The boys and the bubble

Tonight at midnight in Edinburgh, the Perrier comedy award will be celebrating its 20th year on the Fringe with a champagne-drenched party held for the opening of an envelope. In all likelihood, this year's winner will be young, white and male (like nine out of the past 10 winners) and he will go on to have his own TV show, again, like nine out of the past 10 winners. Best to have done with it and just re-name the award, "The New Young, White, Male Soon-to-be TV Star" award?

It's a question that clearly exasperates the award's organiser, Nica Burns, who says (and not for the first time this Edinburgh) "We reflect what's there. We're not seeking to change the nature of comedy, we're just representing what's happening on the Fringe." And there's the rub: the Perrier award is for the best show on the Fringe and on the Fringe there is theatre (a lot more than comedy), music, physical theatre (that's dance to you), children's shows and all manner of "challenging" (some very challenging, I'll have you know) creative endeavours that defy your best taxonomic abilities. In its 20 years though, the Perrier has only once gone to a theatre group, Theatre de Complicite in 1985, only once to a woman (Jenny Eclair - a self-proclaimed "honorary bloke" - in 1995) and never to someone whose skin pigmentation wasn't white.

It's problematic because the Edinburgh Fringe is the biggest arts festival in the world, and if the biggest award at the biggest arts festival invariably goes to a young, white, male stand-up comic, what does that say about the state of the creative arts? There are two quick and easy reasons for this state of affairs. Firstly, theatre on the fringe is (largely) dull and derivative. In any given year, there are numerous re-stagings of Abigail's Party and Waiting For Godot, and it doesn't matter how tarted up they are by having (a) all-female casts (gosh, how daring), (b) all left-handed dyslexic casts or (c) come complete with banging techno music for that ever-so-contemporary feel. Any surprise that one of the biggest theatrical hits at this year's Fringe is a show called Puppetry Of The Penis, which features two men using their penises to create models of Ayers Rock, the Eiffel Tower and various other global landmarks? At least, it's a laugh and not some tortuous home-made piece of urban existentialism performed by people who have just finished their A-Levels.

Secondly, it's a lot to do with money and PR. Perrier obviously wants its winners to go on and have as high a profile as possible, hoping that every ounce of media coverage they garner will have the epitaph "Winner of the Perrier Award" in the first paragraph. The company will not have been displeased that previous winners such as Frank Skinner, Steve Coogan, Dylan Moran and the League Of Gentlemen have all gone to elevated television status.

Which is not to question the motives of the Perrier judging panel, which each year is made up of journalists and other assorted media types. They, independently, choose what for them is the best show on the Fringe and obviously can only respond to what is offered to them. In the absence of theatre getting its act together, this year it will again be a young, white, male stand-up.

The first winners of the Perrier award back in 1981 were The Cambridge Footlights team of Emma Thompson, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Tony Slattery, and they remain the only familiar names from all the winners in the 1980s -they and Jeremy Hardy, who won in 1988. As some indication of how the winners in that decade didn't fully exploit the award as a career move, consider the case of 1989's winner, Simon Fanshawe, who went on to work on That's Life. Oh dear.

The 1990s winners have all proved that the Perrier has now become an extension of British television's light entertainment department. Sean Hughes won the award in 1990 and almost before the ink was dry on his cheque, he had been signed by Channel 4 to appear in his iffy sitcom Sean's Show. The following year, the panel gave up any pretence that they were there to reward "innovative and promising" work by giving the award to the mainstream Frank Skinner whose set, then as now, revolved around oral sex/lavatorial routines that were more end-of-pier than arts festival.

The following four winners (Steve Coogan, Lee Evans, Lano and Woodley and Jenny Eclair,) went straight to TV - in Lano and Woodley's case it was back in their native Australia. Navan man Dylan Moran, who won in 1996, went on to appear in BBC2's How Do You Want Me, the film Notting Hill and next month stars in his own sit-com Black Books (co-written with Father Ted writer Graham Linehan) for Channel 4. The 1997 winners, The League of Gentlemen, protest that their move to television (in their excellent series based in the fictional village of Royston Valley - which is Roy Chubby Brown's real name, trivia fans) was planned before they won the Perrier, but the award certainly speeded up the production schedule.

In 1998 another Navan man, Tommy Tiernan, won the award and again went straight to Channel 4 in Small Potatoes - the recipient of the dreaded "mixed reviews"; while last year's winner, Al Murray (The Pub Landlord), signed a £3 million deal with Sky One and his sit-com starts next week.

Such a record probably says more about the laziness of television commissioners than the acts themselves. The entire British media world moves to Edinburgh for the month of August and why should they be expected to drag themselves away from their hotel-bar expense-tabs when they can just sign up whoever won that year's Perrier?

RTE has a novel take on this: it blithely ignores any Irish person who has won or been nominated for the biggest comedy award in the world and instead opts for Bull Island. As some indication of its reckless squandering of talent, Irish winners and nominees of the Perrier are: Ben Keaton (the forgotten man of Irish comedy, he was the first Irish winner back in 1984), Sean Hughes, Owen O'Neill, Dylan Moran, Graham Norton, Ed Byrne and Tommy Tiernan. And you can throw in Ardal O'Hanlon, who was knocked out on a technicality in 1996. Proportionally speaking, the Irish have the best record in winners/nominees of any country in the world. Wake up and smell the fizzy water, RTE - the laugh's on you.

This year's Perrier winner will be announced tonight at midnight.