(Matt's Part One article is here)

It feels as if we're about to push a snowball off the top of a mountain, because once we're in Edinburgh and underway, the event gains such unstoppable momentum that it's very hard to fix any mistakes made in the planning. With the production side of the Zoo Venues staff currently loading vans with all the technical wizardry required to turn a community centre and some church buildings into bustling Fringe theatres, this is the point of no return for our 2008 Edinburgh project.

There's bound to be the odd anguished noise from a senior technician discovering that some obscure but apparently vital piece of steel hasn't arrived, but we don't tend to have too many last minute scares these days. Last year the get-in went so well that the technicians were all allowed a lie-in on the final day. Things have clearly got too slick, we should add a third venue to keep them on their toes.

It will be another week before what's known as the 'artistic' side of the venue staff (press and marketing, box office, front-of-house and bar) all arrive and launch into the flat-out week of welcome-meetings, training, venue-decorating and launching that will fill the next article.

In August we expand from the year-round core of six people, to a team of 34, which will include many returning members of the Zoo family, but also new recruits attracted via the Fringe website and friend-of-a-friend word-of-mouth.

Recruitment has occupied much of my time in recent weeks. It's naturally quite difficult to attract staff when basically you're asking them to work ridiculous hours with no days off throughout August, doing some of the least glamorous jobs at the Festival, and all on a voluntary basis (we provide accommodation, cover travel costs and help keep everyone fed, but actual wages remain beyond our budget at present).

The challenge is to inspire them, and make them feel the same passion for what we're trying to achieve as the venue founders do. That's why all my staff interviews start with the Winston Churchill speech. It's effectively my previous article about how we came from a car-loan for a car that didn't exist to running a thriving pair of Fringe venues via lots of heartache, dedication, money-loss, cigarettes and frowning, but condensed from 2,000 words to a two-minute rant. Inevitably a few candidates dropped out once the no-payment aspect popped up, but several other interviewees' eyes lit up at all the right junctures and they were duly recruited.

So this year I'll be joined in the press office by Emmy, an actress who promoted her own Edinburgh show in 2007 with phenomenal results and found she rather enjoyed that side of the industry, and Abigail, a journalism graduate who has written for the BBC and The Independent. I'm already delighted with them. Late night emails from Emmy entitled 'IDEAS!!!!' and Abigail excitedly referring to the great preview coverage of 'our shows' (not yours, not Zoo's, but ours) instantly proved I'd chosen well.

They'll join me in liaising with journalists and performers, while our street-distribution team spread the Zoo brand across Edinburgh. The street-team came into being by accident. In 2004, we recruited a last-minute replacement technician named Tubbs. He was not the finest technician we had ever employed. But when we sent him out to Fringe Sunday to distribute our programmes, he became a breathtakingly-efficient promotional whirlwind, and we had an idea.

Four years on, Tubbs is the head of our burgeoning distribution team, backed-up by newcomers Guy (a Fringe-loving eco-campaigner) and Jane (stolen from my wife's branch of Lush to transfer her soap-selling skills to ticket-selling) all month, plus his long-time sidekick Ollie and two men called Dave (one a dancer, one a skater) at peak times. They will frenetically distribute flyers, posters and programmes on behalf of the venue and many of our shows, and play a pivotal role in attracting audiences.

This year I made a point of travelling around to do as much face-to-face recruitment as possible, partly because it's hard to judge suitability by phone or email, but mainly because otherwise I'd got into a routine of barely leaving the office between programming in March/April and arriving in Edinburgh in late July. I'd emerge into the daylight in Scotland and realise that while I'd been solidly sub-editing press releases and answering performers' queries for four months, the world had changed and suddenly everyone was wearing skinny jeans (for example).

With those recruitment trips also including as many meetings with Fringe journalists as I could fit in, life has been a blur of interviews, show promoting and liaisons in exotic places like London, Edinburgh and Glasgow. All of which began to feel increasingly clandestine when one theatre editor who I had only met briefly in previous years sent me the following text to help me locate him: 'I'll be wearing a hat, reading a book about the Citizens Theatre and looking in need of coffee'. In the event, my instruction to him ('carrying a laptop and wearing thick black-framed glasses') proved more useful.

These trips aside, my job requires me to spend more time at my desk than my colleagues, so as August nears and everyone else is frequently away from their phones and computers, I start to fall into the role of venue receptionist. Performers twig that I'm the person most likely to respond rapidly, so press-work becomes punctuation between general advice. For instance this morning's calls and emails featured two queries about press releases and posters but also calls from companies keen to move their technical rehearsals, curious about legal aspects of being a foreign performer, wondering where they could leave their luggage, apologising for owing us money, asking where they could park a lorry, paying us money, enquiring about Edinburgh-suitable clothing, having an absolute panic about all aspects of their Fringe run, and every possible moral and decent disaster (plus some of the others).

The Fringe Office's difficulties with its new box-office system have added an extra challenge to this year's build-up. Normally we leave all pre-August sales in the Fringe's hands, then open our venue box-offices from the preview days. This year with the Fringe's system sometimes shaky, and sometimes not operating at all, we've had to set up temporary ticket-booking arrangements seven weeks early - not easy when your entire box-office team until late July is Mina the box-office manager (who has many vital tasks in the production office before August), your normal box office phone won't be connected until late July, you have no way of taking customers' money until the rented equipment arrives on the eve of the Festival, and you're rarely in one place for long until you get to Edinburgh. So while I've been celebrating the fact that our tickets are selling faster than ever and some shows will be sold-out long in advance, Mina has been pining for the old days of single-figure pre-sales and some peace and quiet. Thanks mainly to her heroic efforts, we've managed to keep things afloat and prevented our companies or audiences from being too seriously affected by the Fringe's problems, but it's been - tricky.

My other daily task at present is updating the sales figures spreadsheet: a beautiful, formula-ridden Excel document that works out every sales statistic I could dream of, not just average audience figures, percentage of capacity filled, week-by-week trends, pre-sales versus on the door sales, the split between venue and Fringe sales, averages before and after good/bad reviews, effects of promotions like the Half-Price Hut, but also how everything compares to previous years' and shows' figures. Whatever way I twist the resultant graphs, there's no denying that things look very good at present - we've fluctuated between being 108% and 124% up on our 2007 pre-sales. Admittedly, the programme's bigger, but only by 12%, so it's not simply that there are more tickets to sell.

So the audiences are building, the performers are prepared, we have talented staff, we've weathered the box-office storm and the press know about us. All we've got to do now is install and open a few theatres.

END

(c) Matt Beer 21 July 08

Matt's next article follows mid-August

Fringe Report (c) Fringe Report 2002-2008

www.fringereport.com