The Scotsman Bulletin with Arts Correspondent, Brian Ferguson. Tuesday August 08 2023
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00:00 Hello and welcome to the Scotsman's Daily Bulletin for Tuesday. I am Alan Young, Deputy
00:11 Editor of the Scotsman, coming to you from the Scotsman's George Street offices in the
00:15 heart of festival land, sun-bathed festival land today. We have our arts correspondent,
00:22 Brian Ferguson, on hand to tell us all the latest. Hi Brian.
00:26 Good morning.
00:27 Let's have a look at the front page first as ever. We're heavy on the festival as you
00:34 might expect. We have our 24-page, unmissable daily supplement in today and we also feature
00:42 the festival on our front page picture. The lead story today, however, is around controversy
00:50 on the government's asylum policy. It emerged yesterday from Glasgow City Council that the
00:57 Home Office had made inquiries about citing an asylum seekers barge in Glasgow. That has
01:04 not gone down well. It has been rejected out of hand by the council leader. You can read
01:10 all about that from our Westminster correspondent, Alex Brown, today. And also to flag we have
01:19 a Scottish rugby international, Fraser Brown, starting his new column in today's paper.
01:25 It is well worth a read in the run up to the World Cup. So, Brian, we're well into the
01:35 first week proper of the festivals now. You've got a really interesting story today that
01:41 I want to talk about first from the Head of Comedy Awards.
01:46 Yeah, so the Edinburgh Comedy Awards, one of many elements of the festival's landscape
01:51 that was looking very shaky very recently, actually. In common with a lot of different
01:57 events, the Festival of Fireworks being a really good example of something where a sponsorship
02:03 deal has come to an end. The whole post-COVID landscape for sponsorship deals is very different.
02:09 It's very different to get cast sponsorships now, apparently. The days of companies, I
02:15 think, putting in a lot of money to be a headline sponsor or something, apparently, are over
02:21 really, certainly in the festival's landscape. So, yeah, they had a big problem towards the
02:26 end of the year and the Edinburgh Comedy Awards have pretty much been organised by one woman
02:29 since the mid-80s, Nika Burns, who is a really successful West End theatre producer. But
02:37 she, since 1984, just a couple of years after they started, she's directed the Edinburgh
02:44 Comedy Awards. An incredible thing about them is that pretty much every comedian or entertainer
02:50 who's come out of the fringe in the last 40 years has been through the world of comedy,
02:59 basically, and a lot of them have been either nominated or won those awards. And, yeah,
03:05 basically, I think the comedy industry, the comedy world was pretty shocked at the idea
03:10 that these awards could suddenly vanish when Nika raised the alarm, maybe a little bit
03:14 belatedly at the end of May, to say, "These awards are at risk. We don't have a sponsor
03:19 for this year." So, previously, she's put her own money into it to keep these awards
03:25 going. There were a couple of years previously when they didn't have a sponsor and basically
03:29 she just said, "Look, I can't do that anymore post-COVID." And the way, quite clever in
03:35 a way, that she's managed to restructure it is to try and get these three different awards.
03:40 There's the main comedy prize, there's a prize for best newcomer and a panel prize, which
03:45 is pretty open to something that the judges feel is worth recognising. Those three elements
03:51 are different sponsors for. And one of them, the panel prize, is actually going to be named
03:56 after Victoria Wood, who, again, I didn't realise she'd been at the Fringe, but yeah,
04:01 she was there in the mid-70s and again in the early 80s with her own stand-up show,
04:06 when Nika Burns was saying she was, her memory is that she was the only stand-up, actually,
04:12 only female stand-up that was at the festival that year, which is quite incredible when
04:17 you think back, it wasn't really that long ago. So, her foundation is sponsoring the
04:21 best newcomer prize, so it'll be a big honour for whoever gets that prize. And again, that's
04:28 really, Nika was saying, they're really looking for really innovative acts to recognise with
04:36 that prize. But the big thing that she was saying I thought was of interest was, if there's
04:41 a big comedy alumni out there, a lot of whom are hugely successful at making, touring all
04:48 over Britain and further afield, who've appeared at the Fringe, every big-name comedian, and
04:55 she was really, Phoebe Waller-Bridge was at the launch of, they always have a comedy industry
04:59 lunch on the opening weekend to get things going, but Phoebe Waller-Bridge was there
05:05 again, she was there last year to support those awards and again, raised her profile.
