Jenny Ryan is delighting audiences at the Edinburgh Fringe until August 28 (Picture: Supplied)
Jenny Ryan has taken her show Out of the Box from the high seas of cruise ship entertainment to the rickety Wine Bar of Edinburgh’s Gilded Balloon. And it’s a treat.
The 41-year-old The Chase star is loving life on the stage, sharing her gorgeous, silky singing voice with punters this August, and a few TV tales along the way.
After years of in-the-box quizzing, the Bolton-born TV personality got a bit of a shock when she entered Celebrity X Factor and the public well and truly fell in love with her singing voice.
It’s only since then Jenny has mustered the confidence to use it. But singing has always brought her joy. ‘It wasn’t really until I did X Factor that I realised it brought so many other people joy too,’ she said.
‘It’s very self-indulgent to do a show all about myself,’ she added, almost a little embarrassed. ‘But it’s no more so than any stand-up show or any cabaret show here. It’s creating something joyful and happy and I think everybody is left with a big grin on their face.’
But Jenny did not wear a big grin when she was tottering around Edinburgh and earlier this month and found her only supersized poster of her show – which cost almost £750 for the month – had been partially covered up by another performer.
The star wasn’t smiling when she found her poster had been covered up by a fellow act (Picture: Lia Toby/Getty Images)
In a tweet that subsequently went viral, Jenny expressed her despair at such an attitude at a festival famed for its collective atmosphere.
Now in an exclusive chat with Metro.co.uk, Jenny revealed her devastation at the sight.
‘Unless you’re a Fringe person, a lot of people don’t understand how the advertising works. You can’t just go and put your poster up anywhere,’ she explained while on a very gusty Edinburgh rooftop bar.
‘There’s a company called Out of Hand who will print and put up your poster in a designated place. But it is not cheap. I didn’t realise just how not-cheap it was.
‘The poster I had made that got vandalised cost me nearly £750 for the month.’
Jenny took to Twitter to express her dismay at the act (Picture: Twitter/Jenny Ryan)
The poster covered up the name of her show and the venue (Picture: Twitter/Jenny Ryan)
While some acts have a promoter and can afford to plaster many posters around town, Jenny was self-funding her show and so only had the budget for a few.
‘I could only afford 10 posters – because my artwork is so beautiful. Very vain of me,’ she joked.
So you can only imagine Jenny’s disappointment when she discovered another act’s poster covering up her show and venue name.
‘It wasn’t so much I was worried about it reducing my visibility or anything. I’m lucky enough to have name recognition profile so I can work that. It was more the principle of the thing,’ she explained.
‘This person could be putting that poster up over anybody. That could have been the last of their marketing budget.’
Luckily, the Free Fringe and Out of Hand Print acted quickly to remove the poster (Picture: Twitter/Jenny Ryan)
The star hopes this will be a lesson to performers in the future (Picture: Twitter/Jenny Ryan)
She added: ‘It’s really not the spirit of the Fringe. We’re all here trying to uplift each other. I know out of 3,000 odd shows everybody’s worked so hard. There’s loads of people who have put in time, money, sweat, tears, sick days at work. Late nights.’
‘It made me a bit sad, and the fact that [the festival] responded very quickly was good, to take them down. But it emerged that they’d done that to other people as well.’
Jenny messaged the culprits after she’d posted the complaint on a Fringe performer Facebook group. She scrolled down to find the very same act had posted ‘months ago’ – ironically asking for advice about where to put posters.
‘Obviously, they didn’t read the message, so I tagged them in the post with the picture up and there happened to be people in the group who were representatives of PBH’s Free Fringe, who the performers were with.
‘PBH has very strict rules about your conduct if they give you one of their venues, because it’s the free fringe. I think they got a severe talking to.’
While Jenny didn’t want anyone to be named and shamed, she thinks this is a good lesson for performers.
‘I don’t think anyone will do it again.’
Jenny Ryan: Out of the Box is on every night at the Wine Bar, Gilded Balloon until August 28.
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That’s got to hurt.