Aidan Smith: Has Edinburgh finally had enough of the Fringe?

Street artists and their admirers can be annoying, but the Festival makes the capital more interesting, says Aidan Smith

It’s a classic Edinburgh image. Not as lyrical as reverends skating on Duddingston Loch or as majestic as sailing boats sweeping under the Forth Bridge and so artists wouldn’t paint it. But maybe they should.

It’s a classic image because it tells of an epic struggle: the little old lady battling through the Festival crowds to reach her bus stop. She doesn’t live in the city centre but must negotiate it regularly. She could be returning home from her cleaning job at a couple of swish townhouses. She might have been meeting her sister for afternoon tea on the top floor of a department store.

Either way, the world’s biggest and greatest arts festival is a pain in the backside. Not just the daredevil who’s drawn a large gathering for his bed-of-nails stunt, so blocking a path to the wee wifey’s stop for the No 22, but all of it. All of the performers and all of the crowds. All of the leafleters and especially that trust-fund twerp challenged by the rest of his undergraduate troupe to attempt to shock the natives with the old refrain: “Live sex on stage! Every day at 3.45pm except Mondays!”

Our little old lady has seen it all before. Not the sex, obviously, but the sight of Edinburgh engorged every August, swelling to four times its normal size. And as she reaches her stop, having missed two buses already, she delivers an old refrain of her own to the assembled exhibitionists: “Away and work!”

What is Embra to do with its cultural clamjamfry? Is the place about to burst because of too many students and too many comedians and too many chancers? Are the good people who live there, who can’t get on to the heavily potholed roads for all this art, about to call proceedings to a halt with a quick clap of the hands, and pronounce: “Don’t call us, we’ll call you”?

“Public fury at Festival impact reaches an all-time peak,” ran a headline in The Scotsman the other day. A poll carried out in the capital by council officials discovered “negativity” towards the Festival on an unprecedented scale. And their report warned that “perception of the Festival may have reached a level where it represents a strategic risk to the long-term success of the city”.

The struggle between thesp and local is not a recent development. Thirty-five years ago, as a junior reporter on The Scotsman’s sister paper, the Evening News, I was regularly despatched on to the streets at Festival-time to check on it.

From the performers’ side, you wanted a positive story with a starof-the-future gushing extravagantly about the beauty of the city and the bountiful opportunities it afforded artists. On one such occasion, unknown teenager Rachel Weisz obliged.

From the residents’ side, the ratepaying, we-have-to-live-here contingent, you hoped for a moan. This was not the paper being anti-festival, far from it. We were proud of Edinburgh’s world-class reputation based on those three weeks in August, but had to square this with the capital’s more prosaic needs (every other day the “Action Wanted” page would highlight the plight of poor blighters living in council houses enduring worldclass dampness and rat-infestation).

And if the moan concerned nudity – fantastic. You phoned up Councillor Moira Knox, Edinburgh’s Mary Whitehouse, who’d ask for venue and performance times so she could see the orgiastic outrage for herself.