Fest turns 20

It’s hard to pinpoint just where it sticks: in the mind or in the craw. Memorable, and terrible. It was 2008 and, against all advice, we went to print with a feature that was an attempted pastiche of the film poster for Face/Off, only subbing Nicholas Cage and John Travolta for Jim Jeffries and Andrew Maxwell. The execution was abysmal; the premise, arguably, worse. Two mainstream, acerbic, white comics, in conversation with each other, slapped on a print run of 10,000. But in 2008, that’s where the festivals were, and that’s were Fest was, too. I remember seeing Jeffries that year and thinking contemporary performance couldn’t plausibly get any better. Reader. It did.

This was the feature that I dreaded unearthing as I sat down one afternoon and hauled out an archive box holding every issue of Fest since 2007. The Fringe marks its 75th year in 2022, and Fest has been with it now for 20 of those. I’ve been around since 2007 when the upstart tabloid switched to the glossy brochure audiences have been able to pick up ever since in venues across Edinburgh.

I’m struck by the extent to which, thumbing those glossy pages, a modern chronicle of the festivals leaps out, for better and worse. Worse than that Face/Off travesty, between 2007 and 2010, not a single woman featured individually on the front page of the magazine. That’s not to say there weren’t some significant splashes. But from 2022’s vantage point, the blind spot feels painful.

I could go on: there’s a masochistic pleasure in cringing at the past. But it’s also