COMEDY FUNDING IS NO LAUGHING MATTER

EVERY comedian worth their salt is getting their artwork ready for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August. The advertisement deadline is this week and I always get panic attacks worrying needlessly about the smallest of details.

The Fringe is all about showing your comedy and theatre wares to the industry and to the wider public.

The cost of putting on an Edinburgh Fringe show is unbelievable - my husband tells me every year that it would have been cheaper and more worthwhile to hold a TV executive hostage, feed him caviar, bribe him incessantly and make him promise I get my own TV show. And there would probably be enough cash left over to buy a new car at the end of it all.

It costs an average of £8,000 to put on a proper show at the Fringe, and yet most people are unaware of that investment when they come and see the finished product. (To rent a decent flat for a month during August is at least £2,000 alone!)

Yet I still do it, because I love everything about the Fringe. It is a wonderful festival and people from all over the world come to see the shows.

In 1996, I asked the Scottish Arts Council for some money to put on my first Edinburgh show. They told me they didn't finance individual comedy shows. This surprised me. In my naïvety, I assumed they provided cash to back performing arts events in Scotland that would invite people to appreciate and explore Scottish culture, which is what my show was all about.

I wholeheartedly agree that cash should be poured into Scottish Opera and Scottish Ballet; they are good companies offering very worthwhile art forms. But the ballets and operas performed are not all Scottish, are they? I am not being biased against those wonderful and worthwhile companies; I just feel that they appeal to a limited number of the Scottish public.

If they were hugely well attended, then they wouldn't need so much funding, would they?

It could be that I don't know enough highbrow folks who enjoy such cultural events, but I suspect that if you stopped 50 people on the streets of Scotland and asked them to name a famous Scottish Ballet dancer, a famous Scottish Opera singer and a famous Scottish comedian, I know that most people would struggle with the first two and yet could immediately name Billy Connolly.

So why aren't comics funded and promoted in the same way as more highbrow art forms, especially at the Edinburgh Fringe, the biggest cultural event in the world?

Clowning and theatre are very much supported by grants and other funding, so if I create a comedy show based on clowns and physical dance it may well get the cash it so deserves.

In 2002, I took a one-woman comedy show, entitled Full Measure of Scotch, to the New Zealand International Comedy Festival. Despite having a Scottish title for a show about diversity and Scottish culture, the Scottish Arts Council still didn't help me out - it was the British Council which partly funded the trip.

My season in Auckland sold out and I won the Best Show Concept award. Last year I returned to New Zealand with my Good Godley! show and won the Spirit of the Festival award.

I was the only Scottish comic in the festival and was welcomed with open arms.

Comedy isn't as welcomed and appreciated as its fellow art forms in Scotland and I think there is a level of snobbery surrounding this issue - I believe that official arts bodies still see comedy as the poor man's entertainment.

We comics most definitely practice an art form, we just happen to learn our trade in back-street pubs and clubs.

Does that make us common? Does it degrade what we do?

Most comics start out their careers working in small clubs, often performing their set for free at the very beginning. I recall the first time I got paid for a gig. It was in a bar in Edinburgh. I was so excited, running through the rain to catch a bus with £20 in my pocket for entertaining six people in a smelly wee cellar bar on a Tuesday night. But that's how we do our apprenticeship in this business.

Some financial aid to put on shows at major festivals would be welcome to support all the hard work and raw talent stand-up comics offer.

Comedy is a very popular way to express your nationality and your artistic ability. Most importantly, when a comic does become successful, they sell out theatres without any sponsorship or need for funding from the taxpayers' pockets.

Now that's an art form!

FEELING THE BURN AS REVELATION COMPLETES DAUGHTER'S REVENGE

I AM just back from Birmingham, where I have been working at Jongleurs comedy club all weekend. I popped into the Kerrang! radio station to take part in their late night Asylum radio show with Tim Shaw the host.

Tim called my daughter Ashley as she was at home in Glasgow and, live on air, asked her if I had any embarrassing secrets.

The show gets around 1.5 million listeners and Ashley told Tim that I once put hair-remover cream on my upper thighs, but because my bosom isn't a pert as it used to be I managed to chemically burn my boobs in the process.

Now I have told everyone this story, that secret will never haunt me and I can firmly admit Ashley got me back for shaming her in this column!

BANK CLERK'S CHEEK TO CHEQUE OUT HOW I SPEND MY CASH

WHILE in London I walked along to my literary agent to pick up a long-anticipated cheque for my book sales. I then strolled along to the bank to present the cheque, mentally starting to work out how I was going to spend it.

As I handed the cheque over to the bank teller, she took a quick look at the amount and asked: "Do you have plans for this money?"

I was taken aback. "Yes," I said, "I plan to spend it all on chocolate, cheap shoes and a trip to Timbuktu. Why? Do you have plans for my money?"

The woman laughed out loud and simply stamped the receipt and handed it over.

I can't believe that banks authorise their staff to ask such personal questions. I have never asked the bank where they invest my money and what they plan to do with it when I hand over that hard-earned cash.

It's bad enough that my husband will lecture me on the art of saving; I don't need to hear it from strangers.

FASHIONISTA, HEEL THYSELF AND TAKE THE LUMPS

VICTORIA Beckham told us in her fashionista tome That Extra Half Inch that us women can benefit from a little height on a heel.

I have seen the big bumpy bunions on Victoria's feet and, to be honest, I would rather wear two-penny gutties for the rest of my days than have old-lady foot lumps.

My mate Monica works all day and most of the night in her sharp-toed Manolo five-inch heeled tools of the devil and she looks fab.

I own one official pair of heels that I bought for the BAFTA awards.

I go up the red carpet like a foot-bound Geisha and Monica glides about like something from the Winter Olympics.

She tells me that she only wears shoes "in season".

I thought that only applied to vegetables and oysters?

The day posh cobblers make high heels that let you run down the street without cracking a knee, jump on a bus with no muscle consequences or clatter over cobblestones without getting dislocated hips, I will be the first in the queue to buy a pair in every colour.