The real danger to the Edinburgh fringe isn’t the big venues, it’s the BBC

After reading one of our greatest living stand-up comedians Stewart Lee’s annual mawkish piece for the Guardian about the commercialisation of the fringe – and how it was much better when Edinburgh consisted of shows like Professor Nutty’s Racist Flea Circus played to three people in an abandoned shoe at the bottom of Arthur’s Seat – I felt an urge to respond.

Stu – (I can call him Stu because he’s done about 5 gigs for me, I’ve interviewed him a couple of times and if I see him in the street he will say hi. Actually, saying that, since he’s had his deserved critical acclaim and commercial success, the last time I saw him he ignored me) – Stewart makes some good points, but he ignores the real danger to the fringe – the BBC.

Lee’s main gripe is aimed at the so-called big four venues and the Etonian cabal who run them. I dislike the big four as much as the next man, but they’ve been at the fringe for over 25 years (Underbelly 12.) They are here to stay, get over it. The real problem is not the big four or Eton. And unless someone wants to burn Eton down and throw all its students into the sea, we are going to have to put up with its alumni continuing its stranglehold over British society – David Cameron, Boris Johnson, Bear Grylls, Prince William...

Lee mentions the cost of performing at some of the venues as upwards of £10,000 (the figure is closer to £6,000 and venue hire makes up very little of that). One of the biggest costs is actually accommodation. Scottish landlords charge a month’s London rent for a week to live in a city with worse weather than the moon.

Most of the big four venues actually do a pretty fair deal apart from forcing you to advertise in their brochure. If you are arrogant and deluded enough to think – after working the open mic circuit for a year with one appearance on Russell Howard’s Good News – that £2000 is a worthwhile amount to spend on PR, then you deserve the debt you find yourself in. Show business is not a charity vanity project. You don’t book the London palladium and ask them to cover your losses if your show is rubbish and no-one comes, so why should the big four? That’s not reality, unless you are playing the Stand it would seem (“The fiercely independent Stand underwrites all its shows, so performers lose nothing,” writes Lee).

Edinburgh offers a platform to develop, become a better performer and build an audience. It is the ultimate meritocracy: the better your show is, the more people come and the more money you make. You can be in the back room of a pub on the Free Fringe or at the Pleasance, managed by Avalon or some bloke who operates out of a public toilet in Peckham, if your show is shit no-one is going to come and see it. So either stay at home or give me £6,000 and I’ll make you a star (1).

What Lee fails to mention was that last year the BBC re-launched their Edinburgh presence by moving their operations out of the Pleasance and setting-up a full time comedy venue to house the live recordings of some of its flagship comedy shows, masterclasses and Q&A’s with TV stars. All totally free.

For £12 a ticket you can see their long running mixed-bill BBC Comedy Presents. At the risk of never getting my own BBC series – something that seems unlikely after 10 years of failing to be called into a meeting, let alone receiving a reply to any of my proposals (2) – the BBC venue is wrong and is a real danger to the fringe.

With over 100 shows scheduled by the BBC, several pages of listings and advertising in the fringe brochure, this is taking thousands of audience members away from other shows at the fringe. Performing to no people is not a show, it’s mental illness.

The BBC’s defence is that they film and record shows for broadcast and this advertises the fringe – but instead of showcasing innovative fringe shows, it produces Q&A’s with bloated TV stars and soulless mixed-bill nights in a marquee more akin to hosting a wedding reception.

And who’s paying for the privilege? The acts, producers and promoters who produce the majority of the fringe’s output. If Rupert Murdoch set up a Sky venue and gave all the tickets away for free there would be calls for it to be shut down and a Levenson-style enquiry into why a massive corporation set up a free venue that took tickets away from the fringe. But because it’s Auntie it feels like their free comedy is a reward for our license fee, when in fact it’s slowly eroding performers’ audiences.

The BBC should be covering the festival as a broadcaster the same way it covers Glastonbury or the Olympics. There is no imagination in their programming despite the fringe having one of the most inventive programmes possible. This should a) be reflected in the BBC venue (which it isn’t) and b) be represented in the BBC’s broadcast output (which it isn’t).

