Virtual Edinburgh Festival Goer

Music festivals, I am sure, are best enjoyed from the comfort of your sofa, where you can enjoy the music and actually see the band without the drawbacks of trying to find your way back to your tent in the dark afterwards, having to pay £4.00 for a plastic piss pot of Carling, having to piss in a plastic piss pot because the queues for the toilets are visible from space, and having to pay £400 for the privilege.  All of this and the threat that the headliner will only play new material.

Literature festivals should be better.  Except that anyone who is remotely good has already sold out, and if by chance you do get to see an author who you really, really admire, you will discover why writing is a solitary occupation as they reveal in the interview that they have the charisma of a damp sponge and when doing the reading why they get Charles Dance to do their audiobooks.

There is only one festival that is, from the moment you set out to go there until the moment you get back, sheer joy, the Edinburgh festival.

First of all, you can get there by sleeper train.  How fucking awesome is that!  You can go to sleep on a train and it’s official, you’re allowed.  You won’t wake to the sound of screaming because your head has lolled onto the shoulder of the teenager next to you and you have drooled on their mobile, you won’t wake to see your station receding into the distance.  Also, club car.

There’s the city itself, so marvellous that you might think you are in a Playstation game that will, at some point, involve the use of the term ‘Templers’.  When the Fret blows in the tops of the buildings are lost in mist and Edinburgh moves from beautiful to magical.  People complain that the ‘real’ Edinburgh of housing estates and working class people is hidden from the tourist city.  Great!

And the festival!  There are shows in the morning (apparently), in the day, in the night and long into the wee small hours.

Lots of it is free, thanks to the BBC.  The best comedy shows are recorded for the BBC so you get in for free and grin with anticipation because you know, you just know, that two years from now you will be able to say ‘oh him, saw him in Edinburgh, a couple of years ago.  He was good.  Back then.’ to friends who have just spunked £80 to go see the ‘new’ comedy sensation.

And even if you are having a shit time, if you have seen one experimental dance troupe too many (that’s one) and are wrestling with a hangover that needs a name, like a tropical storm (‘Hangover Henry, all hangovers are male), you are having a better day than the poor bastards who leaflet on the Royal Mile.  Because there can be no sensation quite like trying to interest people in a show you have been crafting for a year and then realising that people have no interest in your one woman ballet chronicling the importance of the role of church leaders in ending apartheid in South Africa, ‘Tutu 2 tutu’, in fact they have so little interest, they won’t even take a leaflet, although they might be avoiding you because you have blacked up for the part.

And that’s not even close to the elation you experience after steadily drinking all day when you are in a tiny club with sweat dripping down the walls, a plastic pot of warm lager in your hand and a comedian so utterly without fear that he has titled his show ‘FGMOMGWTF’.

Sadly, not everyone can go to the festival.  This is where technology comes to the rescue.

What you need is a festival goer fitted with a webcam to rove the city, sitting in pubs, queuing for shows, laughing like mongoose on acid at jokes he won’t recall the next day, while the subscriber sits at home with a shitload of Red Stripe and a bag of oven chips.

Until then, we’ll just have to make do with Twitter and the Tattoo on the BBC.

Review - BBC Festival cafe

It's a live broadcast. You are part of the audience of a live broadcast. It's like the moment of being in the congregation at a wedding when the vicar asks if the is any just reason why these two people should not be wed, sustained for forty five minutes. The urge to shout 'knickers' grips you hugely and the first five minutes are an exercise in self control until you begin to enjoy yourself.

But you never forget that this is a radio show. Firstly, there is the reason why the license fee is so much, the BBC staff are everywhere, they have people in headphones bringing guests on, bringing guests off and standing about with clipboards, and this is just for a radio show! Janice Forsyth, the presenter, is smooth and sexy with one of those fabulous radio voices that should be used at times of crisis to just tell you everything is going to be okay, combining as it does authority and assurance, she makes the perfect ringmaster for an arts crowd magazine programme with over the top, and festival over the top at that, guests.

It's always interesting to see a show recorded, more interesting still when it's a slick BBC job and most interesting of all when it's a live broadcast, there's a real sense of anything can happen. Good guests, great host and unpredictable excitement, what more could one want from a festival show? A bloke in the audience in a leather kilt with two back pockets, one for a mobile and one for an iPod? It had that too!

The guests were Frisky and Mannish, who did their singing pop songs in the style of other sorts of songs act. A bloke who sang funny songs in an operatic voice, a writer and finally a chap who had won the 'so you think you can stand up' or whatever competition the night before, had had about two hours sleep and was doing an interview about overnight success before being returned to a life of obscurity that's probably going to culminate in a job managing an electrical goods warehouse and a fair to medium sized crystal meth habit.

The show was also enlivened with a spectacular thunderstorm and rain drumming on the roof of the temporary pavilion that was the venue.

It was interesting to see this actually take place before you, not simply tumble out of the speaker of the radio in your kitchen while you wrestle with the larger problems of the day, like whether to cook up some bacon that's two days past its best before date. It's like being in one of those adverts for radio where the host is actually sat at the kitchen table with you, although if you found Chris Moyles at your breakfast table your first impulse would be to hide the pies and find the cricket bat.

It did make me think though that his could be a daily treat if you were up there for a while, I think the only uniformity would be that it's consistently good.