My poor, poor husband didn’t know what was about to hit him. He’d been to the Fringe before, but never with me performing in it, and never for the full month. Luckily, I’d warned him what would happen: I’d even said “It might not be wise to have so-and-so to stay at that point…I’ll be a basket case.” And so, it came to pass. It was such an accurate prediction, he’s now trying to convince me to do one of those live psychic shows next year; they certainly seem to sell.

No matter how well you plan your attack on the Fringe, no matter how clear your run-up, it will always find a way to surprise you. It doesn’t even matter if you’re one of those people off the telly we all complained about, or the hot new flash in the pan, at some point, you will have a meltdown.

Reasons:

1: Your show’s not good enough. You didn’t work as hard on it as you could. It really wasn’t finished and you knew it. You took a risk bringing it to the show-off festival and it didn’t pay off.

2: You didn’t plan your marketing campaign properly. You forgot to have posters done or tell people you were coming and are only now realising your mistake.

3: You’ve gone way outside your budget, on taxis and baked potatoes alone. You meant to cook back at the flat (another financial haemorrhage outlet) and even bought a bag of spuds in the first week. They are now green. You can’t remember where the cooker is, and it’s right beside the spuds.

4: The starers come in. People who don’t like your show, or you, but do like keeping their eyes on you – unblinking and miserable – for the entire thing. This is perhaps the most demoralising of all the potentially demoralising occurrences. If you’re unlucky to have more than one in per show (e.g. my second Monday, where there were about 5 of them) then it’s hard not to find hurling yourself off George IV Bridge onto Cowgate appealing.

5: None of the above. You worked hard, you had a plan and had paid people to help you implement it, the response of the people that did come was great, but things just didn’t take off. That seems to be the story of the majority of the foot-soldiers I’ve chatted to.

6: Women aren’t funny. Again. Oh, fuck off. Really now, fuck off.

I could go on. I have; I’m surprised I have any friends left. For the acts at the more well-known, successful end of the Fringe, the meltdown can come from too much attention too fast, too much pressure to live up to expectation. But rest assured, it will come. And this year, for most of the people that I know, the melting was worse than I ever remember it.

I still love the Fringe, but I’m deeply saddened that it’s morphed into a TV-or-web-based popularity contest. I’m sad that a friend of mine – a really good comic – had their show pulled by an audience member: there were 3 of them in that prospective audience, 2 being a couple. “We don’t want to be in an audience of 3,” said the man. So, no show. Now that’s enough to break your heart, especially when the average audience across the Fringe is 3.

I had to pull one of my own shows, on a Sunday near the end. The only ticket buyer? A BBC TV producer who’d come on a recommendation. He was very kind, and said that at least in the final week, telly people would come and it might be good for work. I thanked him, but told him what he already knew: if they came, and it was my turn to have 3 – or 0 – people in, they would automatically think it was shite. He had to reluctantly agree: industry types, critics and now even punters, have all come to view quantity over quality. It’s hard, but not impossible, to see through a small house to a big show if you’re discerning enough: but it is almost impossible to get what a review might call a “4-star laugh” out of 4 people.

There’s no point in being nostalgic – as I say in the show “things have always been shite”. But I do remember when the Fringe was about seeing not the Big Thing, but the Next Big Thing. It was about taking a random punt and seeing someone great in a room behind a pub, someone who was not yet well known but damn well would be soon. They didn’t have the money for a publicist, or hadn’t been on TV, but they put themselves and their work out there and took a chance. The acts are still doing that. The audiences aren’t. To my mind, it’s the audiences’ loss.

Gone are the days when you could flyer all day and grab someone on the way to the Box Office and change their minds: now, they’ve bought their tickets online. They already have a show to go to before they hit town. Even if your word of mouth is good, the deed is already done: they’ve spent what they’re going to spend before they ever hear about the little shows. Even this year’s nominees for the whatever-it’s-called award didn’t sell out post nomination. Now this is a brand new world.

The only way I can stop myself grieving for the way things used to be is to view the Fringe like the English language: the very reason it’s so brilliant is that it is so vast and amorphous. It will always change. It can’t be contained. Try and push it into a box – reject text-spk or attempt to insert commas where they no longer wish to be inserted – and you’re the one who looks like a jerk. But at least, with English, it’s happening organically and over time. No one bought up all the poster sites and telly spots and told us we had to say “should of”, NOW, when most of us still have a little grammatical voice inside, screaming its incorrectness.

While I didn’t expect the change to be this complete this soon, this is how it has been going. I was somewhat braced, and yet I, too, melted. I don’t think my husband will ever recover.

I said it before the Fringe, and I say it again at the end. Please, please don’t be a sheep. Go and see some live comedy near you this weekend. Someone you’ve never heard of; make that the point of the exercise. All of you, stop being sheep. NOW. Thx.

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