Richard Gadd warns soaring costs put the future of the Edinburgh Fringe at risk
Richard Gadd was speaking at Fringe Central
The Edinburgh Festival Fringe must be “protected at all costs”, Richard Gadd has said, adding that he owes “everything I have in life” to the festival.
Speaking at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society’s new Fringe Central headquarters, Gadd warned the future of the Fringe was at risk as costs rise, pricing out artists who could previously “arrive with a dream” and “leave with a career”.
“Everything I have in life, I owe to this festival,” he said. “Not just the career I made, but it helped me grow up, as a writer, as a person. It helped me figure not not just who I was and what I stood for, but what I like and I know it was like that for so many people.
“But it would be remiss of me, at this point, not to talk about the huge financial pressure artists face, year on year. Accommodation, then you have travel, equipment, marketing, all soaring costs and making it harder for new performers.”
Gadd last appeared at the Fringe in 2019, with the stage play version of Baby Reindeer, which was produced by Francesca Moody, who was also behind the Fringe success of Fleabag. It won a Scotsman Fringe First Award before it transferred to London and was later screened on Netflix.
“With the television festival leaving due to extreme overheads. I worry whether people will start to wonder if they can be seen here at all. and then what, because the Fringe is nothing without giving new voices a chance, the chance to experiment, to take risks on a crazy idea. To see what comes with it, to fail spectacularly, then come back the next night to try again. But when the cost becomes too high, when established performers in commercial productions have more resources and more visibility than ever before, those freedoms become hard to protect.
“Meaning the festival risk becomes something that only those with enough money can do. The Fringe becomes too expensive, too commercial and too difficult to access, we could lose the very thing that makes it extraordinary. We could lose why it started in the first place. We could lose a place where someone can arrive with an idea and leave with a career...leave with a Netflix series.”
Speaking at an event to launch Screen Scotland’s new alternative to the departing TV Festival, Gadd cited success stories of the Fringe, from Alan Partridge, to Black Watch and Fleabag.
“This is so much more than a festival,” he said. “This is the cultural backbone of the whole country, the world, even. And so we must protect it at all costs so that anyone who dares to step out of their front door and call themselves an artist could be given the same opportunity I was.”
Baby Reindeer won four Emmy Awards in 2024, including Outstanding Limited Series, and secured major wins at the Golden Globes and BAFTA Scotland.
His most recent work, series Half Man, which was screened on the BBC earlier this year and also starred Jamie Bell, was set in Glasgow in the 1980s,.