eeting Flight of the Conchords and seeing the teenage Bo Burnham. Improvising a musical with Tim Minchin and buying groceries for Michael Billington. The annual critics versus comedians football match and the bruises that followed. Watching my brains get blown out on stage. Too many all-night benders to mention – and better conversations at three in the morning than anywhere else at more civilised hours. My Edinburgh festival memories recede into the Scotch mists of time, back at least to my teenage years, when we would board the ScotRail from Fife to the fringe, to see Frank Skinner and Fred McAuley, and wonder if anything else could ever be so funny. When the cancellation of fringe 2020 was announced in April, I realised there was only one year in the past 20 when I had not been there from start to finish – reviewing, performing or both. Some people “grow out” of the fringe or get snooty about it. I never will: I love it with all my heart. I love the shape it gives to the year. I love the famous Edinburgh bubble, that seals us off for three weeks from the real world and makes us feel, just for a moment, that theatre, comedy and what Richard Gadd just did in a cellar off the Cowgate are the only things worth caring about. I love taking my kids to it, to experience a city bedecked in colour and creativity. (OK, I admit it – I also love the annual escape it provides from my kids.) I love how it rejuvenates the performing arts with new talent, there to dream big. Bearing in mind all the flipsides of the fringe – spiralling costs, low production values, rotten weather – I am in awe of those artists, indomitable of spirit, who come year after year with their This Is Me, their radical ideas, their pitch for the stars. I was once among them – and it changed my life. The student show I took there in 1994 – poncing around the stage as Charles II in Howard Barker’s Victory – introduced me to the artist Alex Murdoch, with whom I ran a touring company for the next 20 years. We later shared a venue with the Mighty Boosh, crashing and burning with our sophomore show in 2000. By then, having graduated from work-experience errand boy, I was reviewing shows for the Guardian and was in the right place the following year when they needed a dedicated festival comedy critic. Who knew, before the noughties standup boom, that comedy critic would become a year-round, permanent gig? So what is to become of me – where am I to put myself? – this summer, with barely any fringe to speak of, give or take a Zoom gig here, a podcast there? By the time its cancellation was confirmed, it had already felt inevitable: there is nothing less socially distanced than an Edinburgh show. “Thirty people crammed into a tiny sweatbox of a venue,” says John Kearns, winner of Edinburgh’s comedy award in 2014. “That’s where the magic comes from. But it means the fringe will be one of the last things to come back.” Kearns is one of several comics I spoke to (think of it as a support group) about the absence of the fringe. “I owe the festival a lot,” he says. “My income is 90% live performance. That’s built around creating a show in Edinburgh. It’s building towards it, then touring off the back of it. So the heart is pulled out of my year.” Amrou Al-Kadhi and Chloe Petts had planned to make their solo debuts this August. “I’d been developing the show for a really long time,” says Al-Kadhi, AKA Glamrou, of drag queen band Denim. Petts is in the same boat. “I was hoping to get decent opportunities off the back of [the fringe]. Now I might miss out on all of that.” She won’t be alone. “I’m worried about younger or newer people like me, queer people and people of colour who haven’t had a platform yet,” says Al-Kadhi. “Edinburgh is the place they can launch and I’m asking: who are we going to miss out on this year who could have really changed our minds about things?” Of course, the comedy industry may devise other ways to encounter, and harvest, new talent. Al-Kadhi and Petts are involved in Penguin Random House’s audiobook Edinburgh Unlocked, a digital alternative to this year’s fringe. But nothing can replace what the festival supplies face to face. To Al-Kadhi, it is about “the opportunity to perform, sometimes twice a day, for a month, which has always made my drag and my comedy so much tighter. It’s the Olympics of comedy.” To the veteran promoter Mick Perrin, Edinburgh is “where future comedy royalty is nurtured. I’ve been a part of it for as long as I can remember, taking the likes of Trevor Noah there for the first time.” Perrin had 20 acts lined up for 2020, several of them debutants. He has not had a summer without Edinburgh since 1991. Its cancellation “would have been a fantastic opportunity to spend my first ever August with my children … Now they’re too old and don’t care.” It might not be a one-off opportunity. “My fear is that Covid is doing serious damage to comedy on all levels and Edinburgh is never going to be the same again,” says Perrin. Kearns agrees: “Will Edinburgh happen again as it did in 2019? Not for two or three years, I don’t think, or even longer.” That prospect is appalling to fringe-lovers like me. Are there silver linings? More than one performer I speak to admits to enjoying a rare stress-free summer. “I keep thinking: why am I so relaxed in July?” comedian Lucy Pearman says. There are other reasons to welcome the pause. Voices have been raised in recent summers against the fringe – which was becoming more expensive for artists and making slow progress on diversity. Might this year’s cancellation enable a rethink? Jordan Brookes won last year’s comedy award and spent the days after cancellation crowing that he was the first act to retain the prize, albeit by default. “If there were a final winner and the awards never came back, I think it’s right that it’s me,” he jokes now. Assuming the fringe returns, however, it needs to change, says Brookes. “As we know from wider society, you don’t get major changes unless there’s a major disruptive event. I’m trying to remain optimistic that the fringe will come back in a shape that benefits more and excludes fewer people.” Otherwise, particularly after the pandemic, “we are going to end up with Benedict Cumberbatches of the comedy world being the only ones that can sustain themselves.” No one would wish that fate on the fringe. But neither can many of us countenance further summers without the festival. “You never feel more alive than when you get there and for that whole month,” says Kearns. “As a performer, as an audience member.” And as a critic, John. “Edinburgh as a festival symbolises everything the pandemic has said ‘no’ to. For that to disappear, however many Zoom gigs are trying to fill that gap, it’s heartbreaking.” Kearns sounds as crestfallen as I feel. “There’s a reason why the fringe exists. It’s because nothing else like it exists.” What will they be doing this summer? Jordan Brookes: It’s like lockdown has forced us into self-betterment though sheer boredom. I’ll continue to try to improve myself. Learning a new skill, maybe. Chloe Petts: I’ll find myself halfway through August going: ‘Oh God, I should be in Edinburgh now!’ But I am quite looking forward to being in London when friends are doing lovely things in the park. Mick Perrin: I live in Brighton. When I ring home from a rain-sodden Edinburgh, everybody’s been swimming in the sea. This summer, I might go swimming. Apparently, the sea’s quite nice here. Lucy Pearman: I live on a farm, so I’ll be helping my dad with the cows. And writing, doing online gigs, learning to cook … Amrou Al-Kadhi: I’ve got a couple of script commissions for TV. And I’ll continue trying to find a boyfriend. I don’t have that much money at the moment. I’m just going to hang out with my dog. John Kearns: August? I don’t even know what I’m going to be doing next week.