This decision is at best short-sighted, and at worst a disaster; not only for theatre, but for TV, radio and film. The NSDF, over its 53 year existence, has provided a unique bridge between student and professional work, and has encouraged and enabled young practitioners to get a foothold in the creative industries. The list of NSDF alumni reads like a Who's Who of theatre, from Harold Pinter, Michael Billington and Tim West in the earlier years of the Festival to recent successes such as writer Lucy Prebble, actors Khalid Abdalla and Ruth Wilson and director Caroline Cracknell. It's wholly misguided to suggest that the experience of the Festival is in any way akin to something that could be found on a college or university course: there's nowhere that puts students in touch with the range of professional experience that they can draw upon at the NSDF. In the past few years, for example, talks, workshops and masterclasses have been offered by amongst others Boublil and Schoenburg, Peter Hall, Mark Ravenhill, Michael Attenborough, Annie Castledine, Frantic Assembly, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Hampstead Theatre, and the Bush. At the 2008 Festival, the writersroom plan to offer workshops too. But more than this, NSDF generates a level of enthusiasm and passion for creating and watching new work that is without equal.

NSDF is unique in the world. It's not like Edinburgh, it's not like a drama school course, and it's not like youth theatre. We're incredibly lucky in the UK that it's survived for over half a century: if you'd like to help it further, there's an online petition which you can sign here, a Facebook group which you can join here, or you can write to your MP here. This may be particularly helpful if you live in the constituency of Stalybridge and Hyde, which is the constituency of Arts Minister James Purnell - himself an NSDF alumnus.

A friend who was visiting at the weekend tried to engage me in a conversation the other night that was nothing to do with the Fringe, and I found myself incapable of talking to her about anything normal. People putting on the shows seemed locked into the same three conversations; how had it gone, what was next, and how tired and ill you felt and looked. It felt like the final stages of the siege of Paris: if you weren’t exchanging recipes for cooking rats, then forget it.

I saw forty-nine shows – apart from my own – and would have made the half-century had the fantastic Maeve Higgins not cancelled her final show. Here are my personal highlights… The charming Terry Saunders’ Missed Connections, the loopy Bridget Christie – The Court Of Charles II, and the unexpectedly moving Hippo World Guest Book. I’m also looking forward to the next show by Tommy and the Weeks. Their excellent show this year, which blithely subverted expectations, sketch comedy, and taste, promises great things for the future. Paul Foot and Josie Long each created a truly distinctive, beautifully written, and very funny hour of stand-up; Tim Key and Tom Basden each wrote impressive debut solo shows, which for me were even stronger than their work in sketch act Cowards.

Now to start planning what we’re going to do at the 2008 Festival Fringe…

In the middle of the week, I saw two shows within a fourteen-hour period which seemed to encapsulate the polarity of Fringe experience. The first was Seriously. Pet Shop Boys. Reinterpreted. Billed as musical theatre, this is a sort of revue show that takes bits of various PSB numbers and sticks them together with the intention of forming dramatic scenes – closer to Closer Than Ever than, say, Mamma Mia. However, there’s often little apparent logic to the juxtaposition of material, and the fragmentary approach to the original lyrical structure often robs it of any real meaning: chucking a verse of I Want A Dog into the middle of To Speak Is A Sin adds nothing to either piece. However, the cast stride nobly forward into this void of meaningfulness, imbuing every phrase with great, wet, steaming gobbets of meaning. All of the wit, irony, subtlety and charm of the original songs is bulldozed by the smug, precious, overblown delivery. The Pet Shop Boys are sometimes accused that all their songs sound the same: this show, which commits every vacuous cliché of musical theatre, seems intent on proving that myth. I’d have been more willing to forgive the almost wilful misunderstanding of the band’s work, had they not had such extensive professional experience, but their impressive CVs and high production values instead led me to ask what the Pet Shop Boys had done to deserve this.

