Edinburgh festivals: Veteran comedian Barry Ferns on how Fringe drove him to bankruptcy and homelessness

A veteran comedian who first performed in Edinburgh more than 25 years ago will tell a festival audience how he racked up so much debt in his efforts to attend the Fringe that he was declared bankrupt.

Barry Ferns, who has performed 19 times on the Fringe since 1999, found himself in £45,000 of debt in his early years as a comedian due to the costs of having a show in Edinburgh. He was declared bankrupt in 2007 and was subsequently left homeless.

Now the founder of a thriving London comedy club, Mr Ferns’s new show to be performed at the Fringe this August tells how he ended up in the situation - and how he recovered.

Barry Ferns first performed at the Fringe in 1999. | Barry Ferns

“I wasn’t planning to go to Edinburgh,” said Mr Ferns, who first arrived at the Fringe as a 17-year-old after reaching the finals of the So You Think You're Funny? (SYTYF) competition, which has launched the career of many well-known names.

“Someone [at SYTYF] asked me if I was going and I think I just said ‘but I’m 17’. Then they told me they were driving up that night, so I just went. By some miracle, I got a few paid gigs and I spent a lot of nights sleeping on Calton Hill and Arthur’s Seat.”

But his first proper show at the Fringe left him £5,000 in debt.

“I’m from a working-class family in Dorset, so I didn't have a safety net,” he said. “I just thought the way that you got good at comedy was go to the Edinburgh festival. That's where all my comedy heroes went, so I would go up year after year. And I was getting more and more into debt.

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“Every year it was the same. I’d go to the Fringe and spend the rest of the year trying to pay off my debts, but I never quite managed it. I think that first year, I managed to work off half of it.

“But then I went up again, because I thought ‘this is what I want to do with my life’. It felt like an investment. Then it got to the point, after my seventh Edinburgh, that I went bankrupt.”

Despite a successful Fringe run, Mr Ferns had accumulated a total of £45,000 in debt. “It creates compound interest, it just spirals,” he said. “The majority of my debt, maybe about 85 per cent of it, was from Edinburgh shows.”

He became homeless, first moving between friends’ sofas and eventually ending up in a squat in London. However, Ferns said he believed the bankruptcy gave him a chance to start again.

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He said: “It's terrible at the time, it's emotionally hard. But actually, you lose all your assets. And if you don't have any assets to lose, it’s not as bad as it could be, as it gives you a chance to start again.

“It is bad and it does stay on your financial record, so you can't borrow money. But I think that was probably a good thing.”

Mr Ferns now advises people who are also facing bankruptcy on the realities of the procedure. The experience also inspired him to start his comedy club, Angel Comedy, which now has a permanent venue in Islington.

“The whole club comes from the fact that I had this experience,” he said. “We do free gigs. We make sure there's there's access for people, we do free comedy writing workshops. It's like a Fringe venue in London where people can run their shows. It comes out of the fact that I had that hard time.”

In an attempt to generate publicity around his show that year, Mr Ferns had officially changed his name to Lionel Richie, meaning he was using the singer’s name at the time of his bankruptcy.

“I went bankrupt as Lionel Richie,” he said. “I had to go to the Royal Courts of Justice and put my hand on the Bible and say ‘I, Lionel Richie, solemnly swear’. My life is a joke.”

Barry Ferns: My Seven Years as Lionel Richie will be performed at Just the Tonic at the Caves from July 31.