One man will be celebrating every creeping landmark on the road to recession this month.

Dan Atkinson has called his stand-up show at Edinburgh The Credit Crunch and Other Biscuits and is now in the odd position of hearing about soaring gas prices and thinking: “This is wonderful news for me.”

For everyone else involved with the Edinburgh Fringe, the state of the economy and its likely impact on ticket sales is turning into a less profitable obsession.

The world’s largest and most anarchic arts festival officially opened yesterday after the gloomiest preview week in memory. Global financial meltdown apart, organisers are concerned about the competition provided by the Olympics, serious teething problems with a new box-office system, and suggestions from the city’s hotel trade that advance bookings are well down. On top of that, a bitter row is rumbling over the decision by the four most powerful venues to pool their marketing resources and call themselves The Edinburgh Comedy Festival, as if there was no worthwhile comedy anywhere else on the Fringe.

Yet by last night the view was cautiously optimistic.

More than 50,000 people crowded Edinburgh’s streets yesterday for the parade that opens the city’s month of festivals and the rain held off, mostly. The venues’ bars are as packed as ever and up on the Royal Mile, beneath the stern gaze of Adam Smith’s statue, the entertainment world’s purest free market is once again open for business. Credit crunch or not, this is still the place to put curious punters in touch with a rich supply of the unexpected, the overacted and the inexplicable.

Yesterday in the space of a hundred yards there were students in cloaks swordfighting, a woman dressed as Madonna in leotard and thigh-high leg warmers, a man in a gimp mask, a man dangling a puppet made of newspaper from a bamboo pole, an Elizabethan minstrel handing out leaflets, a Georgian aristocrat, a rock band in spacesuits, two girls draped in paper chains, and far too many people in bodystockings.

William Burdett-Coutts, the artistic director of Assembly and one of the founding partners of the new Comedy Festival, is relieved that the festival is finally up and running. “It has been one of the most difficult build-ups to the festival that there has ever been. People are feeling the pinch and I suspect they will be choosier about what they see this year. I think it will be the unknown shows that will be hardest hit, and that’s a shame because the festival is about experimenting.”

He and Anthony Alderson, director of the Pleasance, agree that the Olympics are a potentially more serious distraction than punters’ finances.

“In 2004 the Athens Olympics had a huge effect on us,” Mr Alderson said. “We were down about 10 per cent and in this economy that sort of loss of money is a terrifying prospect.”

Punters and organisers are hoping that the technical problems that saw central ticket bookings suspended three times and left the main Fringe office unable to sell tickets have now been ironed out. On Saturday night, however, performers were reporting that supposed sell-out shows were playing to rows of empty seats.

Mr Atkinson was one of them, but preferred to concentrate on why people were flocking to his dissection of “the global disaster” that has seen “men and women lose their basic human right to cheap flights and seen them turfed out of their second homes”. He said: “It’s a cliché, but if you are genuinely worried about something it is nice to mock it.” Festival coverage, Arts, times2

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