Fest magazine folds and its Fringe reviewers go unpaid

Nine days between five stars and "we cannot make any further payments"

On 26 August, The Skinny gave Jordan Brookes five stars at the Pleasance Courtyard. On 1 September it ran five for Zachary Ruane’s solo debut in the same venue. It gave four to Vittorio Angelone’s you can’t Say Nothing any more at the Assembly Hall. Nine days after that, on 10 September, the company behind all three of those reviews said it had ceased operations. Chortle reported that contributors had been told they will not be paid for outstanding invoices – "likely to include a great many reviews from the Fringe".

The publisher is Radge Media CIC, and it puts out three titles: The Skinny, Fest magazine, and a food magazine called Gnaw. All three are going. September’s issue of The Skinny is the final one. If you filed comedy copy in Edinburgh in August for either of the first two, you have quietly been reclassified from freelancer to creditor, with no form to fill in and nobody to ring about it.

Rosamund West is the editor-in-chief and one of four current Radge Media directors listed at Companies House. She set out the sequence in an email to contributors that Chortle quoted. The business looked survivable at the end of August, she said, and a restructure had started – and then:

when a key piece of potential funding fell through, the situation changed dramatically

On the invoices themselves, her wording was blunter: "we cannot make any further payments at this time, and I truly apologise for the situation this places you in." The apology in these emails is almost always sincere, and it almost always arrives after the bank has already made the decision – I’ve read a lot of them over the past two years, from festivals and promoters and one club that went down owing a compere eleven separate £40 fees.

Is Fest magazine closing?

Yes. Fest magazine is closing, along with The Skinny and Gnaw. Their publisher Radge Media CIC has ceased operations and, per Chortle’s report, intends to enter into liquidation. The announcement landed on 10 September 2026. Fest started in 2002, and its own about page describes it as "the biggest free guide to the Fringe, reaching over 150,000 people every summer in Edinburgh". Whatever else you think about star ratings, that is a lot of A5 glossies in a lot of hands in a lot of queues on the Pleasance Courtyard.

The publisher’s public statement doesn’t mention liquidation or unpaid contributors at all. It blames the sector: "funding pressures across the sector, rising costs and the ongoing cost-of-living crisis". It also says, correctly, that "The Skinny is a key asset to Scottish cultural life". Both of those things can be true while a reviewer who wrote eight Fringe notices in nine days is still waiting on a payment that isn’t coming. The public statement and the contributors’ email describe the same collapse and share no facts.

Wikipedia’s entry on Fest credits its founding to two University of Edinburgh students, Dan Lerner and Helen Pidd, the latter now an editor at the Guardian. Twenty-four years is a decent run for a student idea. It’s also long enough that a generation of comics have never done a Fringe where Fest wasn’t one of the outlets you hoped would turn up. The funding squeeze it cites is the same one that cut the Keep It Fringe artist fund to £40,000 this year, with comics topping up each other’s prize pots to fill the hole.

£63,000 in the red and 13 pages of accounts

The money math here is thinner than you’d hope, because the paperwork stops eighteen months short of the event. Chortle’s line is the one to hold on to: "The latest accounts for Radge Media lodged at Companies House only go up to March 2025, when it showed the business was £63,000 in the red."

I went and looked at the file myself. Radge Media C.I.C. is company number SC310052, incorporated on 12 October 2006, registered at The Melting Pot, 15 Calton Road in Edinburgh, and filed under SIC code 58190 – "Other publishing activities". It traded as Radge Media Limited from May 2007 until December 2023, when it converted to a community interest company. For seven months before that it was called Lycidas (449) Limited, which is the sort of name an off-the-shelf company arrives with before anybody has decided what it’s for.

The accounts for the year ended 31 March 2025 were filed on 8 January 2026 as total exemption full accounts, and they run to 13 pages. The next set isn’t due until 31 December 2026, so a public picture of the 2025-26 trading year – the year that includes the August just gone – now probably never arrives in the normal way. When I checked on 11 September the company status still read Active and the filing history carried no liquidation notice. The most recent entry before the announcement was a change to director Alexander Neilan Park’s details on 7 September, three days out. I’m not claiming those two things are connected; I’m noting that the filing history is where the insolvency appointment will show up, and that it hadn’t yet.

Compare that with the £215,000 Leicester Comedy Festival’s creditors list ran to, where acts found their own names misspelled and their amounts wrong on the statutory paperwork. The fund set up for those unpaid comics has raised £4,000 of its £30,000 target. Radge Media is a smaller hole in absolute terms, though that arithmetic does nothing for the individual writer owed three hundred quid for August’s copy.

The posters already went to print

Here’s the bit that lands on comedians rather than journalists. A four-star pull quote from Fest has gone on a lot of autumn tour posters over the years, and the ones printed in the last fortnight are now advertising a magazine that has ceased operations. The rating doesn’t stop being real – Angelone did get four stars, and the review was still live at its URL on theskinny.co.uk when I looked. Nobody in any of the statements has said who keeps the archive running, or for how long.

The bigger structural thing is capacity. There were 1,401 comedy shows in the 2026 Fringe programme, and the number of outlets with the staff and the will to send someone to a 23:25 debut in a converted lecture theatre is not large. Remove the biggest free guide and you remove a chunk of the reviewing that debut acts actually get, because the nationals were never going to your third preview anyway. That shrinks the supply of printable quotes, which in turn makes the ones you can get more valuable – and makes the acts who win them on other terms, like the Comedy Poster Awards that now pay in cash rather than flyers, look better organised than the rest of us.

What happens next for anyone owed money is dull and slow: a liquidator gets appointed, a creditors list gets compiled, and unsecured names on it – which is what a freelance reviewer is – sit a long way down the order. If you’re on that list, keep the invoice, the commissioning email and the published URL together in one place now, while the site is still up. Save the page itself and not just the link: somebody is currently paying the hosting bill on theskinny.co.uk, and that bill is now a line on a liquidator’s list like everything else.

Sources

• The Skinny and Fest magazines to close – Chortle, 10 September 2026
• The Skinny is closing – publisher statement
• About Fest – Fest magazine
• RADGE MEDIA C.I.C., company number SC310052 – Companies House
• Publisher of The Skinny and Fest magazines to cease operations – Beyond the Joke
• Edinburgh Fringe reviews – The Skinny