Edinburgh Comedy Awards director Nica Burns has appealed to broadcasters and newspapers to support new comedy.
The highly respected theatre owner also underlined how international comedy is in the UK and hoped it would stay that way in the post-Brexit world. She said she was proud that over the 36 years of the awards there have been 14 international main award winners and six best newcomers, three of which have been in the last four years. She was speaking at the annual Edinburgh Fringe launch lunch held at the Ghillie Dhu in Edinburgh.
Burns went on to say that one of the reasons that this is possible is that many years ago the Edinburgh Fringe Society negotiated a deal so that performers could come and perform without a work permit though they had to have a visa. She said that we need to make sure this permit waiver is ring-fenced and preserved. "Talent has no borders," she said. In the last four years three best Newcomers were Daniel Simonsen (2012) from Norway, Alex Edelman (2014) from America and Sofie Hagen (2015) from Denmark.
Burns welcomed the new Edinburgh Comedy Award sponsors: lastminute.com, saying that it was great to be involved with a website with such a huge amount of traffic, because what the industry wants to do is expand the comedy audience beyond the traditional comedy lover and attract new comedy-goers.
She also commented on the lack of national national newspaper critics at this year’s Festival and called on newspaper editors to continue to support culture. As a theatre producer, and the owner of six theatres including the Palace Theatre in London, where the new stage play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is running, she knows how much advertising theatre producers still do. As Nica said “culture still sells papers”.
Burns also called on BBC head Tony Hall to promote BBC Three more aggressively now that it is only online. It was all very well putting programmes such as Cuckoo with a star like Greg Davies online. A name like Davies will always attract viewers, but new talent needed to be flagged up more efficiently on the BBC's various outlets and platforms.