At the other end of the budgetary scale, The Lost Tapes Of Tom Bell is a charming, funny discussion of childhood and adulthood being presented as part of Peter Buckley Hill’s Free Fringe. Tickets are by (emphatically non-compulsory) donation, and the show takes place in the grotty, windowless back room of a pub on the Canongate. Audience participation has never been less threatening, as Tom gets one punter to toast crumpets, and lets another do some painting. To describe the humour as ‘gentle’ doesn’t do justice to how funny it is, but this is a genuinely feel-good show with more than enough humanity and wit to make up for the lack of it the previous day.

I have yet to see a really excellent piece of theatre at this year’s Fringe. The plays that I have seen often suffered from being based on received ideas of what might make good theatre, rather than being based on something in the real world that got under the writer’s skin. Frequently, too, the naturalistic staging and performance style chosen made the fundamental lack of reality all the more apparent.

I’ve had a better time in the best of the comedy shows, although as ever there’s no shortage of patchy sketch acts making lazy jokes about hackneyed targets. But there’s also Johnson and Boswell: Late But Live at the Traverse, which brings the relationship between the eighteenth century diarist and his biographer right into the present day, using it to satirise today’s Scotland in what feels like a genuinely risky way.

Having co-written and directed Bill Hicks: Slight Return, which plays one final Edinburgh show next week, I’ve often been asked which current comedians are keeping Hicks’ legacy alive. There’s never a shortage of reviews which compare his work to that of new acts: it’s usually a shorthand for angry nihilism. But watching the brilliant Josie Long the other day I was struck by how her show – neither angry nor nihilistic – has the same purity and drive for truth that informed Hicks’ later work. Unusually for a comic, she celebrates things she likes rather than derides what she hates. And like Hicks, it somehow becomes more than just stand-up: there’s a genuine attempt to answer the question, how should we live our lives? It’s a mile away from the easy cliché and tired stereotype of much of the rest of the comedy on the Fringe.

The main reason that I haven’t blogged recently, though, is the hefty workload that precedes the Edinburgh Fringe. I’m involved in five shows this year, which now seems cavalier. However, some are already on tour, and two are reworked versions of previous shows. Nonetheless, I’ve been dashing from rehearsal to rewrite meeting to preview to the extent that at times I’ve felt like I didn’t know which cast to expect when I walked into the rehearsal room.

It all starts in earnest at 9am on Monday morning (which is like 3am in theatre time) with the first of my five technical rehearsals. One of the companies I’m working for revealed the day before yesterday that they hadn’t managed to confirm their technician’s appearance for the tech: I asked them to ring him, and it turned out that he wasn’t even going to arrive in Edinburgh until after the first performance. So an hour was taken out of our valuable final rehearsal while we hastily got on Facebook and messaged everyone we know who’s going to be in Edinburgh. When we finally managed to find a keen, experienced student and offered her the pitiful amount of cash that that’s left in the budget she blithely said “oh, I just love to help! I’d have done it for nothing!” By then, of course, it was too late to retract the offer.

Underlying all the bonhomie and ‘spirit of the Fringe’ hooley, the month in August is a very efficient way for a lot of performers to lose a lot of money very quickly. However, whenever I see articles like this one, or a similar one from 2005, I can’t help thinking that a lot of this money’s being wasted, or at least spent in less than efficient way. There’s a lot of received wisdom in Edinburgh about having to have a press officer, or spending money on distribution, or paying a promoter, that year after year turns out to be bobbins. When Tim Fountain got onto the front cover of the List with his show Sex Addict, he claimed not to have had a press agent at all, simply to have done a show that people wanted to see.

This is the Fringe’s elephant in the room: with sixteen hundred shows a day, there isn’t enough on that people want to see enough, to make it economically worthwhile. That’s not to say that these shows shouldn’t happen, or that they aren’t artistically valid, but it seems clear that throwing money at promoting them is never going to make a duff idea into a theatrical, or comedic, or musical, gem.

I find it almost impossible to overcome my natural laziness without a deadline. Usually I’ll have to finish something for performance, or broadcast, or publication, but when you’re writing something uncommissioned it’s hard not to find excuses to leave it for a bit and play a bit of online Scrabble. (Yes, there is almost no end to my geekery. Speaking of which, I played a game earlier today where I got IRONIST, HOPLITE and DEUCING. I was very pleased. But still lost.) Like a lot of writers, I have always assumed that the deadline sharpens the writing, and makes me produce my best work. Thinking about it now, though, this is a theory that I’ve never put to the test, as without a deadline I generally don’t produce anything. It’s not really very scientific.