Essentially the BBC in Edinburgh becomes a rival promoter putting on free shows with TV names and – worst of all – charging for their mixed-bill shows that take further money out of the fringe economy (the equivalent of two tickets for two unknown shows). With many acts producing their own shows, appearing on the Free Fringe or being backed by a small promoter they are never going to be able to compete with this.

So Stewart Lee is right that the fringe has changed but has it changed for the better or the worse? I think the spirit of the fringe is stronger than any corporate entity but you have to look a little harder for it. Artists being abused is a dance as old as time – but that’s not to say I agree with it. The BBC should have a presence at the fringe, but in its current form it takes more from the fringe than it gives back. Right that’s Edinburgh sorted, now can I have my own TV show and a prime slot at BBC Comedy Presents?

(1) I say this to a lot of the young female performers

(2) Can someone forward this sentence to the head of comedy at the BBC?

Guest blog by Harry Deansway, comedy writer, producer & promoter

Sport at the heart of revolution

Interview with double Olympic gold-medalist Alberto Juantorena

On a recent visit to a North London primary school, Cuban Olympic legend Alberto Juantorena was asked by a pupil how much his gold medals were worth. Nobody had asked Juantorena the question before and, unsurprisingly, he didn’t know the answer – but the exchange gave a fascinating insight into the contrasting British and Cuban mentalities. Whilst Britain racks up an £11bn bill for the Olympic games, Cuba continues to punch above its weight in the field of sport despite a relentless blockade. As Britain’s Olympic bill grows, Juantorena observes wryly, “with a smaller budget you could do fantastic things as long as you organise and have government support”.

Alberto Juantorena remains the only athlete to win both the 400m and 800m Olympic titles. At the 1976 Montreal games, Juantorena – also known as El Caballo (the Horse) – achieved the unique feat of winning golds in both sprint and middle-distance events. He smashed the 800m world record and, in doing so, redefined middle-distance running.

Despite his unequalled sporting achievements, Juantorena remains best known in Britain for being the subject of one of the most infamous commentary gaffes. As Ron Pickering exclaimed as El Caballo galloped to victory in 1976, “there goes Juantorena down the back straight, opening his legs and showing his class”.

Standing at well over six foot tall, Juantorena is an imposing figure. Affable and with contagious enthusiasm, he is a giant both on and off the field. Having served in Cuba’s National Assembly for over a decade, he is now Vice-President of INDER, the Cuban Institute of Sport, as he seeks to nurture the next generation of Cuban sporting heroes.

Originally a promising basketball player – representing Santiago province and the national team – Juantorena was encouraged into track and field by his Polish coach Zygmunt Zabierzowski after running the 400m in 51.5 seconds whilst wearing basketball shoes. In 1972, at the age of 22, he made his Olympic debut in Munich where he was narrowly defeated in the semi-finals. For the next two years he remained undefeated and – after recovering from two foot operations – emerged as the 400m favourite in Montreal.

Success in the 400m seemed inevitable – until the indomitable Zabierzowski had another brainwave:

"Three months before Montreal he said ‘you will run the 800m in the next Olympics’ and I said ‘No way man, you’re crazy’. Do you know why? Because I was afraid. I knew that the 800m was the first event and I was worried that I’d be tired after the first race and wouldn’t win anything in the 400m either." 

Zabierzowski set about building Juantorena’s confidence and – at a training camp in Italy – asked him to pace the first lap for two teammates who still needed the 800m qualifying time. He found the first lap so easy that he completed the second and chalked up the second fastest time in the world that season. 

The only person to run faster was Rick Wolhuter of the United States who dismissed the unknown Cuban’s chances in an interview with the French newspaper L’Equipe: “I don’t think he’ll be able to make three rounds in Montreal”.

“They didn’t know about me,” beams Juantorena with a smile as wide as his gigantic stride. “I didn’t have any history in the 800m and from a psychological point of view that gave me an advantage over them”.  

"We changed the strategy of the 800m. Before the first lap was 52 or 53 seconds because they ran the 800m and 1500m. Because I was a 400m runner I could do the first lap in 44.6 seconds, and I was walking! The first lap was faster than ever."

Juantorena broke Marcello Fiasconaro's world record and became the first 800m Olympic champion from a non-English speaking country. “No-one thought the tall guy with the basketball socks and the big hair could win. Nobody cared about me and suddenly boom, I smashed it”. Three days later he sprinted to 400m glory and became the first person to compete on every day of the athletics programme.

