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.

Still Fast

As has been previously documented, when I lived in a shared house it was far more ‘The Young Ones’ (at least in terms of squalor) than ‘This Life’ (although fair to say I did manage to have a relationship with one of my house mates, before she worked out that beneath the façade that I had erected (yuk yuk) to try and pass myself off as a fascinating adult was somebody with the emotional dept of an Arabian puddle – all I can say is thank fuck this happened during the years Doctor Who was off our screens, or she would have drawn her own, quite correct, conclusions from the number of sonic screwdriver replicas on display in my room and the relationship would have ended with the emotional equivalent of her blinking twice when asked if everything was alright, rather than in the pleasingly traditional manner of her finding somebody with more, i.e. any, muscle tone and dumping me like nuclear waste in a national park).  There was, however, a period where we had a mix of people in the house who shared the same interests; coming home and sitting quietly in front of the telly.
In retrospect, we should all have recognised that in terms of relationships, we were never going to do any better, formed a commune, bought i) the house and ii) an enormous telly and lived out the rest of our days wearing DVT stockings.
We didn’t.  I went on to convince somebody else that I was a fully functioning adult by not revealing the extent of my comic collection, hidden at my mother’s house, or indeed my mother, also hidden there, until it was too late. As for the rest, I think they are all essentially following the example set by the actors from ‘This Life’; you never hear from them but you sort of know they are doing well.
I think the secret to our all getting on well together (two blokes, two girls and one bloke who was never, ever, there) was that we never discussed anything personal, or if we did, we only did it drunk and so everything could be denied or diplomatically forgotten the next day.
So how did we communicate?  Not, I am pleased to say, through the traditional housemate method of increasingly aggressive post-it-notes left on bedroom doors, fridges, loo handles, plates stacked awaiting washing up and so on.  Rather, it would appear, through catch phrases.
This became apparent when I watched the two part ‘Fast Show’ special this week.
When it comes to comedy, reviving a show that has been off air is usually about as effective as passing electricity through a corpse and hoping for a reproduction of the original features, and about as funny as passing electricity through a corpse and having it reanimate and start throttling bunnies.  Not so here, this was hysterical.  In being so, it was in defiance of ‘Trotter’s Law’ - that a revived show is exactly as terrible as the original was beloved.
As the familiar characters and catchphrases rolled out, I recalled not sitting in front of the telly, but standing in the kitchen holding a packet of unlucky cod announcing ‘Tonight, I shall mostly be eating…fish fingers’.  I recall the watching the climax of a particularly bitter episode of University Challenge and, as the buzzer goes for the last question, my housemate piping up ‘Sorry, I’ve just come’.  And whenever any of us encountered another when wearing a dressing gown, one, the other, or both, would simply begin ‘Me?  The thirteenth Duke of Winbourne?  Here?’ and go on to describe something utterly filthy involving penguins.
The revival was spectacular, and funny.  And most important of all (J.J. Abrams please note) it did not take a cherished memory and Yewtree it.

Review - David O'Doherty presents: Rory Sheridan's Tales of The Antartic

I know somebody who is related to an Antarctic explorer, her Irish ancestor was on Shackleton's expedition, the one that ended with the epic open-boat journey. And I've been to Ireland and seen a house with a plaque stating that a polar explorer lived there so I asked her, what is it about the Irish that compels their men to seek out the desolate waste? She replied that it's because it's the last place on earth that they are likely to have their mammies telling them what to do.

The explorer in this show went to the Antarctic for love, and love is probably the only thing in the world that is more likely to lead a chap into doomed folly than Antarctic exploration. So the combination of the two was going to be a winner.

The show was good. The venue was a sub-sub-sub basement of some council building, think underground car park with no lights and water running down the walls and you get the idea, I half expected to come across some lost cavers, or morlocks, as I took my seat.

A monologue of love, adventure, madness and the invention of the pub quiz, the writing and delivery was clever and funny, making some mileage from using modern references in the context of early twentieth century polar exploration, with plenty of straightforwardly funny stuff ('penguins, let me tell you, are stupid. They are more stupid than an bottle filled with meat') as well as a poignant conclusion.

In terms of performance, invention, charm, storytelling and laugh-out-loud funny moments, this show was the high water mark of this years fringe, just the sort of thing one hopes to see, deliciously different, wonderfully executed and will change your view of penguins forever.

Review - Al Murray The Pub landlord's Compete for the meat

Flogging the format...to death.

Al Murray has, for years, being doing exactly what it says on the tin, with the added recent development that the shows are now filmed, meaning he can turn a live show into a handy pitch to Channel Five executives, saving valuable time for coke and hookers or wherever else it is that television executives do when not listening to pitches from comedians.

