The Festival is starting to
affect my sleep in more ways than one – not 
only is our timetable cutting down on designated shut-eye
hours, but the Fringe has started to infiltrate my dreams. In ways even my
dreaming self doesn’t understand. For example. Yesterday, I dreamt I passed two
Punch ‘n’ Judy style boxes on the Royal Mile. Inside both was a young
newscaster being groomed by an older mentor – a blond woman I didn’t recognise
in one, Trevor McDonald in the other – nervously preparing for something. After
ten minutes of contemplative perambulation, I ran into someone who could
explain this activity. (How did I not know what was going on? It was my dream…)
They were having a “News-Off” a head-to-head broadcasting battle, to decide
which protégée would take over News At Ten… Naturally…
‘Bagpuss’
Pleasance Dome –
12:00-12:30
Cavalcade
day today, so even our taxi ends up making sleepy slow progress through town,
and we arrive late, stealing into the room as they begin my favourite ever song
about mice rowing a ballet shoe into some cheese and orange squash. This fairly
swiftly compensates for the stage being entirely devoid of a big saggy cloth
cat. Although there are none of Oliver Postgate’s magical creatures present,
their essence remains, as they are brought to life by the three-strong cast; an
Emily (a be-ribboned adult) taking on Emily-type roles, as well as singing
duties (and one spot of toddler dancing), a Gabriel on the banjo with a
decisive air of frog about him, and a professorial narrator (who did actually
look a bit Yaffley) in charge of story-telling and voices. They told us two
tales, seemingly sticking word-for-word to the TV scripts, about A Ballet Shoe,
and A Rag-Doll House, which was glorious for me as I loved the programmes,
though it meant little to Claire. Beaming throughout, childhood revisited, and
the oldest one there without a jammy toddler in tow…
Ignore the fact that
there are hundreds of comedians, dancers, actors, musicians, poets etc.
currently competing for our attention in Edinburgh. Ignore the extensive
theatre listings which take in Shakespeare, Godber, Beckett, Bennett, Chekhov,
Dostoevsky (and not one but two productions of Ben Elton’s ‘Popcorn’). Today
the only play we’re getting to is a Terry Pratchett one, and it’s for that
reason alone that a college friend of mine has corralled two house-mates into
making the trip to Scotland’s capital.
‘Mort’
C Theatre –
14:00-15:30
‘Mort’, adapted from the Discworld novel, tells the story of
Death’s new apprentice; en route, we take in palmistry, murder, the space-time
continuum, espionage, existentialism, warp-bubbles of unreality, redemption,
and a 
horse called Binky. Standard Pratchett
fare then. And that in itself is a compliment. Here, Wonderland Productions do
the text proud. It would (of course) be hard to ruin a Pratchett play – they’re
funny[1],
clever, well-plotted and paced, and chock full of good roles – and aside from a
smattering of over-acting courtesy of the Wizard and frantic Job Centre lady,
the cast acquitted themselves well. Death, in particular, fully miked up (FOR
TYPE FONT ACCURACY OF SPEECH) and mostly cloak-obscured, was spot-on, wry and
dry and likeable, despite his profession. AND there was a fight scene – scythe
action – featuring a nice bit of ‘Matrix’ style slo-mo. Jolly good show…
Louise’s friends, it is
revealed, thought Claire’s kitten bag – newly adorned with a LICK ME sticker –
actually came like that. And that the image and overlying instruction are
intended as a subliminal pussy joke. We, fairly hastily, explain otherwise.
Count Arthur Strong’s Forgotten Egypt
The Gilded Balloon –
17:45-18:45
Because we had a window, it was £2, and
had been enthusiastically recommended by Noel Fielding. Yes yes yes, character
acting at its finest, but a man shouting about hats in a very warm room after a
week of my having no more’n five hours sleep per night isn’t going to prevent
me from slipping into slumber. (Furiously throwing spoons about the place
though, the burning of his falafel the final straw in a litany of stage crises
which pushes him over the edge, I was more than awake for that…)
Count Arthur Strong would
have given us a talk on Egypt, but as his slide projector had decided against
healthy co-operation, he talked about old dead celebrities instead, albeit
meanderingly, and constantly fortified by nips of apple juice. I liked the ‘Red
lorry yellow lorry’ bit, and him struggling with a tongue-twister of his own
devising which ended with repeated Tourettes shrieks of “BOLLOCKS!” But mostly
I was left with the alienated Charlie Chuck feeling of being the last one in on
the joke. (‘I didn’t get it’, she wails, plaintively, ‘Though that doesn’t
Emperor’s New Clothes mean it was avant-garde clever and good because it was
beyond me.’) For Count Arthur Strong is a Marmite man, dealing in acquired taste
character comedy. Alas alack, I do not think I shall be following him and his
Twiglet ways…
We pass the Prince obsessive heading
towards the Courtyard. Claire is suitably impressed that the woman before her
has stroked the Purple One’s hair. I discover that the biro she has onstage is
the actual one he touched; everything she displays within the show is a true
Prince relic. For it to be otherwise – to say it was a picture of Prince
holding bunnies near a skip but for it to be a small waiter from Cheadle – why
that would be cheating.