05:13 And Phoebe Waller-Bridge had actually, through her own foundation, had put some money into
05:18 a new award with the Fringe Society, which again, they launched in the spring and it
05:24 really gave, I think the amount of money was about 100 grand, but it gave 50 Fringe acts
05:29 a little bit of financial support to enable them to put on shows. And a couple of grand
05:34 really these days is pretty much a lifeline and can make the difference between a show
05:39 actually coming to Edinburgh or not. So, Nika was really just trying to get the message
05:45 out to other performers that, you know, she was saying if you can get a bit of momentum
05:51 built up and you can get more and more Fringe alumni, not just comedy performers, but obviously
05:58 other people have gone into different forms of writing and performing as well, if you
06:03 could get them to put in a little bit of money each, it wouldn't break their banks, but it
06:07 would make a huge difference. So, it's the kind of thing, hopefully, might have a bit
06:11 of momentum for future years because, you know, one of the definite challenges, you
06:17 know, post COVID is trying to make the finances of coming to the Fringe stack up. By all accounts,
06:23 they are a hell of a lot more difficult. And I thought a lot of that is down to the price
06:28 of accommodation, no doubt about it. That's the number one issue. And, you know, there's
06:32 a lot of speculation that it's going to get more difficult with some of the new housing
06:37 regulations coming in.
06:42 We know it's, you know, it's very challenging to put on a show like that, the Fringe, and
06:47 we've seen the stories over the past week. They're not all well attended either. It's
06:52 a hard shift for people starting out. But the funding angle is a bit of a theme, again,
07:00 of this year's festivals, really. And it's not just the Fringe. We had the International
07:05 Festival over the weekend also saying that government support is being cut by 40% in
07:13 real terms.
07:14 Yeah, 40% in real terms. I mean, it's quite a tricky position for them to come out because
07:20 they are the highest funded arts organisation in Scotland. It's part of the creative Scotland
07:27 funding pot. Obviously, the galleries and the museums, the National Galleries and Museums
07:33 and the national companies like the National Theatre of Scotland, the Scottish Opera and
07:37 Scottish Ballet all have kind of dedicated ring fence funding. Creative Scotland have
07:41 to go into the mix with everyone else, but, sorry, the International Festival have to
07:45 go into the mix. But they do get substantial support. However, that support has not really
07:51 gone up in the last 15 years. And it is a problem because the costs of everything are
07:57 going, have gone and are going through the roof.
08:00 You know, the simple fact is that arts funding in Scotland has not kept pace with inflation
08:06 at a time when there's only more and more demand. You know, new things are popping up,
08:13 new companies are being set up, there's new events all over Scotland. There's another,
08:17 Creative Scotland have literally just announced the opening of a new kind of application process
08:24 for funding, which is going to be really crucial for the next few years. And there's no more
08:30 money. As we sit at the moment, there's no more money available for that. Creative Scotland
08:35 actually had their funding cut last Christmas and then hastily reinstated after the backlash
08:40 which the unions got involved with. So there's no more money on the table, but there's increasing
08:45 demand for funding at a time when everyone's costs are going through the roof. So pretty
08:49 much anyone running a venue or event or festival or company in Scotland is scratching their
08:56 heads working out how they're going to make things stack up without any actual guarantee
09:00 that they're going to have any long-term funding because Creative Scotland has warned that
09:07 people could fall out of this funding regime. So that is a kind of really interesting backdrop
09:11 to the festivals at the moment. So it may appear that venues and events, some of them
09:18 certainly have been doing very well, there's loads of sold out events in the city, you
09:21 know, that maybe masks the kind of anxiety and concern behind the scenes. But the tricky
09:28 balancing act for anyone running a company or event or festival is, well, how do they
09:32 go about trying to persuade the government to increase their support? So you can either
09:38 do it, as I would call it, soft diplomacy and do it behind the scenes, trying to gently
09:43 lobby as much as possible. Or if you don't think you're getting far enough quick enough,
09:47 you have to go public, which is what the International Festival did at the weekend. And again, there's
09:52 been a bit of a mixed reaction to that. Some people are, you know, quite rightly pointing
09:58 out they do get the biggest subsidy of any event in Scotland. But as Nicola Benedetti
10:03 and Fran Heggy, the Chief Executive, pointed out last week, you know, they've been asked
10:08 to do more with less money effectively. And again, that's not just something that's happened
10:12 post COVID, it's over a very prolonged period of time. So there are big questions for the
10:17 government to answer. And I think we need to see some movement, I think, in the next
10:23 few months, or there's going to be some really difficult times for people.
10:26 Thanks very much. Brian, that story is going to run. It's going to be really interesting
10:31 to hear what Hunter Yousaf in particular makes of it. Just before we sign off, Brian, final
10:37 word from you?
10:38 Yeah, it's a great opportunity for people to get a bargain at the Finge today, because
10:42 tickets are two for one all day today.
10:47 Please keep an eye on Scotsman.com throughout the day where we'll have all the very latest
10:52 festival news along with everything else, including those crucial exam results, which
10:58 have just been released. If you can, please do subscribe so you will not miss a thing.
11:05 And if you're out and about today, it is a beautiful day in Edinburgh. Please do pick
11:10 up a copy of the paper from me and from Brian. It's bye for now.
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