You reap what you sow? Perrier Judges are breaking ranks to let the world know that this years eligible candidates are all, well, crap. There’s a surprise. How do you expect to find innovate talent and new blood when this new blood would need to be prepared to loose close to £4,000 to put on a show, promote it and get noticed? When all you have at the Fringe are established stand ups writing material that would win them last years award, hoping the criteria haven’t changed, you’ve killed the Festival.

As usual, Tommy Sheppard seems to be on the wavelength for the performer:

If Perrier genuinely wish to support the development of live comedy in Britain, they should scrap the award in its current form and replace it with a programme of support for talented new artists… It sets one performer against another and creates thousands of losers for every winner. It sours the comedy programme of the festival and stifles innovation and originality as performers search for lowest common denominators to appease competition judges.

Link: The Scotsman

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 23rd, 2005 at 10:35 am and is filed under Fringe News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.