EdFringe needs better management, not more money – this week in Your Views

It would seem that Shona McCarthy has spent most of her tenure fighting for funding that is completely unwarranted (Shona McCarthy: ‘Running the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society is not a job for the faint-hearted’).

She does not appear to understand that the public funding she talks about is subsidy and the Fringe Society does not need subsidising. It needs better management.

From 1970 onwards, 23 years after the first fringe took place, the society has existed to serve the venues and the participants as a classic membership organisation. Successive administrators (now grandly called CEOs), have been asked to provide three basic services: publicity, ticketing and advice. As the third full-time boss, I took on this mantle in the 1980s and now Tony Lankester, the 10th fringe supremo, will do pretty much exactly what I and successive bosses have done.

I attend the fringe every year. Nothing much has changed, although technology has changed ticketing and marketing forever, but the society boasts that it is a “small charity” when it employs more than 30 full-time salaried staff. What do they do? Not run a venue, not put on shows, not finance those shows, not arrange transport and accommodation, and not take any risks.

If I were Angus Robertson MSP or any of the public figures whom McCarthy and the Fringe Society have been bombarding with pleas to fund the fringe, I would ask why an organisation needs all these salaried people when 10 years ago they weren’t there. If I was a fringe venue or a fringe organisation putting on a show, I would be spitting with rage that the society has put itself ahead of the many people who actually create the body of the fringe.

For example, the society does not need a new home. The £7 million provided will almost certainly not be enough and McCarthy’s successors will be going cap in hand to the council or the Scottish government to ask for more money. It is a nonsense.

The fringe more or less paid for itself through the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. Deficits were covered by individuals and the fact is that people understood that it was a loss-making exercise. In my time, I’m pleased to say that we made surpluses each year to put towards the acquisition of the current high street premises and the old Wireworks building. The fringe may have been smaller than it is now, but it was still big.

The Fringe Society is not in a good place these days, and the beauty of having a new chief executive is that he can hopefully look afresh at the issues, some of which are real, but quite a few of which are exaggerated.

Michael Dale
Via thestage.co.uk

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