John Hegley – ‘The Sound Of Paint Drying’
Pleasance Courtyard – 20:00-21:00
Do not be fooled by the
title. John Hegley onstage is a far preferable showman to a horde of silent pigments.
‘The sound of paint drying’ is actually an experience he wishes to convey to 
us, by giving words to a personal odyssey. Some months ago,
the man was followed, for a Radio4 documentary, to France, where he attempted to paint
the street[2]
his father had brought to life on canvas in 1931. A copy of this painting hangs
suspended from the ceiling, dominating the stage set; it depicts a convergence
of alleys, people hanging off roadside railings to talk to each other, the
central building rising up several stories, each 
balcony threaded through with creepers.
New for the Festival, however, is the human (Magritte) silhouette in the
painting’s centre, with hand and face holes to allow Hegley to become an actual
part of the scene, a living fixture. Some poems are thus performed from within
a canvas. Some are not. Some are sung. Some are not. Some are interactive, and
involve we the audience in the chorus. Some are not. All are good. (Even the
one he improvises about Caravaggio, which does, as he points out, make his
printed work sound so much more polished.) Hegley, who has long favoured
writing poems on either dogs, glasses or Luton, has now found two new rich
seams for invention – the painter’s art, and potatoes. It is the latter which
proves the most fun. He takes the time to sing about his dawning realisation of
potato-ness (rather like Billy Bragg, actually), attempting to throw a few Quo
shapes as he does so (in as far as a man playing a mandolin can). The show’s
end, meanwhile, is of a live French translation – courtesy of a front-row
brain-box – of the song which begins with my favourite ever vegetable poem.
When has the sound of paint ever been as good as this?
Voyeuz voyeuz le pomme-de-terre
C’est le legume que je prefere
C’est ne pas une carrotte
Ou un haricot vert
Non
I love the way this city this time of year makes you blasé and
accepting about most everything you see. Two tanks driving up the Royal Mile?
Sitting at the table next to Jerry Sadowitz in a bar? (Twice?) People wearing
plastic babies as hats? Whaddaya expect, it’s EDINBURGH…
Adam Hills – ‘Happy Feet’
Pleasance Courtyard – 21:30-22:30
Sundays with Hills are
ones of added party-fun. For deaf people, mainly, but also for those persons in
the room eager to know what the sign language is for ‘wanker’[3].
He has a BSL interpreter standing onstage to his right, which means we get the
gig in stereo. In the pause after every sentence, we turn to watch her, how
she’s signing Dirty Harry, how miming 
holding up a baby croc will affect proceedings. After every swear
word, attention from Hills falters, as we immediately turn to her. But she’s
the only thing that could distract us. Bouncy bouncy Adam Hills – a bloke’s
bloke but still capable of words like ‘escarpment’ – really is terribly good at
his job. On a mission to entertain as never before in this year – hence the
‘Happy Feet’ encouragement of the title – Hills starts the set with a Go You
Big Red Fire Engine update, letting us know how his 2001 mission statement has
been embraced by the world, and of the proud day it was used in a parliamentary
speech. He then starts a mild mocking of the advice of Steve Irwin (back
towards dangerous creatures, so they can’t see your eyes), segues it into
contemplation of why there was one Australian fighting for the Taliban (backing
towards the enemy, so they can’t see he’s without beard), and from there moves
onto the subject of aeroplanes, post September 11th. He makes no
jokes around the events themselves, and steers clear of politics, instead
concentrating on a discussion of how we were peripherally affected, and how we
now fly. Hills, who was in an airport lounge waiting to fly to a UK gig when
the towers fell, asks for our own flight-jitters stories. None can best his
air-travel tale of the deportee who decided the best way to avoid extradition
would be to claim he had planted a bomb on the plane (and was eventually only
removed from the plane after insulting the smell of an air-hostess’, um, cat).
Equally, we none of us have airport 
security stories to rival his – none of
our body parts set off the metal detectors. Adam Hills, you see, has a titanium
right foot[4].
