So, we got to the end of it, not without a few mishaps on the way (but most of them nothing really do with the festival); we’ve got some sleep, done the counting-the-money bit, i’ve been to Glastonbury, it’s time to get out and go see what our other favourite festivals are like this time round, who’s new, and start thinking about next year. It’s the second burst of big fun in this job, really, after the excitement of the Fringe itself.

We’ve paid the bills, pretty much - we’re still chasing some people who owe US money - and it looks as though we’ve done OK: in fact we’d have been in profit if the council hadn’t cut our core funding completely; so instead we’re having to spend a chunk of our reserves, our shoebox under the bed of ‘rainy day’ money that would ensure the continuity of the festival and that people who’d be really clobbered got paid if we went down badly (failing green-field festivals please note!). Yes, the Council are still making it more difficult for us to survive, not content with wasting time before the festival (time that should have been spent promoting events) in, um, “discussions” with them, and associated bureaucracy... and still no money. Can you believe they called an important ‘Future of the Fringe’ meeting the day the festival opened? How useful is that going to be, really? We always said that the funding cut was going to put future festivals, not this year’s, into jeopardy and that’s the way it’s still looking.

Well if you looked, you could already see the squeeze on our money and our time this year. The thing this year’s festival fell down on most was marketing, as it happens: no-one gives us much money to spend on that, and we have to compensate with time (which was squeezed), volunteers (a bit thin on the ground) and clever ideas (where?). Some great shows (Sweet Billy Pilgrim; the Birdman The Baron & The Bat; Doreen Thobekile; plenty more) had pathetic audiences, whilst the people with all the marketing budget, staff and time, they were getting crowds for frankly unimaginative fare packaged as something exciting. 

It all comes round to the biggest of all Fringe problems: how do you get (enough) people to come and see something they haven’t heard of that they have no good way of knowing whether they’d like it? I say ‘enough’ people ‘cos some people are just up for it anyway, but they’re quite a small number in a small city and a small festival like ours. OK it’s what we’re going to have to spend some more time and more thoughts on... any ideas, join in the discussion. Go on, start the discussion, i dare you...

But anyway, to end on an up, here are my favourite shows of Fringe ‘08. Any comments welcome as ever.

• Kilter: On a beautiful sunny day, pedalling off down that lovely cycle track chatting with the characters as you go... and then the steam train pulls out at the end. A dream...

• Thomas Truax: A star. A-mazing.

• Barry Cryer: Making us laugh to jokes that are older than even he is.

• Boom Stage: Stunning quality of young local bands; lovely vibe (and Adele’s lovely garden)

• Bedlam Sunday, three of the classiest street acts out

• Top Cats: Doing ‘Lollipop’

• Martin Newell: I would say “he should be on telly,” but i don’t watch telly and it’d probably spoil him. But he should be paid the sort of money that people who are on telly get for being so much worse than he is. That ‘House in France’ poem, Bath needs that kind of cutting wit more often

• The Birdman The Baron & The Bat: utterly enchanting in a non-cosy sort of way

• Sweet Billy Pilgrim: I love ‘em anyway. One day a few more of you will. They’re headlining something at the Royal Opera House, fer fuxxake; isn’t the Spiegeltent more fun than that?

• In fact, the Spiegeltent anyway: best one we’ve had by a country mile.

Wanna help the Fringe and win free tickets for next year?

In order to help us look at modifications for Fringe 2009 (we change a little every year), in order to fully assess what just happened in ’08, we need your feedback (and, just as importantly, some of the organisations who give us money would like to know a bit more about who you all are). We’ve put up a little questionnaire on surveymonkey.com; it’s only about 20 questions so it won’t take you very long (unless you want to write us an epistle in the comments box) and it can be utterly anonymous, of course.

We’re going to put all the names of people who haven’t been anonymous completing the questionnaire into a suitably fringey hat to select three winners of free Fringe ticket packages (eg. Spiegeltent passes or tickets): we don’t know exactly what yet because we haven’t planned the events yet...

And it really really helps us: so if you enjoyed the Fringe – or even if you didn’t, or not as much as you thought you should – get onto that website and tell us about it. It’s an easy way for you, the audience, to help shape your festival, and that’s not an offer you get every day.

Click Here to take survey

did we really say we were going to do one of these a week?
drokk!

Had a lot to do, mostly responding to what i’m writing about now, as it happens:
...money!
Anyone in Britain will have heard plenty about Arts Funding over he last few weeks - sorry, here’s some more...

