Performing is an expensive business – and footing the bill means getting creative
: Handout
For aspiring comedians watching Baby Reindeer, the true horror may not be Richard Gadd’s ordeal at the hands of a stalker but the scenes in which he takes his one-man show to the Edinburgh Fringe and finds himself performing in a pub to an audience of half a dozen people, most of whom refuse to tear their eyes away from the football on TV.
At the end of the show, Gadd holds out a bucket in the hope of getting some donations. The bucket remains empty, but he has to admit that’s an improvement: “Yesterday I got a button and a condom.”
At least the experience will have been relatively cheap. If you are a comic playing one of the Fringe’s larger venues, it is a very expensive business. Accommodation, venue hire, production, PR and marketingthe cost can easily exceed £10,000, and many acts will struggle to break even. The eye-watering expense has led many comics to find creative ways of footing the bill.
John Tothillcontracting malaria as part of a clinical trial
: Rebecca Need-Menear/Handout
Originally, John Tothill planned to get a dose of the flu. Looking to make money to fund his Fringe show, he applied for FluCamp, which recruits people for clinical trials into flu and other viruses. “It’s a classic clinical trial for out-of-work actors, comedians and idealistic arts undergraduates,” Tothill explains. But it turned out that he had an unusually high white blood cell count“I was too healthy!”and he was offered an alternative: taking part in a malaria trial.
The fee was around £2,000a tidy sum for Tothill, 27, who had previously worked in a coffee roasting factory and spent a year as a teacher. “They said the reason that the trial is well-paid is not because it’s dangerous, but because people are scared of malaria. I had to sign lots of forms, and most were agreements that I would not leave the study because if I left the study it was basically a guarantee that I would die. Not all malaria kills but the strain I was given absolutely does.”
A group of potential guinea pigs was whittled down. “Eventually, there were just two of us left, and our prize was to be injected with malaria.” After 48 hours of monitoring, he was discharged and told to report any symptoms in daily updates. He was also issued with two key instructions: don’t drink gin and tonic (on account of the quinine) and don’t visit Kent. “There are no malarial mosquitoes in the UK with the exception of the marshlands of Kent, where apparently they’ve had them for hundreds of years.”
It took an unusually long timearound two weeksbefore Tothill developed symptoms. “After about 10 days they called me in and asked me if I was sabotaging the experiment, because the trials are paid by the day. I’d told them I was raising money for a Fringe show and they said, ‘Are you drinking gin and tonic to keep the malaria at bay?’ But they did say I’d have to be drinking about three pints of it a day, and I could promise them I wasn’t doing that.”
When he did fall ill, it was while he was out to dinner. “It reminded me of having Covidslightly delirious and feverish. I also had these very sharp pains in different parts of my body. It was, by a long way, the sickest I’ve ever been. I was having these bizarre nightmares that turned into waking hallucinations where I thought I was being dragged into hell by the devil as punishment for making this Faustian pact.
“But the physical pain was weirdly offset by the security and support of the surrounding scientists, who were completely unfazed. It’s such a peculiar way of approaching disease, because it was to my own timetable. When people have really bad illnesses, so much of it is fear and the question mark over whether you’re going to get through it, but I was spared that completely because everyone around me was saying, ‘We know exactly what’s wrong with you, we put it there.’”
He was given anti-malaria tablets and recovered within days, despite surprising the doctors: they had expected to see a malaria count of 500, but Tothill presented with a count of 28,000. “The trial was about seeing what the body does at an early stage of malaria, but with me they also discovered what the body does with mid-stage malaria.”
He will discuss the surreal experience in his one-man show, Thank God This Lasts Forever. The £2,000 fee has helped with the costs, but certainly hasn’t covered them.
Tothill got his first taste of the Fringe as a member of Cambridge Footlights; the university covered all expenses. When he took his own show to the Fringe last year, it cost him around £9,000, of which £2,000 went on PR and another £1,000 on marketing costs such as printing flyers. “Not everyone pays a PR company but it’s increasingly the norm,” he says. “Edinburgh is still just about the best way of being noticed as a stand-up comedian. Everyone else has got PR so you have to have it as well.”