As well as working on the Glaswegian script, I’m currently rehearsing in the evenings for one of my first Edinburgh preview performances: the new Pegabovine show, Coat of Arms, which I’m directing. Once again, we had a rehearsal in which we came up with the funniest joke in the world (see my earlier blog entry about Potted Potter), which I’ve subsequently repeated to my friends’ blank, mirthless faces. We’re planning to finish working on the script today, and the first preview is a week on Friday. Hopefully my ‘the deadline sharpens the writing’ theory will also hold true for the acting, directing, and indeed line-learning. Fingers crossed.

For me, it's also a good opportunity to let some of my work be heard by my granny. She doesn't get out of Lincolnshire much, and my work doesn't get into Lincolnshire much, so it's quite an exciting moment for the two of us. Admittedly, that work should be 'invisible' - the script is written by Miranda, and my job was to make it more like itself, with jokes and editing to shape it, but I imagine I'll big up my input at parties.

Here's hoping she laughs.

Both sides, of course, are right in part. Or in other words, both sides, in part, are wrong. Am I alone in thinking that Hytner’s sweeping generalisation of misogyny is blind to its inherently ageist assumptions? Andrew Haydon, in a discussion show over at right-wing internet TV station 18 Doughty St., thinks that Hytner was writing with his tongue in his cheek, and makes the point that the contentiousness of his pronouncement has provided a massive boost in publicity for the show. I certainly had no intention of seeing it until all this kicked off.

In many of the blog replies, the argument now has turned into the age-old one of whether critics should be allowed free tickets, column inches, or even to exist in the first place. One odd thing about this debate is the fact that it’s happening at all: these days audience members of any age, gender or personal bigotry can get online and publish whatever they like in any number of outlets, set up their own blog, or even a whole website: the critical landscape at the Edinburgh Fringe is almost unrecognisable compared to when I first took a show there in 1992. And for every Billington there’s a Reduced Billington to undermine it. This massive increase in published opinions has meant that the weight and authority of broadsheet reviewers has been diminished – and perhaps there are times when their weighty, authoritarian prose style seems pompous in comparison with a lot of ‘user generated comment’. But it has meant too that the overall standard of writing has fallen: I’d rather have a well-argued, less positive critical response than the witless gush that passes for a review on the Fringe. Come August, however, I’m sure I’ll eat my words, and be praying that one of the shows I’m directing is lucky enough to receive some witless gush.

This is a rare chance for us to all discuss the same thing (this usually only happens with last night’s Life On Mars); get a sense of what our quality threshold should be, and what different things each reader saw in the same script. It was a relief to discover that while we didn’t all have exactly the same opinion of it, we had many more points of consensus than of difference.

Meeting development commissioners from comedy, CBBC, radio drama and continuing series was welcome too. They reached consensus too: unsurprisingly they’re all looking for good new writers. They also reiterated how helpful it is for writers to have some knowledge of what different departments and channels actually look for, by checking out the Commissioning Guidelines on the BBC website.

Then we all went to the pub and in a welter of unfounded paranoia, discussed which of us the boss was most likely to sack… The Apprentice has a lot to answer for.

We’ve put a new bit in now which has the three of us giggling like schoolgirls, although we also feel sure, somehow, that the audience will never find the joke as funny as we do. I think that when you’re working on comedy, there’s an extent to which you’re just guessing whether an audience will find something funny, and this effect is doubled when your target audience’s age is in single figures. When I did my first kids’ show last year, the first week of the run was a very steep learning curve as we ditched a lot of my favourite stuff that the five year-olds just weren’t going for. Tough crowd.

One of the actors in Potter has a friend who’s a teacher, and she overheard some of her charges the other day saying, “That is jokes!”, meaning something was funny. Is this common? Or is there just some corner of the country where that usage is, well, used? Nonetheless, I think I might adopt it.

