Stew; “This is a rebuttal of this piece by UNDERBELLY which doesn’t really address any of the points in it, and pretends I said The Fringe was too commercial instead.“

Just before this year’s Edinburgh fringe got under way, the comedian Stewart Lee and his landlord, Tommy Sheppard of the Assembly Rooms, criticised the commercialisation and consequent death of the fringe. Lee roundly declared that “Edinburgh in August now threatens to become an oligarchy, a Chipping Norton of the arts,” accusing the four-year-old Edinburgh Comedy Festival of “corporate cattle rustling familiar from 30 years of government sell-offs”.
Sheppard leapt to Lee’s side, attacking what he called “over-commercialisation and over-sponsorship”, and suggesting that his venue offered a fairer deal to performers. One of their targets was the venue I co-run, the Underbelly, which is also part of the Edinburgh Comedy Festival.

I’m afraid I can only view Lee and Sheppard as the Rising Damp of the Edinburgh Festivals scene. They are a pair of Rupert Rigsbys, grumpy old men, nostalgic for an Acardian festival that has surely never existed. They seek to impose their model on a festival that was expressly set up not to be homogenous, but open-access, self-regulating and kaleidoscopic. Unfortunately, in criticising, they could be accused of publicising their own commercial interests: Lee is one of the highest-grossing performers at this year’s festival, and Sheppard runs one of the biggest group of venues.

At the close of the Olympics, this grandstanding is immensely damaging to the festival and to those people they nominally suggest they are trying to help: artists. Reading their comments, the rest of the world – our potential audience, let’s remember – would be excused in thinking us to be a bunch of backbiting, introspective whingers. Over the past few weeks, Edinburgh has had to cope with the biggest competition since London last hosted the Olympics, in 1948, but the Olympics and Paralympics also give us the opportunity to persuade millions of people to come to Edinburgh. So, in this year of all years, when we should celebrate and sell the fringe, why denigrate what we do?

Channel 4 cheekily advertises its Paralympic broadcast as “Thanks for the warm-up”. We should do the same: come to a festival of theatre, comedy, dance and music; see the famous, find the new; once you’ve been, you’ll come back. At the Sydney 2000 games, visitors were urged to stay for one more week and enjoy what Australia had to offer. Let’s shout with one voice about how great all our Edinburgh festivals are, and entice people here – rather than put them off coming.

Let’s also put a few facts straight. The Edinburgh fringe – which sells around 2m tickets a year – is almost entirely privately financed. There is some public subsidy, but that is a mere drop in the ocean. The fact that no one body organises the festival means that it’s impossible to calculate the overall cost. However, from Underbelly’s point of view, we will spend in excess of £1.5m to set up and publicise our operation, and invest a further £300,000 in producing shows. This is before year-round overheads to plan and programme each festival. Extrapolate this out to other venues; combine it with the costs incurred by artists and productions; and add in the Fringe Society’s annual budget, and you have a total cost of tens of millions of pounds.

The risk of recouping these costs is borne by venues, producers and artists. It’s nonsense to suggest – as Lee comes close to doing – that our venues expect the artists to take all the risk. Yes, some performers pay to perform with us, but that’s a standard model adopted by theatres world over (and indeed by some shows performing at the newly refurbished Assembly Rooms – not that Sheppard is shouting from the rooftops about the fact) [see footnote]. Indeed, the first performers at the 1948 fringe rented their spaces. Equally, however, we also pay a large proportion of our performers to perform with us. And whatever the deal is, all these costs depend on audiences for recoupment.

This is Sheppard’s first year of running a large-scale professional theatre venue. Welcome to a brave new world. The costs of setting up temporary venues with the facilities required for theatre are exponentially more than running a comedy club that exists all year around (maybe why the ticket prices are much higher at the Assembly Rooms – top price £17.50 – than they are at the Stand).

We’re in a world of arts cuts, and venues at the fringe who seek sponsorship to offset some of these costs are no different than theatres throughout the country, from London’s National Theatre downwards. Indeed, I notice some bright orange alcohol branding and sponsorship adorning the new Assembly Rooms outdoor bars. Well done to Sheppard for securing the money (and blocking off one of the finest streets in Edinburgh for his own – I assume commercial – bar).

It’s also nonsense to point the finger at the Edinburgh Comedy Festival – which remains very much part of the fringe, and seeks only to create a marketing banner to maximise the potential for the shows that perform under it. All the perceived problems heaped on it (performer deals, sponsorship and umbrella marketing) existed years before it was set up. Nor is there a “cabal” in operation, as Lee suggests. Indeed, I’m proud of the fact that Underbelly’s involvement in both the fringe and the Edinburgh Comedy Festival has increased competition among venues for artists, improving the deals offered.

If being “commercial” means attracting audiences to fuel ticket sales and returning more revenue to all involved, then I’m not bashful about it. It’s the world we live in. According to research done last year, the fringe alone adds £142m per year to the local economy. That’s a commercial impact, one that benefits many Edinburgh businesses. At our own venue, we have in excess of 350 staff, many of whom live in Edinburgh, so giving local people employment; and also for many people, their first step on to the arts world career ladder.

Rigsby in Rising Damp says of his neighbours: “They don’t believe in private property – unless it’s theirs, of course.” Stewart and Tommy, I’m delighted for your successes at this festival. But cheer up – and celebrate it for all our sakes.

• This footnote was appended on 24 August 2012. The Assembly Rooms have asked us to point out that no performer is required to pay a deposit or guarantee to play there during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.