The venues behind the Edinburgh Comedy Festival are not, they insist, “breaking away” from the Edinburgh Fringe. Well, of course they’re not.

They don’t need to. They’re simply swelling to such a size that the Edinburgh Fringe itself is looking – to comedy fans, at least – like an enterprising spin-off from the Pleasance, the Assembly Rooms, the Gilded Balloon and the Underbelly.

Is this a bad thing? After all, however much we like to talk about seeing some amazing naked Finnish ventriloquist performing in a rusty bathtub in Leith, most Edinburgh punters trust to a bit of natural selection. Fair enough. You don’t have to be Milton Friedman to think that the comics appearing at the Pleasance, say – with its prizewinners and TV names and smoker-friendly courtyard – are ready-filtered for your enjoyment. You’ll see some rubbish, of course. But less rubbish than you would elsewhere. The problem isn’t the big boys forming a cartel. The problem is them giving themselves their own name. The Edinburgh Comedy Festival makes explicit what was only implicit before: it makes the two-tier system a fact rather than an interpretation. It helps the venues to sell themselves (and let’s not forget how difficult it is for anybody to make money at the Fringe). But this lightent Premier League risks ruining the lower leagues in which acts can develop to a point at which they can do something more professional, more fully formed. Which used to be the whole point of the Fringe.

One of my favourite Fringe experiences last year was a comic called Edward Aczel. His show, in a dowdy rugby club in the middle of the afternoon, was technically inept, stumblingly staged and culminated in a rather feeble pub quiz. It wasn’t for everyone. Sometimes you wanted to give him a good shake. But it’s stayed in my head a lot longer than other, far more virtuoso performances. Last year Aczel was appearing in the same festival as Frank Skinner, Sean Hughes and Russell Howard. This year he wouldn’t be. And that’s a real pity.

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