Ellis & Rose: The Fringe is Dead

We were introduced to the Edinburgh Fringe early in 2013.

We were in the Soho Theatre bar, celebrating Richard Herring's acquittal (he wouldn’t be writing for The Metro, if only they knew), when Daniel Sloss offered to introduce us. We were led over to a corner away from the bustle, where, crammed into a tiny booth with a couple of honeys, was the Fringe. He was a short man with a greasy ponytail and a flagrant disregard for the rules and personal hygiene – he puffed away on a Davidoff Slim, choosing to ignore the indoor smoking ban which had come into effect years previously, and coughed up globules of phlegm onto the table.

The Fringe had more charisma than anyone we had ever met. Despite his appearance as a slimy, sweaty letch, he turned out to be a great raconteur. We talked and laughed and drank with him until the early hours. He gave us dirt on all the greats, told us of all the dark deeds which happen down Edinburgh alleyways and dared us to pull out one of his front teeth. Whenever our glasses ran dry he would snatch them from us, run to the toilet and return with our glasses full of fresh, steaming Fosters.

Around 3am the Fringe leaned in conspiratorially and asked "So boys, what is it you want to achieve?" We remember his smile: a wicked, mischievous grin, all gums and yellow teeth. We told him we were just planning on doing our double-act schtick, but he gave us a better idea; the incredibly controversial Jimmy Savile: The Punch & Judy Show. It was so salacious and tempting, we just could not resist. The Fringe promised us notoriety and an award if we agreed to do the show.

The reviews for Savile were scathing and doing it day after day damn near pushed us to the brink of our sanity, but the Fringe kept his side of the bargain, and we were rewarded with a Malcolm Hardee Comedy Award. A one-off award (The Pound of Flesh) was created for us, and we were lauded as brilliant comedic innovators for our antics. We were not proud men, and we are now not proud men with a shiny trophy.

The next time we saw the Edinburgh Fringe was fairly recent. We happened upon him outside Jongleurs in Camden in May, sloshing a bottle of kerosene about and mumbling vaguely about the death of alternative comedy. He did not look well. Pale and emaciated, this was not the man we remembered. His eyes were dead and the loss of his effortless charisma seemed to be the least of his woes.

"Don't know if you've heard," he wheezed, "but Jim Davidson is performing up in Edinburgh this year. I don’t know if I can take it. I’m weak and the idea of him being inside me for the whole month is going to put me six feet under unless I do something drastic." He sneezed and a couple of rotten molars fell out. “I’m going to have to kill him. It’s the only way to do it.”

We simply stared at him. He seemed too weak even to land a punch, let alone kill a man.

Then the Fringe turned to us, with that same malicious glint in his eye that we had seen before.

"Ah. You boys owe me a favour, don’t you…?"