The Wee Review

About The Wee Review

The Wee Review is Scotland's online arts and culture magazine, publishing reviews and opinion on theatre, film, music, comedy, books, art and food and drink across the country from its base in Edinburgh. Its website is theweereview.com. It began life in 2008 under the name TV Bomb, with its first review published on 8 June 2008, and was relaunched under its current name on 26 March 2017. Run by a volunteer team of writers stretching from Inverness to Dumfries, it has grown into one of the most prolific review outlets at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe — by 2019 the second most prolific reviewer at the Fringe after The Scotsman — and a year-round presence in Scottish cultural journalism.

TV Bomb: the 2008 origins

The site's history begins on 8 June 2008, when the first review was posted on a site then known as TV Bomb. Where that name and the site came from is, by the publication's own admission, lost to the mists of time — there was even at one stage a TV Bomb Berlin magazine. What is known is that very early on the site came into the hands of students on the Drama and Performance course at Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh. For those students it served first as an outlet for the critiquing skills they had learned on their course; then, as they graduated and moved on, it developed into a more general arts magazine, drawing in new contributors from beyond the student scene. That student-press DNA — enthusiastic, volunteer-driven, intellectually serious about criticism — has shaped the publication ever since.

Relaunch as The Wee Review

On 26 March 2017 the site was redesigned and relaunched as The Wee Review, a name chosen to reflect both its Scottishness and the fact that it reviews things. By then it had long outgrown its student origins: over the previous five years it had expanded beyond the central belt and added new sections for Spoken Word, Books, Art, Food & Drink and year-round Comedy. The 2016 redesign and 2017 relaunch formalised its status as a general Scottish arts magazine rather than a Fringe-season project. The following year it published a tenth-anniversary retrospective in which its writers looked back on their cultural highlights of the decade — a milestone that, as the site noted, not many arts magazines, on or offline, reach.

The Fringe Guru merger

In 2019 The Wee Review merged with Fringe Guru, another of the online Fringe review publications that had emerged in the late 2000s. The merger consolidated two of the digital-native review operations covering the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and strengthened the combined title's position as one of the festival's most prolific reviewers. The Edinburgh Festival Fringe's own histories of Fringe media list The Wee Review (founded 2008 as TV Bomb) alongside Chortle, Broadway Baby, Fringe Review and ThreeWeeks as the online publications that transformed festival coverage after the turn of the millennium. By 2019 The Scotsman was once again the most prolific reviewer at the Fringe, followed by The Wee Review — a remarkable position for a volunteer-run website.

Reviewing the Fringe at scale

The scale of the operation at festival time is striking. The publication began reviewing at the Fringe in 2010 with a team of just three writers covering seven shows. By 2015 its team of 30 reviewers was covering more than 350 shows. Year-round it draws on a team of around 70 writers based across Scotland, with larger concentrations in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen and contributors from Inverness to Dumfries. Its Fringe coverage spans theatre, comedy, dance, musicals, children's shows and spoken word, with reviews published daily through August — a volume of criticism that makes it one of the essential records of each year's festival.

Sections and coverage areas

Beyond the Fringe, The Wee Review publishes year-round across a wide range of sections. Theatre and film reviews form the core of its output, alongside music, comedy, books, visual art and spoken word. In May 2017 it launched a dedicated Food & Drink section, covering Edinburgh's restaurant and bar scene with reviews, festival food coverage and wine tastings, with plans to extend the coverage across Scotland. It also publishes news stories on the Scottish arts scene — from festival announcements to the cancellation of the 2020 August festivals during the pandemic — and interviews with artists, programmers and cultural figures.

The Wee Podcast

The publication has made occasional forays into audio with The Wee Podcast, in which a collective of its writers discuss cultural matters. Early episodes, recorded around the Fringe in 2018 and 2019, tackled subjects such as how to plan a Fringe, what qualifications a reviewer needs, and the ethics of charging for reviews — the kind of insider shop-talk that reflects the site's roots in a community of working critics. The podcast is hosted on Acast and presented as an extension of the site's critical conversation rather than a separate brand.

A volunteer model

The Wee Review is powered by volunteers: writers who fit reviewing, editing, design and administration around day jobs, families and social lives. Its tenth-anniversary editorial paid tribute to the "hard work of a lot of people, people who are squeezing in writing, designing, seeing shows and completing unpleasant amounts of admin around day jobs" — an honest description of how the site survives. Contributors write for the love of the art forms they cover, and many of the year-round team originally joined to review at the Fringe before staying on. The site has participated in the Edinburgh Fringe's emerging critics programmes, and its editors have spoken proudly of giving young writers their first step on the ladder — two winners of the Fringe's Young Writer Awards have come through its ranks.

Editorial character

The site's critical voice is direct and independent. A long-running guide to Fringe publications once noted its willingness to point withering criticism at work it took exception to — while observing that, most of the time, its reviews are reasonable and measured. Its reviewers attend press nights and previews across the festival, and its star-rated reviews (the site has experimented with its rating systems over the years) are aggregated by the British Comedy Guide and other collators, giving its verdicts a wide secondary audience. For performers, a Wee Review notice during the Fringe is a recognised currency; for audiences, its sheer volume of coverage makes it one of the most useful guides to navigating the festival.

Place in Scotland's arts media

Alongside the print magazines The List and The Skinny and the broadcasters, The Wee Review forms part of the infrastructure of Scottish arts journalism — the digital-native, volunteer-powered end of it. It has survived the closure of many of its early-2000s contemporaries, absorbed one of them, and built a national network of critics without ever abandoning its founding ethos. From a first review posted in June 2008 under a forgotten name to one of the Fringe's most prolific review operations, its trajectory mirrors the rise of online cultural criticism itself. It continues to publish daily reviews and arts news from Edinburgh and across Scotland at theweereview.com.

Aggregated and widely read

The Wee Review's verdicts travel well beyond its own pages. Since 2010 the British Comedy Guide has collated comedy reviews from as many publications as possible — gathering more than 4,700 reviews from 135 publications in 2018 — and The Wee Review's notices are part of that record, giving its reviewers' opinions a second life in the most comprehensive archive of Fringe criticism. For comedians bringing shows to Edinburgh, a review from the site is a recognised part of the festival's critical ecosystem, quoted in publicity and weighed alongside the nationals. That secondary audience — performers, promoters and PRs tracking every notice — multiplies the influence of a volunteer-run site far beyond its direct readership.

News beyond reviews

While reviews are its bread and butter, the site also functions as a news outlet for the Scottish arts world. Its news section has covered everything from festival programme launches to the unprecedented cancellation of the August 2020 Edinburgh festivals during the pandemic, when it published the festivals' joint statement on the decision and its historical context. Interviews with artists, programmers and cultural figures sit alongside the reviews, and the site's opinion pieces tackle wider cultural issues, politics and society. That mix — daily criticism plus arts news and commentary — is what makes it a magazine rather than merely a review aggregator, and it is why the title has endured while many of its early online contemporaries faded away.