Yes, there is life outside the Edinburgh Festival

'One day it shall be I who looks deep into the camera and says: "I feel like chicken tonight" '

The best way to assess the importance of the Edinburgh Festival is not to go. Anyone reading this in Edinburgh, especially performers, will be under the impression that the whole world revolves around the festival. If you mentioned to a performer that Vladimir Putin was in trouble, they'd say, "Oh, yeah, he's had some shocking reviews." Perhaps some will have read that story, and their only, rather facetious thought will have been, "He's lucky; I wish I could get that many people in a room at the same time."

The best way to assess the importance of the Edinburgh Festival is not to go. Anyone reading this in Edinburgh, especially performers, will be under the impression that the whole world revolves around the festival. If you mentioned to a performer that Vladimir Putin was in trouble, they'd say, "Oh, yeah, he's had some shocking reviews." Perhaps some will have read that story, and their only, rather facetious thought will have been, "He's lucky; I wish I could get that many people in a room at the same time."

Strangely, the more ludicrous the act, the more likely they are to take themselves seriously. Once, at a gig during the festival, I was introduced by a compere whose act consisted of his assistant hammering 11 nails through his nose. I walked on to the blood-splattered stage and noticed a huge drumkit behind me. So I said, "Some of you probably saw this and thought there might be a band playing, but that's going up his arse later on." Back-stage, he went berserk at how I'd undermined his artistic credibility.

When you don't go, it becomes apparent how irrelevant it is to most people. As a kid, I never understood what the festival - or "the arts" - was meant to be. Partly, that was because such things were only ever on BBC 2. If anyone accidentally switched on to BBC 2, we'd see ballerinas, or an old professor talking about the Incas, and shriek, "Oh, my God, we don't want that."

Having rapidly changed back to Val Doonican, we'd all give off a little shiver, the sort you emit after squashing a huge spider. BBC 2 was for the sort of people who drank wine, or had prawn cocktail when it wasn't their birthday.

It wasn't helped by the pompous way "the arts" were, and still are, presented on television. There's usually a smug host who says something like, "The letter D has featured over the years in such diverse words as 'dog', 'eradicate' and 'radish'. But where now for this thoughtful and provocative letter, especially after Franz Howdenbeck's epic trilogy, which was written using only the letter D? With me to discuss the letter are Germaine Greer and Tony Parsons."

Later, I spent about 10 consecutive years bound up with the intensity of the festival. Now, I doubt whether I could keep up with the debauchery. And performing at Edinburgh without staying out until five every morning is as pointless as going to the Ministry of Sound and asking the DJ if he could keep the noise down a bit.

But there is one sense in which the festival is a sign of the times. Present throughout is a pack of promoters, TV executives, publicists and people whose function never becomes clear, but who suddenly rush into the room with clipboards, that has come to dominate the event. Certain agencies place their acts in sold-out shows for three weeks and pay them nothing, except a promise that this will "get them noticed".

Publicists haggle with papers to get their acts featured in slots such as "My favourite piece of gardening equipment". And the media entourage decides who is the success of the festival. Though the amazing thing about most people who work on the business side of comedy is that they have no sense of humour. They're the sort of people who hear a joke and say, "But isn't that impossible? I mean, I didn't think dinosaurs could talk. And how would they fit into a pub?"

Worst of all, most of them equate success simply with being on telly a lot. But most people who perform, whether stand-up or acting, start with higher aspirations than that. I don't suppose there was ever an actor who said to himself, "I may be just another thespian at drama school. But one day it shall be I, with millions of viewers awaiting my lines, who looks deep into the camera with perfect poise and says: 'I feel like chicken tonight'."

The art to being on telly a lot at the moment is to be as vacuous and anodyne as possible, like Carol Smillie or that camp idiot who used to work at an airport. So while it's depressing that a festival fringe designed to encourage innovation and be a challenge to the mainstream has been swallowed by a vast media clique, it's brilliant that so many performers still defy the odds to put on shows destined to make no money for themselves. Even if the only thing most of the rest of the country hears about is which show has enraged a local councillor.

This year's shocks go nowhere near the depths of the show that I read a review of during one year's festival. The play began with three men coming out stark naked and walking in circles. After a few minutes, apparently, one of them did a dump on the stage. "At this point", said the review, "12 of the audience walked out." But what interested me was the people who stayed. Presumably, they leant across to the person they came with and whispered, "We'll give it another five minutes."