Gadd's debt to Edinburgh: 'You arrive with an idea and leave with a career'

Richard Gadd says he owes everything to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

His show Baby Reindeer, a dark comedy about his experience of a stalker, won a string of awards, and enjoyed a sell-out run in Edinburgh before transferring to the London stage.

But it was the arrival of executives from the TV Festival in the final week of August in 2019, which took his career on a whole new trajectory.

"The show had sold out before the festival had even begun," he told a gathering at a Screen Scotland event to launch a new TV festival.

"This was exactly 10 years after my debut at the Fringe where I had to cancel a show because nobody had turned up.

"It was the talk of the festival, and at the end of the month, I got a message from my manager to say Netflix wanted me but so did the BBC and HBO and Channel 4."

He eventually made the TV show for Netflix, where it became a cultural phenomenon, topping their streaming platforms globally.

It went on to win a stream of awards, including six Emmys, before Gadd moved onto his next project, Half Man, with the BBC, which was screened earlier this year.

Gadd, who grew up in Wormit in Fife, first connected with the Fringe through the National Theatre of Scotland show Black Watch, which premiered at the 2006 festival before touring nationally and internationally.

"It was a brutally funny ensemble piece, part-dance epic about the Iraq war, the camaraderie of soldiers, and the desperation of lost youth," he said.

"And as the lights went down on the final seconds of the show, I remember the entire audience getting to their feet with tears in their eyes and I knew that I had witnessed history.

"I remember watching the lights of Edinburgh disappearing out the window and thinking THIS is what I want to do. "

Four years later, he made his own Fringe debut at the Argyle Cellar Bar.

"I'm wearing a thong and I'm head to toe in baby oil having just danced to Tom Jones' sex bomb, and there's an embarrassed couple in the front row still clapping me in an otherwise empty room.

"I ask them for donations at the end of the show and they end up giving me two pounds. It was 2009. I'm 20 years old and I've just started doing comedy.

"I've flyered all day and all night, but despite my best efforts, I've performed to audiences of no more than five people."

He added: "Sometimes, indeed most times, I had to cancel the show because nobody turned up. Once, my audience was so small, I ended up taking them for a drink instead.

"His name was Douglas, and he admitted coming to my show because the sight of me flyering outside his office for two weeks had been too much to bear."

The fringe's tradition of using every space as a stage found him performing in some unlikely places.

"One venue didn't have a door. Not even a curtain. Halfway through the show, people would wander through looking for the bathroom.

He says the festival gave him the chance to experiment in a way the comedy circuit never did. And the result was his first four-star review.

In 2014, he performed a show called Breaking Gadd – which he said disappointed scores of fans of that other hit TV show.

"They came, expecting anecdotes about Walter White and instead got a man in a jockstrap talking about all the ways he wanted to kill his family," he recalled.

During a later show, his routine involved biting into a bar of soap.

"I took a bite, and immediately the most excruciating burning sensation fills my mouth. My eyes were instantly popping, and my mouth filled with ulcers by the second.

"I snatched a pint from a random spectator's hand to wash it out with, but the burning sensation was between my teeth.

"In the end, we pulled the show early, and I find myself in A&E.

"When the doctor asked me what I'd done, I said, I ate a bar of soap. They looked at me for what felt like an eternity before asking 'Edinburgh Festival?'"

Gadd's 2015 show Waiting for Gadot brought further acclaim and he called the bar where he worked in Camden to tell them he wasn't coming back.

"Craig, my manager asked what I was going to do instead. I told him, I'm going to be a comedian and I hung up the phone."

In 2016, he performed Monkey See Monkey Do, which won him the Edinburgh Comedy award.

Although the performance was surreal with Gadd running on a treadmill throughout while being chased by a gorilla on the screen behind, the content detailed his experience of sexual abuse.

The show sold out, won rave reviews and brought acceptance from friends and family of the trauma he had not previously shared.

"My fears of judgement vanished in an instant," he said. "The weight of trauma lifted night after night. Is this what happens when you reveal your darkest secrets to the world?

"I found the most phenomenal freedom, and realised what it was all about.

"I remember when I went out to collect the Edinburgh comedy award that month, Something I'd dreamed about from the moment I first learned of its existence.

"I said, the worst thing my abuser ever did was take my confidence away, and I suppose this goes some way to getting it back."

As well as Baby Reindeer, the fringe has been the launch pad for Fleabag, Taskmaster, Six the Musical, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Stomp, Flight of the Conchords, Garth Merengue, Alan Partridge, Mr Bean, The League of Gentlemen, Jerry Springer the Opera, Operation Mincemeat, and The Mighty Boosh.

Gadd hopes the launch of a new TV festival to replace the industry event which is moving to Manchester in 2027, will be vital to the festivals as they prepare to mark their 80th anniversary.

But he says he's concerned about spiralling costs, especially when it comes to accommodation.

"The fringe is nothing without giving new voices a chance to experiment, to take breaks, to hitch their car to a crazy idea and see what comes of it, to fail spectacularly but come back the next night to try again," he said.

"The festival risks becoming something that only those with enough money can afford to do. And that's what worries me."

He said if the Fringe became too expensive, too commercial, and too difficult to access, it could mean losing the very thing that makes it extraordinary.

"We could lose why it started in the first place," he added. "We could lose the place where someone could arrive with an idea and leave with a career."