And when he tells airport staff this, they wave him through, no questions
asked, not even wanting to see it, let alone take it off to check; their
unwillingness to offend the cripple (or “mutant!” – Adam’s favoured
description) outweighing security protocol. This is one typical reaction,
gently mocked. The other is a voiced assumption that it was shark related
solely because he’s Australian. (It wasn’t. Nor was it crocodile related. He’s
never had a right foot.) Thus does he spend the rest of the set, engaged in
foot chatter. Telling us how self-conscious he was about it until struck by a
(sock-related) playground revelation. How his mum kept all of his prosthetic
feet, in chronological order, as other parents hoard baby teeth[5].
How Phil Kay once enticed him into stripping onstage, got him down to his
boxers, and got the audience to make him take off “one more thing”. Aaah; truly
his are happy feet indeed.
Another reason to love the Festival: as well as
filling the city with slightly famous people, it also provides any would-be
conversationalist with an instant way to bond with them… (The shared-experience
factor means everyone’s approachable, and that there’s always something to talk
about…) Ask how their show’s going, ask what’s wrong with their flat (there’s
ALWAYS something wrong with their flats), ask whose shows they’d recommend. The
latter, in particular, everyone does. It’s the Festival equivalent to ‘and how
are you?’ (Not least because it’s a fairly easy way to establish – get out of
the way – whether the person you’re talking to has a show here themselves.)
Towards the end of Previews week, some of the onstage acts had started doing
it. Asking what we’d seen, endorsing their own favourites. Nice Mum, for
example, were quite taken with Andrew Clover’s Birthday Party… even though the
show they’d seen had ended with Kris repeatedly clobbering Clover with a giant
inflatable hammer…
‘Comedy Zone’ – Markus
Birdman, Nick Doody, Gary Delaney, Ray Peacock
Pleasance Courtyard – 22:55-00:25
We comprehensively missed the
start of this one (having been mis-directed towards the Comedy Clone in
the 
Cavern). In so doing, we also missed
introductions, and some sort of attack suffered by a front row audience member
who left with medics… Consequently, I’m unsure of the compere’s name – though I
think he was Markus Birdman, and not Nick Doody – and whether he seems a little
hesitant onstage because he’s just been involved in a 999 emergency. (I don’t
entirely care, either.)
The first act of the
evening is (probably called) Nick Doody, who seems far happier to be with us,
and cheerily dives straight in to some faintly political material. He likens
the dropping of food AND bombs (in the same colour packaging) on Afghanistan to
“some sort of fucked up 
Kinder Surprise”, and then kills the
warmth in the room by making a very Wrong Joke concerning learner-driver
flight-paths and the World Trade Center Towers. He does not follow this with a
Fonzy impression; there is no tempering of this material. Which could well
hinder his – otherwise shiny – future. By contrast, Gary Delaney, up second, is
something of a revelation. Pretty much his entire act – but for a lengthy
discussion on the correct way to file your record collection[6]
– is made up of punning one-liners. (Yet somehow he escapes the grating
monotony of 
a Tim Vine set…) His delivery is laconic,
his stage persona muted, yet the relentless stream of twist-in-the-tail gags
and personal proverbs – all of at least middling quality – somehow bring him on
side. (“Why did the chicken cross the Ouija board? To get to the other side. ”)
Delaney is confident enough in us and his material to let the jokes just slide
out and find a happy home. There’s a little more homeward-joke-ramming with Ray
Peacock (“A lot of people say to me ‘Ray Peacock…fuck off’”), but then dry wry
obliqueness isn’t this man’s style. Not that he’s as Yorkshire (ferrets, Leeds,
ferrets) as the flat-cap would have you believe. A top-class pub-mate ‘dun
good’, or so it sounds…
Key subjects everyone seems keen on
bringing in to their sets this year: Tourettes, the apparent idiocy of
America’s president, and September the 11th. Some people have built
entire shows with these issues and events as the backbone. (including Brendon
Burns’s ‘The Thinking Man’s Idiot’, Rich Hall & Mike Wilmot’s ‘Pretzel
Logic’, and Tina C’s ‘Twin Towers Tribute’, respectively.) But for most these
subjects pop up somewhere. And what is interesting (though not always funny) is
watching which comedians feel they can ‘take on’ 9/11 in their sets, and how
they go about it; dealing with the events themselves (bad flight-path decisions
& wedding bombings…) or with the peripheral effects of terrorism (plane
wariness & patriotism & so on…[7]).
Their need to do so is fascinating. As is what people will and won’t laugh at.
And how, unless you’re making an intelligent and valid point on these subjects,
the audience can so easily turn against you. Even making jokes about the Queen
Mother is easier to pull off…
Last revised: 04/09/02