We’ve recently  found out that we didn’t get an Arts Council grant this year, even though we were hoping for one and put some serious work in on an application. We’re not a ‘regularly funded organisation’ (the ones you’ve maybe been reading about) which means we hadn’t been told we’d definitely get money; as it is, the message was “perfectly good ideas, guys, it’s just we don’t have enough money to support you this year”. No-one in Britain needs to be told, either, that (despite more money than was expected in the Arts Council allocation from Government, and despite promises not to pour any more of it into a black hole in East London) a lot of Arts Funding has been corralled by those extraordinary people who administer sports events, for a certain way-over-budget event in 2012.

What’s more of a wrench is that we’re staring down the barrel of a massive cut in what we get from the local council here in Bath: in big figures they were saying they were likely to give us about the same amount of money for the whole of the next three years as they did in total in 2007: ie. that cut us by two-thirds. If you compare that with what they gave us in 2006 it’s down to something like 28%.

OK, it's still possible it's not going to be that bad, we hear that not everyone in the council is happy with the suggestion, but we're going to get cut by a big chunk. Everyone's going to get cut and we're not a priority. Nothing like a priority. Not even like some other 'cultural' organisations you could name. We find out how bad it is soon. We'll tell you when we know - unless we've got complaining-fatigue by that point.

I’m not going to argue the reasons here: the council can give money to who it likes, they’ve got less of it over the years (and no it’s not because they gave it all to Thermae Bath Spa) and they’ve got priorities and protocols and targets and the like that tell them what to think.

People who live round here should be told that this puts at risk lots of stuff we have usually spent their money on: printing the programme that advertises things that everyone else puts on; giving money to the FAB Visual Arts programme (locally created free events in unusual places) when no-one else does; putting things on for free in public places; and running our office that makes all those things and a lot else happen when no-one else can be bothered. That includes paying our two “part-time” workers and some contracted help, so i expect i should declare an interest.

If the council wants to, they’re free to tell us that they don’t want to support that sort of thing; if you’re bothered by that, you have a vote and perhaps one of the parties could put arts & culture funding on their manifesto (this is supposed to be an arty city but it’s apparently more interested in shopping).

What this means is: anything free we put on this year for people in general (you guys) is going to be there because of our sponsors and supporters (not everyone thinks we’re doing it wrong); we’re going to try and do something on Kensington Meadows but it’s not going to have any seed money, so it’s likely to have a gate tax on it; and some things we charge for (like programme entry, which is waaay cheaper than Brighton, Buxton or Edinburgh) are going to have to go up a bit. And then probably a bit more. The money the council gives us will go an some very specific things they’ve selected: it’s all stuff we want to do, but it’s outside the remit of what we’ve been accustomed to put on for you. Priorities, you see...

Actually, this could mean more fun in the long run

• Council-sponsored art has never been known for - umm, how can we put this? - it’s never been known for taking the right kind of risks; we’re probably better without them breathing down our necks. At the moment, apart from Suited & Booted, the youth film crew, I can’t think of anything that I’ve been to from one of the other locally subsidised ‘agencies’ that I’ve enjoyed - and no, Cynthia, that’s not because I don’t like innovation, my tastes in experimental performance and abstract music are well leftfield of most people I know - it’s because they haven’t been any good.

• We’re still going to be doing stuff for free in the streets and elsewhere, that’s the way we like it and that’s the way it works best. Luckily our sponsors - and very probably the Arts Council in another year, and very probably some other institutions who like what we do and, even better, like the things we’re planning - can connect with that idea, even though they can’t get it to fill in a questionnaire.

• The things we want to develop for the future, the big ideas we’d really like to see, are way out of the budget range of things the council supports unless you happen to be Bath Festival, and some of them aren’t the sort of thing the Arts Council pays for without you already having a reputation for doing them - but there are other people who might take a punt on it earlier on. It’s the big, mad and one-off ideas that keep us interested, and they're as difficult, or as easy, as they’ve ever been. We’ve got reams of them, we suspect you’d really like to see them when they happen, and we’re going out to look for support for them in the country beyond the focus group where things are more interesting. 

We only ever got involved in state funding because
• we were doing things that they said they wanted to happen
• and because there were other things they said they wanted to happen that we happened to think we were the best people to do.
We’re not looking to add to the increase of arts bureaucracies, we’re a Fringe and Fringe comes from the artists and the audiences rather than the bureaucrats.

They’re probably doing us a favour.
It's just not the most obvious interpretation from here.