So the premiere of our feature doc Adam Smith: Father of the Fringe is this weekend and I
just wanted to tell you the quick story of how it came about. Cos it’s quite a good
story
If you cast your mind back to the lockdown in 2020, there was suddenly a shortage in
content and I said to my friend the director Alex Webster, if we can produce something
half decent and quickly there might be an opportunity for us to break into the clsoed
shop that is British TV.
So we talked about various ideas and the easiest one seemed to be to make a film based on this
lecture I had given at the Edinburgh Festival the previous year. I have the lecture At Panmure
House, in Adam SMith’s old front room, and it was all about how the philosophies of Smith
had manifested themselves in the economics of the Edinburgh Fringe. You might say it’s
an esoteric subject, but it worked really well - and, perhaps above all, the material
was already written.
We could make a film about the history of the Fringe in the year it was cancelled.
So we went up there and with the help of Caroline Howitt at Panmure House managed to get the
film shot in just three days.
And then Ian my manager suggested we get some interviews with big name comedians as this
would make the film a bit more sexy to commissioners, so we thought, yes. And that put us back about
a month - many of the comedians were busy. We had an interview scheduled with Jimmy Carr
in three weeks time and then Jimmy had to go into quarantine for 2 weeks and when he
came out he was super busy, but eventually by the early autumn we had a decent first
cut.
We started touting it about and just ran in this wave of no interest from commissioners
despite all the big names we had on board. Emails into the void, endless zoom calls to
nowhere with the BBC and all the rest of it.
People kept giving me feedback, and I was like I don’t want feedback, I know it’s
good - I want a commission!
We needed about twenty grand to finish the film - to cover the costs of the music, the
grading, the archive footage and all the rest of it. I didn’t want to fork out the money
if it was just going to end up on YouTube because I’d already put so much into it.
Then early int he new year I was driving one cold evening from Devon to London and I pulled
over at a service station and while I was there checked my emails and I got one that
read: “Hi I hope you don’t mind me messaging. But I’m writing from hospital where I have
just had a near death experience with Covid. I was 36 hours from death according to the
doctors. And I stumbled across your YouTube channel and I just wanted to thank you for
the joy and laughter that your songs brought me when I was so low and at death’s door.
And by the way I’m a video games entrepeneur and I’m worth 150 million quid.
And he left his number and I phoned him up and we chatted for nearly two hours and one
of the things he asked me was if I needed any help with projects, so I said yes we’ve
just this film but we need twenty grand to finish it, and he said say no more. And the
very next morning the money was in my account.
So I guess there’s moral to the story for frustrated content creators. Even if you're
not one of TV's lucky chosen few, if you put stuff out there, and it's decent enough, good
things can happen.
So that’s the story of how Adam Smith: Father of the Fringe came about - I do hope you enjoy
it. It’s quite a powerful story.
Thanks for watching. Please subscribe to my channel. Blah blah blah