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We excel at drama and formal debating
Right. This post has been a month in the writing, so is hideously out of date. It's also hideously long, being mostly for my future-self's reference. You have been warned :)
Monday (13th August)
As noted in the previous post, the first show we went to was the rapid-fire Chortle Presents Fast Fringe, compered by Ed Gamble and featuring Piff The Magic Dragon, Al Pitcher, Tony Law, Late Night Gimp Fight, Jason Patterson, Angela Barnes, Manfred Bernstein, Johnny Pelham, Sean McLoughlin, Lloyd Griffith, Alistair Barrie, and John Shuttleworth.
With the exception of Piff the Magic Dragon and John Shuttleworth, I hadn't heard of any of them. They were what I tend to expect of unknown stand ups: fine, not outstanding, but entertaining.
Having been flyered by a passing student, we paid half price to get into Danielle Ward - Speakeasy (one of the two solo shows she was doing this year). To stick with the Speakeasy vibe, there was music playing as we all filed in, and Ms Ward at the front dishing out G&Ts. Admittedly she was pouring them pre-mixed from a giant teapot, but G&Ts none the less.
The Speakeasy theme pretty much stopped there, and we got an hour of her pontificating on various topics and hopping like a grasshopper between them.
We then experimented with our first free show, which was Thom Tuck goes straight to DVD. I'm pretty sure the blurb made this sound terrible (something about Thom Tuck having watched all the made-for-TV Disney movies), but we went along anyway because he seemed entertaining in a show last year.
While it is, apparently, true that he's seen all the Disney straight-to-video films (and talked about a lot of them, interleaved with sketches of various episodes form his own love-life, and finished with a sing-a-long of a song from The Little Mermaid), this show was cracking. Great story-telling, a lot of laughing and a panoramic mix of silliness, romance and heartbreak.
We rounded off with a recording of Do The Right Thing, a silly podcast presented by Danielle Ward (again) which featured Michael Legge, Margaret Cabourn-Smith, Susan Calman, and Nick Doody. The show's premise is simple: consider various situations, and discuss what is the right (or occasionally) wrong thing to do. The Moral Maze it ain't; most of the panellists' ideas of the right thing were on the surreal side. Susan Calman (ill and swigging cough mixture from the bottle) managed to combine actually knowing a lot of answers (she's a qualified lawyer) with really creative obscenity. I should go and see her doing stand up.
Highlight of the day: Thom Tuck. Definitely.
Tuesday (14th August)
We started off the morning by finding the Canon's Gait (it's a pub, and it has proper beer, yay) and watching Domestic Science. That's Helen Arney and Rob Wells talking about the fun you can have Doing Science in your own kitchen - it contains actual science, but is also very funny.
Having said hello to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mykreeve on the way in, I was mildly surprised when he was introduced as one of their special guests, but he was highly entertaining (as was their other guest, Ria Lina).
ChrisC and I occasionally play "Today, I celebrity-spotted..." (like twenty questions, but the subject has to be a celebrity you have spotted. It ain't rocket science. He is much better at spotting celebrities than I am, I claim this is because he works in central London.) We have a reasonably flexible definition of celebrity, and had already established the ground rule that anyone seen on stage at the Fringe counts if you subsequently spot them in the wild. Also you can use someone more than once if you spot them more than once. This introduced the thorny issue of whether or not Myk constituted a celebrity every time we ran into him at another show.
Anyway, we stayed at the Canon's Gait to see Robin Ince present Carl Sagan Is My God. I was hoping that the title was indicative of some sort of actual show but it was the usual: Robin Ince waffling a bit and presenting his sciencey-inclined mates (in this case Matt Parker, Eleanor Curry, Tamandra Harkness, and Matt Kirshen). So I didn't get quite what I expected, but I did get something that I very much enjoy. Also the first occurrence of someone solving a Rubik cube as performance art. (I mean first occurrence of the Fringe, seen by us; I'm not claiming it was ground-breaking.)