Breaking even is “the best possible scenario. Last year my show sold basically every ticket, and I broke even. The reason I had to get malaria is that you need the money in your bank account first.” And contracting a disease brings another perk: “Because it’s compensation and not pay, I don’t have to declare it as tax, which is fantastic!”
John Toothill: Thank God This Lasts Forever is at Pleasance Courtyard on July 31, August 1-11 and August 13-25
Kevin James Doyleteaching chess to billionaires
: Handout
“When all is said and done, the Fringe will cost around $20,000 for me,” says Kevin James Doyle. That includes flights, because Doyle lives in Brooklyn, New York. The festival’s reputation has crossed the Atlantic. “I heard about it on a podcast in 2015 and went for the first time in 2016. Since then it’s only grown in stature and recognisability here in New York. It’s a mecca for more thematic shows.”
In 2019, he caught Richard Gadd’s Baby Reindeer show at Edinburgh, and chatted to Gadd afterwards. “Then a few months ago I got a text from one of my chess clients asking if I’d seen it. I was like, how do they know about this obscure one-man show? Then they said it was a show on Netflix.”
Doyle, 38, has been teaching chess for 12 years, and has channelled all his recent earnings into his forthcoming Fringe show, After Endgame, which weaves the history of chess into comedy. “Chess is having a moment, so there is a little more interest,” he says of his teaching.
“I teach it privately and have also opened it up to more people with Zoom. It’s mostly beginners, people who may know how the pieces move but don’t know anything about strategy. I don’t want to stretch people’s time and money over seven lessons so I say that if you spend an hour with me, you will walk away with 10 bullet points to remember which will make you a better chess player.”
Some of his clients, however, have money to spare. Doyle says: “Chess has a bit of prestige to it, and so there have been a lot of very wealthy people in New York that I have taught.” And some of his clients are billionaires. “Last year I was flown to Singapore to teach. One of the lessons took place on their private yacht, which is not the norm in my life. I was there for eight weeks and taught the person eight times.”
The lessons have contributed a “moderate amount” towards his Fringe costs. “I wouldn’t say that I’ve met my goal, but I’m about halfway there, which has been great. It’s a huge investment monetarily.
“I’ve been to Fringe twice before and had moderate success, and I’m putting a little more into online marketing this time and hiring a promoter. I do think there are more budget ways to do it. But I’ve saved up over the last few years. This year I’m going a little more all-out.”
Kevin James Doyle: After Endgame is at Just the Tonic at The Caves on August 1-11 and 13-25
Megan Prescottselling nudes on OnlyFans
Megan Prescott will be making her first appearance at the Fringe this year, but she’s an old hand when it comes to performing. In 2009 she appeared in the cult Channel 4 teen drama Skins, which launched the careers of Nicholas Hoult and Dev Patel. The recognition that Skins brought her has come in handy for her Edinburgh money-making scheme: selling nudes on the adult content site OnlyFans.
She started up her OnlyFans account in April 2020 when lockdown hit. “I was working at the time for minimum wage as a tour guide at a distillery. The manager didn’t put us on furlough for weeks and I only had a few hundred pounds in my account.
“A friend suggested doing OnlyFans. She knew I did stripping a couple of years before and that helped me out when I needed a quick income. Every person’s OnlyFans is different; you can charge a monthly subscription fee, and if you want to post additional content you can. You only need to do what you’re comfortable with.”
Many of her subscribers know her from Skins: “I was very fortunate that I had been on a big show. It was years ago but there are people who still know me from then, and others who have watched it since on Netflix.”
Looking to increase her earnings from the site to fund her Fringe show, she chose to offer something extra. “I decided to do a fully nude shoot and send 10 images out to special subscribers who are willing to pay for it.
“I’d never done fully nude photos with my face on them; I was nervous because of facial recognition technology. Your image is there forever and always on the internet. Even though I don’t have shame about my body, I know there’s a lot of stigma about nakedness and sex work.”
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