Another Edinburgh Festival Fringe shortlist arrives, and another wave of consternation predictably follows. Why? Because no Scottish comedians feature on the main Edinburgh Comedy Awards (ECA) nomination lists this August. Established in 1981 as the Perrier Comedy Awards, the accolade traded headline sponsors across four decades - including Intelligent Finance, Foster’s, lastminute.com, and Dave - before adopting its current independent title.
Comedian Mark Nelson captured the online mood, when he declared “the bias is just ridiculous”. He pointed to The Stand’s newly created McTavish Award: an honour restricted to Scottish or Scottish-based acts, as a vital corrective to an insular industry bubble.
Outrage is easy and even understandable. Judging is, by its very nature, strongly subjective. Of course, I cannot categorically rule out such bias altogether. However, I believe that close inspection of the mechanics of the competition reveals clear, objective reasons why local talent may appear to be missing out.
Fighting the odds
The ECA explicitly targets ‘up-and-coming’ acts. Nominees cannot have starred in major television comedy programmes or regularly filled 500-plus seat venues under their own name. If you want a spot on the newcomers’ list, your Fringe show must be your debut.
In a festival packed with many hundreds of contenders, judges working under immense time pressure must whittle lists down rapidly. Panellists watching up to six shows a day almost certainly rule out acts hovering in administrative grey areas to narrow a sprawling field. I would!
The McTavish Award celebrates one of the city’s best-loved comedians and offers a great new showcase for our home-grown talent.
Examine the eight featured, and superbly talented, acts on the inaugural longlist. Four present headaches for ECA judges weighing up strict eligibility. Amy Matthews fronted an ITVX solo stand-up special. Chris Forbes has co-headlined Glasgow’s 1,785-seat King’s Theatre and spent years on BBC’s Scot Squad. Gareth Waugh supports arena-level global tours for Katherine Ryan and Daniel Sloss. Kim Blythe’s viral online footprint is driving her to bigger and bigger venues in the coming year.
Panellists looking for clean eligibility lines will naturally hesitate over such edge cases. That leaves only four McTavish contenders - Amanda Dwyer, Gareth Mutch, Paul McDaniel, and Robin Grainger - sitting comfortably within traditional venue and media thresholds without grey-area complications. Only three of these are Scottish. That’s three gifted, homegrown comedians versus a small army of the best in the world currently playing venues around the city. These are not great odds.
You’d be forgiven for believing there must be many more eligible performers, but you might be surprised by the raw numbers. Former ECA panel chair Stephen Armstrong, who we will hear more of below, notes that despite the geographic advantage of lower accommodation costs, surprisingly few Scottish comedians actually stage full, eligible 50-minute runs out of the 700-plus comedy entries listed each August.
ECA Criteria at a Glance
Three Categories: Best Comedy Show (£10,000), Best Newcomer (£5,000), and a discretionary Panel Prize (£5,000).
Eligibility: Original stand-up, sketch, or character comedy running 50 minutes or more. The awards exclude plays and cover acts.
Performance Window: Acts must run at least eight shows between 20–28 August (or five if opened earlier).
The Star Rule: The panel disqualifies acts starring in major TV/streaming specials or filling 500-plus seat venues under their own name.
Judging Panel: Ten judges (seven industry professionals, three public members) inspect every eligible comedy show.
Inside the Judging Room
To understand how these decisions happen, let’s look at the judging process itself. Arts critic Stephen Armstrong was kind enough to speak with me at short notice to explain the inner workings. A veteran journalist for The Sunday Times, author, and Orwell Foundation trustee, Armstrong sat on the main ECA judging panel across multiple festival seasons dating back to 2010, chaired the panel in 2018 when Rose Matafeo claimed Best Comedy Show, and served on the panel as recently as 2023.
Armstrong describes a relentless, highly structured operation. First, local spotters filter out raw or unprepared acts (there are legions of these, believe me. That’s part of what the Fringe is for!). Then a ten-person panel takes over.
No show enters longlist consideration unless at least two panellists attend and give the nod. By the final Sunday, the panel debates every remaining contender for hours to build a longlist of roughly 15 acts. Panellists spend the next 72 hours filling gaps in their viewing schedules, ensuring every judge sees every shortlisted act before a secret ballot on Saturday morning.
Armstrong highlights a consistent demographic sweet spot in these debates. Shortlisted comedians almost always average between 30 and 35 years old. Ageism, I hear you cry? But think again. It takes time to master any craft; why should comedy be the exception?
“They’ve been working for a certain amount of time, so they’re able to create a show of a certain ambition and scale,” says Armstrong. “But they haven’t really got jaded yet, and they haven’t moved on. So that’s the sweet spot.”
Just gags doesn’t cut it
Armstrong’s insider vantage point reveals that stylistic preferences may also dictate shortlists far more than geography.
“What probably leans towards comedians who have something about their show that isn’t just basically club comic gags,” says Armstrong. “The one thing that really doesn’t... very, very rarely works... is to say, “Oh, this is f***ing funny.” It has to be something about that you can get your teeth into. So this is about this, or this matters for this reason.”