This was essentially the Christmas version of 'Compete for the meat'. If you are actually competing, as we were last year, then there is the fun of a quiz and the edgy titillation of possibly being humiliated by Al. If you are an audience member, the show is not so immediate, you are essentially just watching a live version of a tee vee quiz show based on a pub quiz.

But they do work hard to make it fun. Al has raised his game from victimising individuals to victimising whole tables at once, and there are sing-alongside for the whole audience. If you go along to this with a sort of ironic detachment, you'll be miserable. If you grab hold of a 'thick and slow' foam finger and join in the abuse, rendering the whole experience not unlike some beery version of 'Lord of the flies' then you'll enjoy it.

Was it fresh? No. Was it slick? Very. Was it funny? Yes. Al did enough, in particular with his attempted wooing of one young helpless woman, to make an established format one has seen before seem fresh. What one was watching was essentially a comedians greatest hits, and, as anyone who has ever been to a gig and observed the audience reaction when a band announces that they are now going to play some of their new material will tell you, that's no bad thing.

Review - Andy Parsons: Gruntled

The Assembly Rooms was packed, this, remember, is a comedian who has been on television and expectations were high. There's always that extra bit of excitement when a television comedian 'fucks' for the first time on stage and that was certainly the case here, particularly in the seat near me where a dad had brought his son, who looked about nine, along to the show. I have no doubt that a nine year old probably knows just about all the profanities he'll need in the playground, but what he will have taken away from this show is how to use them professionally and for effect.

The material was good topical stuff, as anyone who has seen Mock The Week or, before that, listened to 'Parsons and Naylor's pull-out-section' on Radio 2. There was plenty of banker bashing, some slick interaction with the audience and an effective rant about the economy ('I've heard the accusation that some people have too much money and thought it stupid, then realised that, if you are one of the thousands of people who bought the autobiography of Alexander Meerkat, you have too much money').

Are established comedians a good ticket at the Fringe? Well, you have what you hope is a safe pair of hands and you can expect a reasonable return. Although the ticket price is normally at the higher end it's still cheaper than going to see the tour that inevitably follows. It's fun to see a comedian working up some new material and always enjoyable to see a panel show comedian doing their day job.

Good, yes, but probably because of the warmth that Parsons brings to the performance, providing a good counterpoint to his cynicism and anger meaning you leave entertained rather than thinking that you have just listened to a middle aged bloke moaning for an hour.

Review - Stewart Lee - Flickwerk 2011. Work in progress

Oooooooohhhhhhh, edgy. Stewart Lee has, in defiance of his status as a mainstream comedian who has been a continued television presence for a couple of years now, continued to play the Stand comedy club during his Edinburgh stints. So the audience that turn up are probably a mixture of people who like Lee enough to tolerate this frankly appalling venue year after year, and those who have seen the telly show and hope they will catch the live version, that is; as funny as the telly show but with more swearing.

It's not as funny as the telly show, but there is more swearing. It's funny, it's just not as funny as you'd expect. Then again, nobody could be that funny for an hour without distilling down hours of material and drafting in Armando to deconstruct the programme between sets.

There's warning signs a few minutes in when Lee explains that as a parent he never goes out and so has nothing to base new material on except Children's television. He does, however, really pull it out of the bag with a spectacular piece about his hate mail bag, and he had the best gag about the riots.

And, what was that...how could such social upheaval, with Greggs on fire, be so overlooked here, it was almost as if none of the comedians cold be bothered to build this into their sets because they had got the timing right and the construction just so and bunging in fifteen minutes of topical humour about chavs going on the rampage would upset the delicate balance of all those knob gags. Maybe it was that, just as the social unrest was apparently coordinated by social networking rather than the traditional method of scallys just telling asking other that they had just looted J.D. Sports but that, being innumerate, they had neglected to loot any trainers in their size and did they want a pair? The jokes were also posted instantly on twitter too and so the social media savvy Fringe goer would probably have read any punch line in the form of a tweet months ago.

The Stand is my least favourite venue by far. Small and pokey and painted black its the sort of place you wake up in after being abducted and know that everything is very much not going to be alright. And with self-important signs telling you to switch off your mobile phone and not to talk during performances. This was the sort of place that Hitler could have made an address from if the bierkeller had been busy.

There was, during Lee's act, the odd reference to Richard Herring, which was appreciated by the audience (you can't fit a crowd into the Stand, so...gathering? Group? Audience will have to do...fans! That's it, appreciated by the fans), but a bit odd, I bet the Beatles didn't name check each other after they broke up.