We moved on to our third free event, which turned out to be in a very unprepossessing basement of a chain Mexican restaurant. Marc Burrows' An Indie Boy's Guide To Sex And Girls looked for a while like it was going to be the first truly poorly-attended show we'd been to. Eventually 15 or so people shuffled in (to a room that seated around 30) and he kicked off.
Again, I felt the title suggested something slightly better, but he waffled about sex, girls and indie music for three quarters of an hour or so.
Our flat was to the west of central Edinburgh (Dalry, for them as know it) and long way from the Fringe action. However, we were quite near a Fringe venue, and someone managed to flyer me for The 27 Club and made it sound brilliant.
This was a show about the "27 Club" - all the musicians who've died from the excesses of their lifestlyes at 27. Weirdly, there were at least 3 shows on this theme; we saw the one featuring a singer called Jack Lukeman.
It was basically a concert, by him and his band, with a projector showing pictures of the relevant artists and Mr Jackman occasionally talking a bit about them. The band were great, and I enjoyed it... but at the same time couldn't help feeling that I'd basically paid to see a covers band. It was a good show, but since it was also the priciest one we went to all week it didn't seem to be value for money :)
From there it was off to the extraordinarily oppulent Voodoo Rooms (seriously: check out their decor) for Mr B's Chap-Hop Hoorah! I've written about Mr B before - upper-crust, ukelele takes on various well-known musical numbers and some of his own compositions.
We rounded our day off with The Horne Section - Live at the Grand!, with guests Tim Vine, Hannibal Buress, Otto Kuhnle, and Kai Humphries. The Horne Section are a band, led by Alex Horne. They are absolute geniuses, the lot of them - although particular mention should go to their keyboard player, Joe Stilgoe. As they put on screen when he was introduced:
Pets? No.
Allergies? No.
Is his dad...? Yes.
As a band, they're amazing - musical comedy in the sense of playing with music and being hilarious. They introduced various guests - some of whom made random demands. "Play burgular music". "Play some old-man music". And they did. Their show kicked off when (having solicited suggestions from the audience for songs) they played a medley of It's Not Unusual, a song I have now forgotten, and the theme from Batman. Seamless and very, very clever.
In fact, I've have happily listened to the Horne Section all night and never mind the guests. Tim Vine was his usual one-liner self; all the others I could have done without (although Kai Humphries was the second performance-art Rubik-solver of the day).
Highlight of the day: The Horne Section. Check out their podcast.
Wednesday (15th August)
Fancy starting your day with a bit of odd? Go and see Bridget Christie: War Donkey. Possibly the only show to feature donkey costumes, fart jokes, an attack on male attitudes towards feminist literature, a lot of ranting about the way female comics are treated and be really funny.
Many comedians refer to their partner - often disparagingly - on stage. Bridget Christie does the same, quoting various banal or foolish things "my husband" has said. She clarified part way through the show: by the way, this is my fictional, on-stage husband :)
Having gone through the Half-Price Hut like a scythe in the morning, buying tickets for everything we were next off to see Porphyria which was Proper Theatre instead of comedy.
A three-person play about a couple, and their au-pair... it was... really good, actually. Some flyer-ers by the Hut had regaled us with a plot summary and made it sound interesting, and it really was. The characters were well-drawn, the dialogue was cleverly written and (often a gamble in experimental theatre) it had proper plot.
Weirdly, we were ambushed by one of the actors on the way out asking if we had any feedback. We blithered vaguely at her for a bit, and by the time we were halfway across town we'd almost evolved some sensible things to have said. Had we evolved them in time.
Then back to the Voodoo Rooms to see Paul Dabek presents Thurston, a one-man show covering the history of Thurston, an American magician who was the contemporary (and rival) of Houdini but is now all-but forgotten. Story-telling and genuine history, interspersed with proper, old-fashioned stage magic. What's not to like?
I remain largely unconvinced by Richard Wiseman, but we had a free slot and he had a free show so we went to see Psychobabble. It was a fairly aimless wander through some interesting bits of pop pyschology, illusions and general trickery. I'm not sure I learned much, but it was a pleasantly entertaining hour.
