Comedy news: Stealing the comedy limelight: The Five Pound Fringe at Leicester Comedy Festival

It's never easy being the last person to turn up at a party. Most of the time most people already know each other, there's at least one couple quietly thinking about the occupancy rates for the rooms upstairs, and the feeling of not-fitting-in can be almost overwhelming. However there are always those rare few who can make an entrance in style.

Last August the Five Pound Fringe (FPF), which has been setup by Lisa Keddie and Jon Briley from Best Medicine comedy, managed to waltz into the Edinburgh Fringe with enough panache to make even the most avid party-goers strain their necks to see who the new arrivals were.

With a simple, new approach designed to give customers decent shows for prices which they could afford, £5 (the clue is in the name), the FPF's Fringe debut breathed new life into a festival which was in danger of pricing itself out of popular appeal.

“We felt that ticket prices [for the Fringe] had got too high for the level of act we were promoting – people are more likely to take a risk and see someone they have never heard of before for a fiver than for £10-£12,” Keddie says.

The Five Pound Fringe (as well as the obvious economic impact of the recession) managed to make a significant dent in the ticket prices for the Fringe in 2009. During 2007, ticket prices at the Fringe stood at £9.38, in 2009 they were £7.76, a drop of over 17 per cent.

But the FPF didn't only help bring ticket prices down; it made the Fringe more accessible to both audience and artists alike. What was once a beacon for the arts industry has suffered under the weight of 'corporate responsibility'. Artists were losing money and frequently mortgaging their careers to fund their Edinburgh show.

According to Mark Watson, who performed his own show at the FPF, it provided valuable exposure to up-and-coming acts.

“The Five Pound Fringe was the perfect bridge between the prohibitive expense of the top-end venues and the worrying amateurism at the other extreme of the festival,” Watson says. “It was also run in one of the most genuinely Fringey venues to be found in Edinburgh. All in all, a genuine breath of fresh air in the sometimes stagnant Edinburgh atmosphere, and something to look forward to for next year and beyond.”

The Fringe – like any other arts festival – survives on its ability to convince artists from across the world to spend thousands of pounds to travel to Scotland to put on a show.

This appeal had began to stagnate in recent years as it's reputation became increasingly tarnished while at the same time the rise of the Camden Fringe and the London Fringe Festival – as well arts festivals such as Latitude – have given London-based artists cheaper options to showcase their new material.

Despite supporting the downward trend in ticket prices, according to Keddie most FPF shows managed to turn in a profit in 2009: “If shows hadn't made money, we wouldn't have either. But we had faith in our programming and tried to keep entrance fees for acts in the FPF to a minimum while also covering things like brochure costs.”

Yet although the FPF has gone a long way to changing that, it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that it would be a success.

“It was terrifying,” Lisa adds. ““I lost a lot of sleep over the FPF but I think you just have to keep going, keep on the ball and at the end of the day remember no-one is going to die if you are going to fuck it up.”

“We had never taken on such a large project before so there were things we didn't anticipate and that - combined with getting all our equipment robbed – taught us a lot about managing a project of this size. This time we are much better prepared."

The FPF is back in 2010, both at the Leicester Comedy Festival in February and at the Brighton Fringe this May but what are their hopes for the first year of a new decade?

“Better weather!” Jon says. “Last year we did ok and we learned lessons to make it [The FPF] even better, get more people in and raise the profile of FPF further."

The Five Pound Fringe will be at the Leicester Comedy Festival between 5th - 21st Feb, with over 50 shows at £5 For more information visit www.fivepoundfringe.com