Armstrong notes that an audience typically sustains focus on pure jokes for roughly twenty minutes. Expanding a set to a full Fringe hour requires a stronger structural spine or personal narrative.
When I pointed to the absence of the dearly missed Janey Godley from prior nomination lists, Armstrong was quick to praise her wit and charisma. However, he isn’t wrong to say her pre-national-treasure-status Fringe sets were audience-responsive, sharply observed, punchline-rich shows.
What of now international star Daniel Sloss? “Daniel Sloss is the kind of comic who would have been shortlisted if he wasn’t so successful so quickly,” says Armstrong, noting Sloss bypassed award eligibility by leaping straight to massive rooms. “He basically now travels the world doing Fringe shows, but for a vast audience.”
Scottish comedians who do secure ECA nominations have done so by subverting traditional club formats. Armstrong cited Glasgow comic Larry Dean, a three-time ECA nominee across the Best Newcomer and Best Comedy Show categories. Dean opened one nominated hour-long show with stripped-down gags reminiscent of a wide-boy before revealing a nuanced story about his sexuality.
Similarly, Fife-born Scottish comedian Richard Gadd, of Baby Reindeer fame, claimed the main prize by dismantling the comedy form entirely.
“Richard Gadd, he takes the form of the comedy art form, and he sort of throws it around and moves it into different spaces,” says Armstrong.
“The problem with judging any comedy,” he adds, “is that I could tell you the show I think was the funniest ever, and you would think it was rubbish. If you don’t have a show that’s got a story or that’s got something to it, you’re running the risk of other judges just going, “This is rubbish”.”
Armstrong also has the idea that streaming platforms may be pushing this ‘story’ trend harder still. “The Netflix special has taken on the format of the Comedy Award Fringe show,” he says, pointing to the prevalence of story-based stand-up specials available on demand.
Shifting Stakes and the Tokenism Trap
As our chat proceeded, I found myself strongly agreeing with Stephen’s observation that critics of the shortlists often mistake the festival’s fundamental identity. Perhaps they could have been retitled a little more clearly, but the Edinburgh Comedy Awards are an international affair, not a regional showcase: a huge part of the awards’ cachet stems from its global stature.
“The lists are probably... designed to represent an international festival. Not a Scottish festival,” says Armstrong. “What I think is amazing about Edinburgh, both the International Festival and the Fringe, is that they were born out of the idea that the world would show the world’s art to each other... there’s nothing like it anywhere else in the world where so many people show up and perform.”
This global influx inevitably creates formidable competition. Performers from every English-speaking country arrive in Edinburgh to test their work against the world’s best; Armstrong praises the host city’s willingness to stage this international battle.
“The beauty of Scotland and Edinburgh, I think, is the generosity with which they host that. It’s such a generous act on behalf of the city.”
The problem perhaps is any proposals to ring-fence nominations for local acts miss the mark. The ECA’s leadership (director Nica Burns and executive director Emma Brünjes), he tells me, have regularly surveyed Scottish comedians about creating a dedicated local talent award, but performers rejected the concept.
“What you find is that they don’t [want it],” says Armstrong. “Because what they want to do is they want to be shortlisted and considered alongside everybody else. They don’t want to because they feel like a local talent award would be like a second best.”
It’s not hard to see that engineered quotas on the main list would insult performers rather than celebrate them.
“If the panel every year had to put one Scottish comedian on the list, then that Scottish comedian every year would hate the fact that they were on the list. If they didn’t win, they would just see that they were token representation on that shortlist.”
Plus, winning the comedy awards might once have guaranteed you at least a shot at TV glory; that’s simply no longer the case. Armstrong points to Dominic Holland, winner of the 1993 Perrier Best Newcomer Award, who was last seen on the Free Fringe back in 2017 with a show about being eclipsed by his super famous son.
Curiously, missing the shortlist might even yield its own dividend. Armstrong - tongue somewhat in cheek - argues that sustained public debate over a snub could build a comedian’s profile more effectively than a nomination slot that ends without a trophy.
“If your favourite comedian isn’t shortlisted and they are good, and you’re prepared to keep that argument going, then maybe their actually not appearing on the shortlist will do them a career favour anyway.” Most would, obviously, prefer to win, but anything is preferable to a pity prize.
Let me lay my own cards on the table: The Fringe succeeds precisely because Edinburgh welcomes in the world’s best. Local frustrations are understandable, but attributing nomination shortfalls to prejudice ignores reality. It’s impossible to prove a negative, but there’s just no need to invoke anti-Scottish bias to account for the situation.
I might think brilliant young Scottish comedian Ayo Adenekan deserves a nod, but Scottish performers face an elite global field, strict eligibility criteria, and a panel that leans towards matured, thematic heft. The McTavish Award offers a welcome celebration of domestic talent (no Ayo again, though!), but to me, the main ECA shortlist simply reflects a ruthless, international arena. It’s worth winning precisely because it’s very, very hard to do so.