I'd been flyered by someone dishing out free sweets, and decided I wanted to go and see Baby Wants Candy: The Completely Improvised Full Band Musical! It was pretty much what it said on the tin: a bit like watching the Comedy Store Players, but with a band and performing a coherent one-hour show.
In many ways it was great: the musicians amazing, the cast on stage hugely creative and bouncing off one another in some impressive ways. We laughed a lot. On the other hnd, it was just what you'd expect something like that to be like, and given that it was in the hugely busy half-sevenish slot, I wonder with hindsight whether there were things I would have liked to have seen more.
Our plan to end the day had been to go and see The Boy With Tape On His Face, but sadly too many other people had had that plan, too. Instead, we headed off to Peacock & Gamble: Don't Even Want To Be On Telly Anyway for an hour of silliness and slapstick. On paper, I don't expect me to like Peacock & Gamble. In reality, they seem to be having such a lot of fun that it's kind of infectious.
Highlight of the day: really not sure. Bridget Christie, Porphyria and Paul Dabek were all great, but I'm not sure any one of them stands out as a clear winner.
Thursday (16th August)
Another case of me mutinously demanding something based entirely on caprice and having been flyered was Photographing The Dead. Knowing virtually nothing about this, we headed to a slightly odd, tiny, vaulted room under a bridge (inevitably there sat behind us arty students discussing what an amazing space it was).
It turned out to be a one-woman play (or monologue, or dramatic recitation, or thingy...) in which a character described some chance meetings with a man on the Underground. The language was poetic and beautiful, and I found myself really caught up in the story.
Most interesting, to me was some of the technical aspects of the writing. The character was dressed in shabby, 40s clothes and talked about the war and its aftermath without ever specifically alluding to the war. It amazed me how clearly you can fix a time or an event in mind without being precise - I'd be curious to know how well it would work without the visual cues of post-war dress.
Anyway. I thought this was great; £3.50 well spent at the Half-Price Hut.
At the Fringe this year there were at least three productions of Proof, a multi-award winning play about an aging mathematician, his daughter, and one of his students.
I enjoyed the play, but it didn't blow me away. A lot of it is basically people having fairly stressed-out arguments with each other and - no matter how well it's performed - that's just not something I'm all that keen to watch. Although I didn't notice at the time, ChrisC pointed out the complete lack of believable tension between characters, which I think probably added to the overall lack of enthusiasm.
Breaking away briefly from our day of theatrics, we saw the ever-bizarre Simon Munnery: Fylm-Makker in a pub basement. This is a live show, but performed to a small camera at the back of the room and projected onto a screen. Fortunately, being late, we ended up at the back where we could see both the real Munnery and his projected image.
It was, of course, bonkers. Puppetry, silly cardboard animations, songs, short films about possessed wheelie bins, puns... He continues with the amazing of talent at making you laugh at things that really actually aren't funny, but are delivered with such conviction.
Sealand claimed to be a show based on "real events", but as far as we could tell was simply a fictional story set on a Sealand-like nation/gun platform. It was probably the closest thing we saw to standard student drama; fine, but not outstanding (ditto the actual play, which I didn't rate much).
Having found it sold out on our first evening, we subsequently got tickets for Pappy's: Last Show Ever!. I'm familiar with Pappy's by name only (thanks, Answer Me This): it turns out to be a very small comedy troupe of three blokes (one of whom is disturbinglyulfilias-like).
They do songs, sketch comedy, extreme swearing and minor pyrotechnics, with lots of mild costume changes, all to really quite good effect. The show's schtick is that three old members of Pappy's are reminiscing about performing what turned out to be their last show ever, running through the show as they describe what happened. As a construct, it was really well put together and very entertaining (and featured a were-vicar).
On a recommendation from David Mitchell (not a personal one, he tweeted it) we rounded off the day with Alfie Moore - I Predicted A Riot. Mr Moore is a policeman, who last year wrote a show called I Predict A Riot. Except he never got to take it to the Fringe in the end, because, well, he's a policeman. And last year, policemen were quite busy in early August. With, y'know, riots.
