ComEnts

As some of you might have read on Berkshire Live the Reading Fringe Festival has been hijacked. We had hoped to resolve the situation behind the scenes without anyone finding out because it is a bit embarassing and reflects badly on the organisation.

Anyway, the situation at the moment is that one member of the organising group has gone solo, changed all the passwords to the e-mail addresses and myspace site, moved the website to his own new site. We knew about all that and were discussing what to do about the situation when out of nowhere he held a Fringe Festival Launch party yesterday. Myself and the rest of last years organisers weren't invited but reports from one of the performers suggest it went pretty badly.

We've worked really hard over the last couple of years to try and build up the Fringe's reputation. It's been difficult, we've made quite a lot of mistakes along the way and hopefully we've learnt from them. My main worry is that reputation is pretty fragile and it's much, much easier to destroy it than it is to regain it. The rest of the organisers are going to carry on having our planning meetings, the next one is tonight, and work out what we are going to do. The Fringe Festival concept is about much more than a name, website, MySpace and e-mail address. Possibly there could be an opportunity to reorganise and rebrand. We could then put some measures in place at the start that would stop this kind of thing happening in the future. That way it wouldn't be possible for one person to have a hissy fit and wreck the whole thing.