How Edinburgh Festival Fringe became a hotbed for BAFTA-winners

The world’s biggest arts festival began with a group of party crashers. After missing out on a place in the official programme of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947, eight artists staged their own performances on the festival’s fringes instead. From that act of creative independence, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe was born.

Nearly 80 years later, that same independent spirit still draws performers and audiences from around the world to Edinburgh each August. Shows spill out of theatres, pubs, churches and community halls, while street performers claim every available corner of the city. Among the thousands of productions staged each year, many of the defining creative voices of the past few decades have found their first major audiences. Including many a BAFTA award-winning programme.

Bolstered by the successes of some stand-out talents, a growing directive has emerged to bring runaway Fringe successes to the small screen. Industry initiatives supporting screen adaptations, alongside the annual Edinburgh TV Festival taking place amid the bustle of August, have strengthened the Fringe’s reputation as a place of artistic discovery and creative development. Here are some of the BAFTA award-winning writers and shows that have made the transition…

This year, more than a decade after premiering his debut solo show, Jack Rooke returns to the Fringe with Good Grief. Since first performing the piece in Edinburgh, Rooke has won multiple BAFTAs for Big Boys, a sitcom inspired in part by Good Grief and its 2017 follow-up, Happy Hour.

Good Grief explored Rooke’s experience of losing his father when he was 15. While the first episode of Big Boys opens with Rooke’s voiceover: “Statistics show that every one in one people will eventually die. But… it’s shit when they’re 56, and your dad.” He then jokes that he “looked nothing like” Dylan Llewellyn, the actor playing his younger self, but: “If you can’t cast yourself as better looking in your own life story, then what’s the point?”

The warmth, humour and candour that characterised his Fringe performances remain intact. The series also carries forward a narrative device introduced in Happy Hour – Rooke addresses his friend Danny directly as “you” in voiceover. Although Jack is the protagonist, it gradually becomes clear he is telling the story to, and for, his friend. Three series later, that decision culminates in an emotionally devastating scene as Rooke appears on screen as himself for the first time and speaks directly to the man who inspired Danny, a scene that was nominated for the P&O Cruises Memorable Moment at the 2026 BAFTA Television Awards with P&O Cruises.

• Jack Rooke has won two TV Craft BAFTA’s for Writer: Comedy for Big Boys – one in 2024 and one in 2026.

It seems a logical determination – in taking a solo theatre performance from the Fringe to the screen – to retain the distinctive voice audiences responded to so fervently. Whether that be bringing the performer in front of the camera or using their actual voice to tell the story. Another Fringe success that followed that formula, albeit switching it up by having its creator play a fictional character, was Richard Gadd’s Baby Reindeer.

Telling the story of Donny (Richard Gadd) and how his act of kindness towards a stranger, Martha (Jessica Gunning) devolved into her stalking and threatening him for over a year – Baby Reindeer was perhaps the most-talked about television of 2024. Even resulting in Gadd at one point being the most Googled man in the world.

Baby Reindeer was first staged at Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2019, following on from his breakthrough Edinburgh Comedy Award-winning stand-up hour Monkey See, Monkey Do in 2016. By then, Gadd had been a Fringe comedy regular for six years, building a reputation for the kind of meta, anti-comedy that had become synonymous with the festival. Monkey See, Monkey Do marked a striking shift in tone. Beneath its playful structure lay a candid account of Gadd’s sexual assault and its lasting psychological impact.

That instinct to blur performance and autobiography carried through to Netflix’s Baby Reindeer. Rather than leaving the Fringe behind, the seven-part adaptation places it at the centre of Donny’s story. In the fourth episode, he performs ramshackle prop comedy to a handful of indifferent pub-goers, and after one of these performances meets his perpetrator. By the sixth episode, Donny’s performing persona can no longer mask the trauma beneath it. Mid-set, Donny abandons the act altogether and tells the audience the truth about his assault.

Like the original stage show, Baby Reindeer feels less like a straightforward adaptation than the culmination of years of work. Ideas, performance styles and personal experiences first explored across multiple Edinburgh shows coalesce into a television drama that retains the festival’s experimental spirit while reaching a global audience. Its success with audiences and critics alike translated to three TV and TV Craft BAFTA wins in 2025.

• Richard Gadd won a Writer: Drama BAFTA, Weronika Tofilska won a Director: Fiction BAFTA at the TV Craft Awards in 2025. Jessica Gunning won a Supporting Actress BAFTA at the Television Awards in 2025.

Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag has become something of a calling-card for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, a north star for performers and writers of what’s possible with a high-stool and a good story. It started out at Edinburgh Festival Fringe in a late-night slot at Underbelly Cowgate for sixty people. It’s since been watched by millions, been taken into cinemas as part of the National Theatre Live series and topped countless lists of the best TV shows of the past decade. Not to mention two BAFTA and six Emmy wins.

When Fleabag arrived on our screens in 2016, it felt like a breath of fresh air. Not only in the characterisation of the lead female character; a messy, provocative anti-hero that so often women aren’t allowed to be on screen, but in the narrative device of breaking the fourth wall from Waller-Bridge, whose elastic expressions and whip-sharp delivery endear the audience to her. While Waller-Bridge was by no means the first to employ this device, Fleabag utilised it in an innovative way – by positioning the audience as active participants in the story. The camerawork throughout the series can at times act as an oppressive force as it unrelentingly follows our anti-heroine – and the eponymous Fleabag’s asides to the audience can be a source of comfort and escapism from a judgemental, prying eye.

The level of personalisation of the viewer in Fleabag felt like something never seen before on television. A deep recognition of the audience as an influential character themselves – an experience that, until then, was relegated to the theatre where the audience was physically present in front of the performer. The show was groundbreaking in that respect, taking the theatrical experience to the screen in a new way.

Waller-Bridge herself continues to support the festival, as President of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society, investing in supporting the next ‘Fleabag’.

• Phoebe Waller-Bridge won a Television BAFTA for Female Performance in a Comedy for Fleabag in 2017.

More than just a showcase for individual artists and performers, the month-long stay in Edinburgh during the festival gives attendees the chance to build new relationships and catch up with old peers. The convivial nature of the festival as a meeting point for artists across the world was on display in 2010, when Alex Horne brought together twenty comedians to impress The Taskmaster…

Beginning its life in the months preceding the Fringe, Horne asked his comedy friends to record themselves completing a few simple tasks like ‘deposit some money into my bank account’ or ‘send me something large in the post’ – with their efforts reviewed by the Taskmaster (in this original iteration, Little Alex Horne himself). The responses to these tasks varied in weird and wonderful ways. It was received well by the Fringe crowd and returned the next year with a slightly refined approach, and a smaller group of comedians. The concept was promising, and TV executives took notice.

It was given the green light by UKTV, commissioning several episodes to better display how the format would work. Taskmaster was a complete deviation from the traditional panel-show format that was the most prominent platform for comedians on British television at that point. Over the course of multiple episodes, comedians were brought into a studio to watch and react to their pre-recorded task attempts – whilst they banter and barter with The Taskmaster (Greg Davies) to gain points.

Now going into its 22nd series, with multiple specials, a junior spinoff, a boardgame and two BAFTA wins to its name, the series has gained a worldwide audience. The format has been taken across the globe with versions produced in 17 countries. The growing audience can be attributed to its popular digital channels and Netflix deal, but its enduring success largely lies in the adaptability of its format. Allowing audiences to connect with the contestants over the course of an entire series is a remarkable platform for the comedians themselves propelling them to bigger stages and bigger audiences across the country.

Taskmaster continues to thrive, having recently been re-commissioned for a further six series at Channel 4 – and its connection to the Fringe in platforming comedians who have climbed the ranks through their time at the festival means the show will continue to have a wide pool of potential contestants to choose from.

• Taskmaster won a Comedy Entertainment BAFTA at the the Television Awards in 2020 and Entertainment Craft Team BAFTA at the TV Craft Awards in 2025.

Nearly eight decades after its anarchistic beginnings, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe remains defined by the same trailblazing gambles of those first unofficial performances in 1947. While it has long been celebrated as a launchpad for new talent, its influence on television extends far beyond discovering the next generation of stars. As exemplified by these BAFTA-winning talents, the Fringe provides a unique environment in which artists can test ideas, refine their creative voices and develop formats over time before they reach much larger audiences.

In an increasingly competitive television landscape that values distinctive voices and original perspectives, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe has become one of Britain’s most important creative incubators, shaping not only who appears on our screens, but how television itself continues to evolve. Whether through deeply personal storytelling that retains the intimacy of a solo performance, theatrical techniques reimagined for television, or experimental concepts that evolve into internationally successful formats, the most enduring screen successes do not leave the Fringe behind, they carry its spirit with them.