My Longest Love Affair

I never imagined I’d spend most of my working life making comedy.

For the first five years as a stand-up, I only ever heard one person use the word ‘career’. Apart from when my parents regularly asked me when I was going to stop doing comedy and look for a proper one.

Not one of us when we started imagined we’d ever be on telly – and that ‘us’ included Mike Myers, Jo Brand, Paul Merton and Harry Enfield. Or that we’d be doing it for so long. We got lucky: we were the right age, in the right place and at the right time. And we owe everything to…

The Edinburgh Fringe

“Alternative comedy” is a horrible, clunking phrase, that for many conjures up the image of an unfunny comedian ranting about evil Tory bastards. For others makes comedy sound like the kind of earnest, stodgy and blandest wholefood you’ve ever been unlucky enough to throw away, or up, at a muddy weekend rock festival.

At the time, the name served its purpose. In those pre-internet days it allowed us to discover like-minded practitioners, and to push us towards creating the kind of work we never imagined it would be possible to do. There was comedy on the telly, and the Working Men’s Club circuit around where I lived. As far as I knew both those routes to professional comedy may as well have existed on another planet.

We were different in almost every way from the old school, as different as The Sex Pistols were to Pink Floyd. But there was one place where our distinctive style was able to flourish side by side with the dinosaurs of hilarity, where funny feminists and mother-in-law mockers shared the same audience, and we came out on top – the Edinburgh Fringe.

I blame Edinburgh for everything. I performed at the Fringe every year for 11 years, with no breaks, from 1984 to 1994. My entire stand-up career was built and dismantled around each August, and even when I quit stand-up and became a writer, my comedy new year’s calendar seemed to begin around the first week of September.

I’m two thirds of the way through completing a trilogy of books, my first ever novels, and they’re all about… the Edinburgh Fringe.

Comedians who go to Edinburgh spend the rest of their year paying for the privilege. Comedians who succeed are always looking for ways of coming back. Comedians who don’t like Edinburgh snap up the work available elsewhere in the rest of the UK in August, but for the remaining 11 months resent those who put so much effort into going.

I was lucky. I only ever once lost money, but the hours and weeks and months that went into those shows could have been spent more productively. It took me more than 30 years to understand that my time spent in Edinburgh was a spectacular failure.

If I could go back in time and visit my 18-year-old self, I’d tell him this: ‘Write jokes. Perform them. Develop comedy ideas. STAY AWAY FROM EDINBURGH.’

And my 18-year-old self would smile and ignore me, because he already knows better.

The first time I went to Edinburgh was in 1977, aged 18. I stayed four days and four nights, three of them sleeping in a broom cupboard – not a euphemism, the room was an actual cupboard with brooms, a hoover and a mattress on the floor – at number 369 Leith Walk.

For three days I wandered up and down, damp and alone, in and out of the converted church halls and cosy bars that spilled onto the twisting streets and ancient alleyways, the stench of the local brewery following me everywhere like a bad review. I saw 16 performances, lost my critical faculties about ten shows in, and became an emotional wreck. Plays that were mildly amusing had me roaring with laughter, gentle comedies moved me to tears.

I ran out of money and got a job for one night behind the bar at the Cafe Royal. I was sacked for failing to understand what my customers were saying, while speaking myself with an English accent. While I was there, news broke that Elvis Presley had died. It was the summer of punk. How could that first visit be anything other than a defining moment in the life of an 18-year-old?

My fourth night was spent at the home of a friend’s parents, in a beautiful Edinburgh house with a lovely bedroom overlooking the border hills, in a suburb two miles south of the city centre. I had a long bath, a deep sleep, and woke next day believing I’d seen my destiny. And I had.

At the time I was unaware how accurately those four emotionally charged days would reflect the pattern of all future stays. All I knew was that I would be back. And since then I’ve spent more than a year of Augusts in Edinburgh.

Bloody Edinburgh

It’s said that if women could remember the specific detail of every second of pain they suffer during labour they would only ever have one child. If comedians could relive every moment of anguish they experience of their month at the Edinburgh Festival, they would only ever go once.

I took the coach home to Leeds next morning, carrying back memories of moments that have stayed with me for the rest of my life. I didn’t forget the exhaustion or the emotional roller-coaster or the sacking, nor the shock waves that Elvis’s death had sent through the world. Those moments embellished the opening chapter of the mythical narrative my life story had just become.

It took me another 44 years from that experience to turn it into something fictional. There are moments in Stand Up, Barry Goldman that are based on real stories. But I finally understood the reason I spent so much of my life there in my 20s and 30s: so I could write novels about it for the rest of my days.

If there was a single show that could explain the essence of the Fringe, the joy and pain, excitement and anti-climax, it’s this, 39,000 Steps, written and presented by John Lloyd for Channel 4. August 1988. I’m there, for about 30 seconds, the right amount of time I think to sum up my contribution to the Fringe that year.

How can I explain the magic of the Edinburgh Fringe? If you’ve ever been, you’ll know. If you’ve never been, watch this and you might begin to understand.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of my first visit as a pro comedian. I was nominated for the prestigious Perrier Comedy Award that year, and like the journey back to my Stockbridge digs it’s been downhill ever since.

To celebrate this miniature milestone in my averagely successful comedy life I’m currently giving away the first book in the trilogy  https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1999313828 This offer is running until Thursday 8 August 11:59pm BST

…and for one week only, you can pick up the second in the series at the special offer of £2.99 (Normally 6.99) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Barry-Goldman-Wilderness-David-Cohen-ebook/dp/B0CKWGCXZN?ref_=ast_author_dp

If you want to find out what happens in the final book, you’re going to have to wait until it’s published, in November 2025. I’ll be going up briefly later in the month to remind myself of the joy, excitement, thrill, tedium, misery and real life experience that shaped the last 40 years.