Letter: Festivals' future

A spokesman for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society claimed it had only received 14 applications for membership since it closed its door to new members earlier this year (your report, 11 August). This guy must be an aspiring comedian.

Isn't it obvious that this number would have been much higher if performers at this year's Fringe had not already been informed they would not be allowed to join? Regular Fringe performers like myself have been trying to join for over a year but our application forms keep getting lost.

Earlier this year I was offered membership of the Fringe Society from May to July 2010. At the end of July my membership would then be suspended until the society's constitutional review was completed in November. This move would ensure that I and others like me would have no vote on changes to the constitution of a society we were briefly a member of.

Come November 2010 any planned coup of the Fringe Society will be a fait accompli. Option one of the proposed changes discussed at Tuesday's public consultation on the Fringe Society recommended that any new members would have to be sponsored by a current voting member.

Option two offered automatic membership of the society for any Fringe performer or audience member who cared to part with the 10 joining fee. Tommy Shepherd from the Stand Comedy Club was the only person publicly in favour.

Perhaps it is time for performers and audience to act now to protect the Fringe Society and keep it true to its roots of protecting and developing the Fringe and the rights of all those involved.

All those interested in preserving the future integrity of Edinburgh's world famous Fringe should make their voices heard at today's AGM starting at 10am in the McEwan Hall, Teviot Place, Edinburgh.

JOHN McGUINNESS

PBH's Free Fringe

Edinburgh

Regarding Jonathan Mills' robust defence of the Edinburgh Festival (11 August), this year marks the 64th anniversary of the Festival and I am thinking of that famous Beatles song containing the lines: "Will you still need me, will you still feed me when I'm 64?" As someone who has been blessed with the experience of all 64 Festivals, I still need the Edinburgh Festival and I feel the obligation to feed it as best I can with a programme on the Fringe which mirrors that of the official Festival.

The Fringe is inextricably linked to the experience of the curtain being raised on the stage of the official Festival. That will happen next week and it is unthinkable to me that the Festival curtain will not have a Fringe as a necessary appendage.The Festival curtain without its Fringe is surely now still unthinkable, particularly as the Festival approaches pensionable age; it needs more than ever, in its senior years, a respectful acknowledgement of its history, made manifest with a curtain with that distinctly visible Fringe which caused the official and Fringe Festivals to be inseparable in the year of its birth.

I heartily agree with Jonathan Mills that the Fringe could arguably survive alone but that could mean that it would be taken far less seriously and that it could, sooner or later, turn into a giant festival of stand-up comedy.

Perhaps the time has come for the official Edinburgh Festival, together with the Fringe, to provide a space where the whole history of what is evoked by the words "Edinburgh Festival" could be properly documented, studied and fully appreciated.

RICHARD DEMARCO

Upper Cramond Court

Edinburgh