Returning to Cuba a national hero, he was greeted at Havana airport by Fidel Castro.

“Fidel gave me a big hug. He congratulated me and called me his colleague. I asked him why he called me a colleague and he said that he also ran the 800m. He told me about how he ran in the 1946 college competition in Havana. He had a magazine from the Jesuit school and there he was winning the gold medal! I was very proud to have a colleague like Fidel”

As we sit chatting, Juantorena removes one of his gold medals from its original commemorative case. It is the first time it has left Cuba since 1976 and the other remains on permanent public display in a museum in Havana.

“This belongs to the Cuban people, not to me. It belongs to everyone: the man who prepares the track, my doctors, my coach, my team and my Commander Fidel – but also to every single Cuban who strives on behalf of our country”.

It is a sobering and inclusive sentiment which has underpinned Juantorena’s whole life. He spent the summer after his Olympic triumph volunteering on a sugar plantation. “I wanted to cut cane, support the workers and help the economy,” he declares proudly. “The first voluntary work in Cuba was created by Che Guevara and it is part of our tradition”. 

Juantorena sees himself as both a product and champion of the Cuban revolution. “When the revolution triumphed, the opportunity to participate in sport opened up to everyone regardless of religion, gender or race,” he reflects.

“Before 1959, professionalism was the only way to compete in sport. You couldn’t go to sport installations because they were private. But look at the change! Fidel abolished both these things – professionalism and private institutions – and put all those facilities in the hands of the people”.

The revolution brought a new mentality and new coaches to Cuban sport. Before 1959, there were only 800 physical education teachers, now there are 78,000. “We had only one Olympic champion – and he lived and trained in France,” says Juantorena. “Now we have 62”. All this has been achieved despite an unrelenting and pernicious blockade.

Juantorena – who has been denied a visa to the US on four separate occasions for being a “danger” to the American people – laments the debilitating effects of the blockade. “We cannot buy anything from the United States. If we want to buy a javelin, shoes or rice, we need to go via another country like China or Pakistan. It would be cheaper to go to the United States, but we cannot do it.”

“Two of our pole-vaulters – Lázaro Borges and Yarisley Silva – need equipment, but the pole they need is produced in the United States by UCS Enterprise and we cannot trade with them. Do you know how I got them five poles each for a tournament last month?” he asks.

“I called a friend of mine in Mexico who was a former president of their association. I asked him to speak to UCS – even though they are friends of mine – and we had to get the poles via Mexico.”

“We practise sport in Cuba with a real lack of everything. Almost nothing. Our infrastructure is not sophisticated. Our resources – from an economic point of view – are not high. But we have been successful because we focus on children. We pay a lot of attention to physical education which is compulsory in school from primary to university. And we produce athletes like a windmill – we never stop. Why? Because if you have mass participation, if you have 2.5m students – from primary to university – practising sport at least three times a week, then you can see the talent, select it and nurture it. It’s easy.”

The organisation of physical education in Cuba is multi-layered. Primarily, it focuses on mass participation and, as a sub-product, it seeks to develop champions. Mass participation in sport is a key pillar of Cuba’s exceptional health system.

“Sport is a key benefit to people’s health. It’s better than medicine and it’s also good to socialise, interact with friends and to teach people to think collectively. It’s about providing tools for people to improve their own health. If people can reduce their blood pressure then it reduces the risk of heart attack. Mass programmes of activity can help people with diabetes or obesity.”

Playground sport in Cuba

Juantorena – in his role as Vice-President of INDER – is a sporting visionary focussed on equal and inclusive participation. “We promote sport not to promote competition, but to increase life-expectancy. We aim to increase the health of the people first – but, as a consequence of this, you can develop talent and win medals.” 

At the 2004 Olympics in Athens, Cuba won nine gold medals – the same as Britain – despite being a sixth of the size. Furthermore, whilst more than one third of Great Britain’s Olympic team in 2012 will have been privately educated and rely on private sponsorship to compete, Cuba’s emphasis on inclusion and mass participation has made sport accessible to all. 

