castle, no problem.”

His Laughing Horse counterpart Alex Petty is slightly more reserved, content with his camp's rapid year-on-year growth.

“We’re a couple of thousand performances up on last year, so we’ve made another big leap forward. I don’t see it letting up," he says.

Both festivals are moving in the same direction, albeit by slightly different routes: Petty adopts a slightly more pragmatic, hierarchised approach compared to the Free Fringe’s performer-driven kibbutz mentality.

“Peter’s method was very much a slightly anarchic way of whoever could do it all mucked in, everyone worked together and something happened as an end result," says Petty, remembering their attempt to run a venue together. “It wasn’t going to be a marriage made in heaven."

Even so, he contends that “it’s two different ways of achieving the same thing”. Buckley Hill, shall we say, speaks of the split with a little more acrimony.

But from where the public stands these festivals are in the same boat. Most do not care whether the Free Fringe allocates the same column inches to every act in its programme or whether the Laughing Horse charges performers £40 to guarantee equipment and publicity.

Petty and Buckley Hill’s main concern, then, must be to combat the idea that free means worthless. Blame consumerism for teaching us to equate cost with quality, but only the strength of a show can prove this deeply ingrained belief wrong. Unsurprisingly, each organiser insists his lineup is the product of rigorous vetting.

“If I should happen by ill chance to book a show that doesn’t make the standard, it reflects badly on all our other shows,” says Buckley Hill. “Therefore I don’t.”

It seems to be paying off. The festivals have grown not only in size but also in status and now the acts that make the cut stand a better chance than ever of getting noticed. Still, with the sheer volume of competition, Buckley Hill wouldn't count on it.

He says: “The Fringe is financed on dreams. People think they will go there and become famous, and they won’t. It’s as simple and as brutal as that.”

Try telling that to Imran Yusuf. The 31-year-old standup was rightly declared the breakthrough hit of last year’s free festivals—perhaps even the Fringe as a whole—after his became the first ever free show to score a best newcomer nomination. I speak to him the day before he flies out to play the new Mumbai Comedy Store, a gig he wouldn’t have dreamed of last summer.

It’s been a hell of a year and these days he mythologises his own rise to stardom: “I was the unknown guy who came in on the Free Festival, tried to sneak in under the radar just to learn his craft and then walked away with a nomination and all these fantastic reviews.”

Yusuf calls his backstory the perfect example of “failing forward” – an ideal autobiography title were it not already borrowed from a bestselling self-help book. He came to the Free Festival desiring nothing more than a training ground but, having underestimated just how far a room under a bridge and a little hype could go, he found himself thrust into the spotlight with a whole new hour to write.

“One day people were coming into my show and I could still pack out the room,” remembers Yusuf. “But the next day I remember walking towards my venue to perform my show and I could see a queue coming out of the building, and I’m like ‘I wonder what the hell’s going on in there’.”

Of course, you could say his fate had been decided even before he stepped off the train at Waverley. A successful audition for Michael McIntyre’s Comedy Roadshow, held shortly before his festival run, guaranteed he would not stay under the radar for long. Once news of his imminent TV break got out, word spread quickly among comedy fans, industry types, critics and the judges on the Foster’s panel.

Though his success was swift and perhaps inevitable, August was no easy ride for Yusuf. The Muslim comic with the Protestant work ethic says he played an incredible 101 shows in 25 days during last year’s festival.

“I totally believe in that adage of ‘build it and they will come’," he says. "It’s all about if you’ve got a dream and you work hard enough, anything’s possible.”

This year Yusuf plays in the major-league Pleasance Courtyard, but intends on "keeping it real" with some Free Festival guest spots. He is understandably a little high on his own success and so his glasses are perhaps of a rosier tint than others’. Several careers have been launched from free shows. Countless more have sunk without a trace.

But Yusuf has faith that the platform offered by the free festivals can lead to great things and feels his triumph could have paved the way for this.

“I sincerely hope that somebody from the Free Festival does it again this year," he says. "It’ll go to prove that making it as a comedian isn’t necessarily down to who you know and how much money you’ve got.”

The chances of a repeat may be slim, but if ever there was a time to see the next big thing while paying next to nothing, it is now.