In a few weeks my play about Bill Hicks will make a long-overdue visit to Brighton, for the Brighton Festival Fringe. In it, the late comedian returns from heaven to talk about events since his death in 1994. This means that every time it’s on we update it to take in recent developments, and given that we have a long section about US gun laws, we’re now going to have to make at least some reference to the horrific shootings at Virginia Tech. It’s easy to write something about sensitive subject matter like this that would get a laugh; breaking taboos is central to comedy. But it’s much harder to find something to say about them that’s both surprising and true, and doesn’t slip into gratuity.

That is jokes.

Tonight I’ll be watching my final show, Al Smith’s Radio, staged by Edinburgh University. This production was premiered at the Fringe last summer, after one of Al’s previous plays, Enola, had appeared at the 2006 NSDF. He’s an extremely talented young writer, and both of these shows, which weave personal stories into American politics and science, were written with humility and humanity. It feels sometimes as if his primary instinct, and skill, is for narrative, rather than drama, but he is certainly a writer to look out for.

Also from Edinburgh University, and displaying a similar warmth and humanity, were a new company called Pangolin’s Teatime. Their puppet show, Haozkla, told the story of a young girl who is forced to give up her child as a sacrifice, in order to enable the inhabitants of a distant city to never get ill or die. Told with elegance, wit and humour, it was a real highlight for me, even if some of the darker elements of the story weren’t given their full weight. I look forward to seeing what the company come up with next.

Lee Barnes’ Talking in the Darkness, a production from Calderdale College, showed a real talent for painful emotional honesty, as well as for wry comedy. As a play it wasn’t wholly successful: an examination of a failing relationship, it spent too much time analysing and discussing the emotions, and not enough simply allowing the characters to negotiate their relationship in front of us. But at its best it was engaging, moving and funny.

Charlie Brafman’s Cast Aside, billed as a satire on pretentious theatre, divided the Festival. Another Edinburgh Fringe hit, this time from a Nottingham University company, it told the story of a misguided production of The Merchant Of Venice. Half the audience found its crude humour and broad comedy of theatrical self-interest absolutely hilarious, others found it cheap, empty, and questioned why it had been selected at all. The ensuing debate was framed as one between forces of entertainment and serious content, with the latter group being derided as killjoys by the former. But for me the problem with this show was a lack of craft in creating entertainment at all. The writer tended to let his characters deal in discussion of events, rather than in dialogue which carried dramatic action forward; he also seemed to have no affection for them, making this a rather misanthropic and unpleasant experience.

We were also lucky enough to be able to see the UK premiere of Adam Rapp’s magical-realist take on heroism and sacrifice, Stone Cold Dead Serious. In this play, a teenage boy from Chicago travels to New York with his mute online girlfriend to take part in a live action version of a samurai computer game. Although the play’s cavalier approach to reality baffled many Festival goers, others enjoyed a play that was genuinely innovative, and perhaps with Talking To Terrorists, was the only show that seemed to be crucially about the time we are living in right now.

So far this year, we’ve seen a revival of Robin Soans’ Talking To Terrorists, and a newly devised cabaret show with puppets about child abuse, The Ordinaries. The latter had some strong line writing in it, although the strongest moments were those where they resisted their tendency to over-write and allowed simple visual moments to speak.

Later this week, as well as revivals of The Night Heron, Iron and Stone Cold Dead Serious, we’re going to be seeing new plays by Charlie Brafman, Lee Barnes, and Al Smith – who’s currently part of the BBC’s writing academy. There’s also more puppetry in Haozkla, a devised show from Edinburgh University.

Some of the best theatre work I’ve ever seen has been at the NSDF. There’s a willingness to experiment, and for the audience to accept experiment, that is rarely seen elsewhere: not least because there’s no financial pressure at all. There’s also a high level of debate and discussion that promotes and encourages excellence.

I’ll be blogging about the new shows, I hope, later in the week.

There are times when it can feel a bit overwhelming, this is true, and it’s at that point that tea becomes necessary. However, it’s extremely rare that we ever have to read the volume of scripts that were attracted by the BBC Talent competition that I mentioned below. In that instance 3000 scripts had been budgeted for, and 5085 were received, which surprised everyone. However, having stated that we’d read every submission cover to cover for that particular scheme, that's what we did.

