EDINBURGH 2022: Emily Wilson Guest Blog

Guest Blog - Emily Wilson brings coming-of-age debut comedy show to the Fringe

Emily tells the story of her time on X-Factor USA and using multimedia to illustrate the drama.

Musician and comedian Emily Wilson blogs for Broadway World about bringing Fixed to the Fringe and why she performs stand-up, sings original songs and plays old footage all in one hour as she goes behind the scenes of the world's most famous reality TV show.

Hello! My name is Emily Wilson, and I am bringing my one-woman comedy show Fixed to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this year. In Fixed, I tell the story of when I was on The X Factor when I was fifteen. I auditioned for the show in a duo with my best friend Austin, who I was madly in love with (without knowing that he was deep in the closet). We called ourselves AusEm - you know, like the word 'awesome' but way cooler because it's spelled with our names!

It turned out the judges loved Aus, but hated Em (that's me, I'm Em). It was brutal, but we still got sent through to Hollywood and, believe it or not, made it to the finals. I'll leave it at that - you'll have to come see the show to know the full story!

In Fixed, I frequently shift between stand-up, singing and playing archival footage to tell my story. When I first decided to write this show, the added singing element was a given, as I like to include songs in my regular act (fellas, get you a woman who can do both, am I right?). But when I ran my first ten minutes of stand-up about the story of the audition - despite the fact that I was quoting the judges verbatim - I could tell there was a small part of the audience's brain that was thinking, "no way." The second time around, I played audio clips from the audition, and the difference was nuts. After that, I knew that seeing the footage would be the kicker. Ya gotta see it to believe it, folks!

Once the general footage element was unlocked in my brain, I started thinking of the show in a new way. I was born in the 90s and grew up in the early 2000s, so most of my childhood and teenage years are captured on video, a lot of which I recorded myself. I have folders and folders on hard drives of me being a cringey teenager. And because this show is about such a specific time period in American pop culture, using my own home video footage helps to build out that world and show you who I was way better than any written joke could. If a picture's worth a thousand words, then a video's worth, uh...well, let's see, there's 24 frames per second, times however many seconds...

I wouldn't say that the story I tell in my show is necessarily different from what was shown on TV. All of what happened on TV definitely happened in real life, and I have to live with it for the rest of my life! But I will say that, as expected with any reality TV show, the TV version only showed a sliver of the whole story. Which is what reality TV is meant to do! It's entertainment. But (and I'm truly biting my tongue as I brace myself to write this corny sentence), behind every single reality show contestant that gets their brief moment of fame, there is a real human being who still has to wake up the next day and live the rest of their life. Gag, vomit, puke. It is true though, and I am one of those human beings. By using little bits from what was on TV, in combination with clips from my own life, original music and the Written Word herself, hopefully I am able to let you see my whole story - and of course make you laugh along the way.

Photo credit: Dylan Woodley

Emily Wilson: Fixed, Pleasance Courtyard (Beneath, 10.25pm, 3-29 August (not 17)

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