“All the sports people in Cuba are students. They are studying different subjects at university such as physical education, engineering or journalism. It’s very different to everywhere else because our sponsor is the state. The state provides revenue, budget, materials, equipment, medical care, education, flight tickets, food, everything. It’s a completely different approach”

So how well would Britain do if we adopted the same sporting principles as Cuba? “Really, really well,” admits Juantorena. “Because you have the resources and the infrastructure we don’t. The British love sport. My advice is always focus on physical education, not just for future champions, but for the whole country. Everyone might not be a champion, but they will be the politicians, teachers and doctors of tomorrow.”

This interview originally appeared in CubaSi magazine

Media Watch: The Anti-Islam Bias

Iran is trending on Twitter. It must be true.

While the Arab Spring was a democratic triumph, the resulting wave of Islamic conservatism seems troubling. Reading media reports describing proposed Egyptian laws allowing sex with dead wives and plans to destroy the Pyramids one can’t help feel that the previous regimes had a place in suppressing this Islamic madness.

That may be the case but neither of the above stories are actually true – and yet they were still reported as fact around online and print media. Once the truth behind the stories came to light, most media outlets pulled the story – but the damage had already been done.

These stories typify a trend of spurious anti-Islamism which dominates Western media, and it occurs for a number of reasons:

1.       Lazy Research

Decreasing resources and corporate competition mean that journalists are under increasing pressure to churn out more copy. This “churnalism” results in little or no research time and therefore uncorroborated falsehoods are often reported as fact. In a market where stories are the product, it’s cheaper to buy in from public relation companies or reprocess press releases from the news wire than spend precious resources on producing well-researched original content. A well-researched story is likely to be less sexy – and less saleable – than something specifically designed by a corporate PR company to be emotive.

2.       Bias

The first rule of PR is to “be the journalist”. When working for the Labour government I attended constituency training on how to increase your vote. The talk was given by Tom Watson who stood out by defying the national trend to hold his vote in 2005. Tom explained that spamming the local press with stuff you wanted to get in will get you nowhere as you are asking the journalist to find value in your message and extract it by rewriting it. Instead you evaluate the saleability of the story yourself and write it for them in that vein. If you are successful they will print it pretty much word for word and whack a journalist's name on it. This is ideal since you are getting your message through intact in a way that looks like ‘objective’ journalism. The media thus has become middle ground for competing PR interests who win and lose depending on the market value of their message. You can increase your chances of getting in by appealing to the known bias of a media source or by democratisation.

3.       Democratic Journalism

The rise of social media has taken the guesswork out of determining the market value of news items. If a story is trending then it obviously has appeal and can be reprocessed and sold to a different audience. The very fact that it has been popular creates safety in numbers as if you print the story and it is disproved you are not alone.

Let’s take the above example of a Daily Mail article that was debunked.  They first published the article on having sex with dead wives on the 25th of April – but the correction exposing the hoax didn’t appear until over a month later even though the story was contradicted within a day (as soon as the Egyptian authorities could respond). The reader comments underneath show the reaction to this lie. I wonder how many people who read the article saw the later correction? Why, also, does the story link to other articles about Muslim women’s rights rather than other false stories?

The journey of the story is fairly typical. It was seeded and propagated through Twitter (democratic journalism) and at no point did the Daily Mail check with the Egyptian Parliament to see if this proposed law was on the table (lazy research). And why would they bother? It fits nicely with the Mail’s constant bashing of Muslims (bias). 

There are also some who believe that corporate interests play their part in promoting or suppressing stories. It's difficult to find direct evidence of this in the UK (in the US it isn't).

Media Watch: The First Casualty of War is Truth

The above image appeared in the Kronen Zeitung – Austria’s largest newspaper with a daily readership of over three million – on Saturday. It shows war-torn Aleppo in Syria alongside the title "Assad’s Tanks roll through the streets to the Mother of all Battles". It’s a powerful and emotive image – but, as the photo below demonstrates, it only tells half the story.

This original image emerged from the European Press Agency. Whether the Photoshopped consumer-friendly image was produced by the newspaper itself, or an unscrupulous PR company, it perfectly symbolises how the West wishes to frame the Syrian conflict. Sometimes the truth just isn’t enough. 

Further Reading: Interesting article by John Rees on U.S. intervention in Syria and the Middle East & the response of the left