In the normal run of things, a group of three or four readers will meet once a month (and a second group meet later in the month), for a sift day. During this, we’ll read the first ten pages of every script that’s submitted to the writersroom. Most readers will get through thirty or forty scripts in a day. This may seem like a lot, but remember that at this stage we’re looking for a generally positive impression rather than the detailed critical analysis that we’ll aim for later, when those that we feel have potential will be taken home and read in their entirety.

Most readers take about eight to twelve scripts home, which they’ll write a report on: this is included in the letter back to the writer. Generally I’ll spread this reading over more than one day to help me to approach each script with a fresh eye. The department also receives a wide variety of scripts: one moment you could be in a feature-length historical epic, the next in a student flatshare sitcom. This helps stop everything becoming a big verbal mulch.

writersroom receives around 10,000 scripts a year, and as a public service broadcaster it’s important that the BBC considers all of these writers seriously. However, that’s a lot of scripts to get through, and we’ve ended up with the system that we think is fairest, and most useful for the BBC. As with any system that involves people, it’s not flawless, but we hope we’ve got it about right. Like any writer, when I’m reading another rejection letter it’s easy – and satisfying – to think that the system is wrong and that the reader just didn’t get it. It’s much harder to look again at what you’ve written and ask, how can this be better?

Proud? Really? Going to the theatre isn’t a duty, although as Anthony Neilson writes, it often feels like it because it’s boring.

His article feels uncannily like the announcement of the small child that the Emperor is naked. I’ve sat in ever so many plays wondering what possessed the writer to think that anyone else would give a damn about anything that’s happening on the stage, and I’ve read ever so many reviews that made me think that critics have become so used to the boredom that they don’t notice it any more.

And it’s not usually a matter of duration, either. If I were to make a list of my top ten plays of all time, I reckon at least one Robert Lepage epic would make the cut, and possibly even the 22-hour marathon The Warp, whereas Stoning Mary, despite it’s sub-hour running time, wouldn’t.

Theatre doesn’t have a monopoly on boredom, however. Films, TV, books, opera, comedy; you name it. Internet poker, my favourite waste of time, is very much characterised by long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sicky, nervous excitement. But somehow in the theatre the fact that it’s live makes it worse. In comedy if you’re bored you can heckle: the same, unfortunately, isn’t true in Chekhov. You’re stuck there, and it’s considered rude to leave. This, incidentally, is part of the success of The Warp. No-one cares if you nip out in the middle of that. The entire pace of the thing, and relationship with its audience, is much more laid back.

I don’t know what the answer is. I’m sceptical of Neilson’s comments about spectacle, which all too often seems to be used as a way of covering up a lack of real engagement with an audience. Perhaps we shouldn’t be so polite, or perhaps theatres should be designed to allow people to leave easily if they’ve had enough. Maybe it’s just that writers should have his sole commandment, THOU SHALT NOT BORE, blu-tacked above their computer screens.

I’d be interested to hear other solutions.

After doing an English degree I trained as a director at the Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff, and moved to London when a show I’d co-written and directed there transferred, disastrously, to a now-defunct pub theatre in Chelsea. As I worked at various places on the Fringe in London and Edinburgh, I found that what I enjoyed doing most was comedy, and much of the stuff I’ve done as a writer and director has been funny, or was intended to be so.

In 2000 the BBC launched the Talent scheme, and I was asked to join the 30-strong team of readers by a development producer who’d seen my sketch group in Edinburgh. The competition received many more scripts than expected, and I ended up reading over 300 sitcoms in the space of about a month; a sort of baptism by fire.

When the writersroom started reading scripts for the comedy department a couple of years later, I think they reckoned that anyone who’d managed to read that many sitcoms without chewing off his own feet was probably the person to get, and I’ve been working in a freelance capacity for them ever since.

When I’m not reading submissions I’m working on my own stuff – I really must get round to looking at that unfinished novel – and running workshops in writing, acting and directing. And when I’m not doing that, I’m playing internet poker.