It was a good show to see so that you didn't wonder if you missed something special. If you missed it, you didn't miss anything special, apart from the hate mail thing - honest to god, I laughed so hard my colon almost came up my nose.

Review - BBC Comedy Presents - Early and late

Usually the best ticket in in the Fringe and this year was no exception. The late night comedy from the BBC is always a good show, often a great show. It starts late enough for the audience to be sufficiently 'relaxed' and, because most of the comedians have come here after their shows have finished and the venue is a large one, they are a combination of relaxed and terrified, pleased to be playing before an full venue that's probably far larger than the tiny empty place that they have just come from and possibly regretting that drink or line they took to settle their nerves. But that's okay because the audience have been drinking too.

Certainly the show I saw contained two comics who had taken a drink, one obviously, one not so much but both still very funny as they reeled out the highlight ten minutes from their set. The compare was sober, he has to be as he interacts with the audience and that can get interesting at this time of night.

Most of all though, it was tremendous fun, the compare was great, the acts were good and the star turn, Nina Conti, was outstanding; make no mistake, ventriloquist dummies are creepy, Nina embraced that, turned the creepy into funny, the funny into spooky, the spooky back into funnier and the funnier into disquiet bordering on dread. I haven't been that scared and amused at the same time since I was tickled at gunpoint.

This showcase tends to provide the acts that you tell your friends about when you get back from the Fringe and they ask you who you saw, because as cool as it is to tell them about the comedians they know from panel and stand up shows, it's cooler still to tell them about the comedians they'll be seeing in a few months time on panel and stand up shows.

This is still the best ticket in town.

Review - Richard Herring: What is love anyway?

A full theatre and an interesting premise, that after doing a show last year about how god was made up, Richard tackled something else that was made up.

This was slick stuff, with lots of very funny stuff being linked by some thought provoking stuff, and a lot of stuff about angst and being single. There were even some very funny jokes in there, which was good for a comedy show, and one protracted routine about chocolate and mathematics that kept the audience on a sustained roll for a good ten minutes.

The show I attended included a member of the audience being taken ill and the attention of the audience slowly switching from the stage to events in aisle F. Richard struggled on but eventually had to concede that somebody was being helped from the theatre and decided to play the uncaring sod card by thanking them for their money. He managed to get the audience back but it was a bump.

And he mentioned Stewart Lee. Is this desperate? Like asking about your old girlfriend to a group of mutual friends? Because, you could tell, most of the people coming to see Richard were going to see Lee too, surely. It was as if he was hoping somebody might say 'oh, yea, Stew mentioned you in his set last night'. 'Did he, maybe he...maybe there's still...look, did he say if he was doing a double act with anything else at the moment?'. Cue much embarrassed looking into pint glasses until somebody says 'look, just let it go mate'.

He was funny, he was thought provoking, he had good hair and he made for a convincing fourtysomething confused by love. And I have used one of his jokes because it's easy to pass off as your own, but not the chocolate routine, partly because a ten minute monologue is not easily adapted to a pub environment but mostly because it involves a logical flaw at an early stage that a theatre crowd is too polite to correct at an early stage, but which a group of your friends would show no such reticence about.

Edinburgh Reviews - BBC presents

Four new comedians of varying ability and talent. Very good and made you realise there is more to really funny comedy than Mock the Week.

Edinburgh Reviews - Al Murray

Sat in the front row. Audience participation mitigated on my part by me being too dull to be really worth picking on. I had sat next to a fat bloke and it was the comedy equivalent of firing chaff. Not suitable for children.

Edinburgh Reviews - Jimmy Carr

Did exactly what it said on the tin. Warmer in person than he is on telly, doesn’t have that mean edge that you see on television and able to laugh at himself. Very polished.

Edinburgh Reviews - Denise Van Outen

Another surprise. Great singer and very funny. Also an interesting take on confessional theatre, talking about her feelings in a way that, as a bloke, made my arse pucker in self-conscious embarrassment with a sound like a toddler rubbing a balloon.

Edinburgh Reviews - Jo Caulfield

We earned out festival fringe stripes the other night by missing our show because we were in the bar. But it wasn’t our fault, honest. The dizzy twat bar staff forgot to call us when the show started. Luckily the venue, the Stand, is a multi room place and even luckier, the staff were fantastic and traded our tickets for Jo Caulfield with no fuss.

She was excellent and so, in a very Fringian manner, surprise victory was snatched from the jaws of disaster.

Edinburgh Reviews - Marcus Brigstocke

God Collar, best show we saw. Sat in the front row, was promised that he would not pick on us. Ranted about Christians, then had a go at atheists and then at agnostics. Then had a bile-fuelled rant at the muslims that would have had the speech writer for the BNP frantically making notes. Intelligent comedy.