So we got an hour of quite interesting stand-up and information about police matters, interspersed with really quite tired jokes. He struck me as a very old-school comedian, who'd probably go down well in Working Men's Clubs. I don't think he actually was particularly sexist, but I always had the uncomfortable feeling that he was just about to be.
However, I learned some things about police procedure and behaviour in riots that I didn't know.
Highlight of the day: hard to call. Could be Photographing the Dead, could be Pappy's. They're so different it's a bit difficult to decide.
Friday (17th August)
We started off the morning at a Free Fringe event in a huge nightclub, hearing about Josie Long & Sam Schafer's Awkward Romance. This was basically Josie Long being Josie Long, on the topic if romance (and various other things as she got distracted), followed by Sam Schafer being vaguely lugubrious about his failed relationships and social ineptitude.
Which was, actually, rather better than I just made it sound.
We shot off to a bar to hear (based on name alone) Love In The Key of Britpop. Which turned out to be Emily Andersen on a stage, telling a long, rambling poetic tale of meeting, marrying and divorcing an English boy in Australia. The whole story is told alongside their shared love of Britpop, and it was completely, compellingly delightful from beginning to end.
Apart from the sheer feat of memory required to stand and recite a poem for an hour, it was so beautifully written and passionately told that this nudged itself rapidly into the running for top show of the festival.
Our final show before leaping on the train was Raf Shirley's Computer Programmer Extraordinaire. An unknown show is a gamble; it might suck, it might be performed to one man and half a dog. We'd had 24 decent-to-fabulous shows, and we blew it all on the last one which was royally, epically shit.
Raf Shirley started out by stating that a lot of people would leave (they did). And his blurb cites him as an unfunny comedian (he is). I've seen stand-ups die on stage, I've seen people tell jokes that don't work out, I've seen people misjudge a crowd. I tend to think that I'll happily enjoy what ChrisC calls "high-effort low-return comedy". But this? This was just bizarre. He told long, rambling anecdotes with no point, each of which abruptly ended "and then I shat my pants". He explained (and demonstrated) a wire device he'd invented to prevent embarassing bulges in gentlemen's tracksuit bottoms. At one point he - for no observable reason - blew a raspberry for around a minute.
We contemplated leaving, but I elected to stick it out out of sheer curiosity: I assumed there would be some pay off. There was not. It was the only free show where we deliberately left without putting something in the bucket. I still think that he was conducting some sort of bizarre experiment into what audiences will put up with, possibly ready for his next show.
Highlight of the day: Love in the Key of Britpop.
Monday (13th August)
As noted in the previous post, the first show we went to was the rapid-fire Chortle Presents Fast Fringe, compered by Ed Gamble and featuring Piff The Magic Dragon, Al Pitcher, Tony Law, Late Night Gimp Fight, Jason Patterson, Angela Barnes, Manfred Bernstein, Johnny Pelham, Sean McLoughlin, Lloyd Griffith, Alistair Barrie, and John Shuttleworth.
With the exception of Piff the Magic Dragon and John Shuttleworth, I hadn't heard of any of them. They were what I tend to expect of unknown stand ups: fine, not outstanding, but entertaining.
Having been flyered by a passing student, we paid half price to get into Danielle Ward - Speakeasy (one of the two solo shows she was doing this year). To stick with the Speakeasy vibe, there was music playing as we all filed in, and Ms Ward at the front dishing out G&Ts. Admittedly she was pouring them pre-mixed from a giant teapot, but G&Ts none the less.
The Speakeasy theme pretty much stopped there, and we got an hour of her pontificating on various topics and hopping like a grasshopper between them.
We then experimented with our first free show, which was Thom Tuck goes straight to DVD. I'm pretty sure the blurb made this sound terrible (something about Thom Tuck having watched all the made-for-TV Disney movies), but we went along anyway because he seemed entertaining in a show last year.
While it is, apparently, true that he's seen all the Disney straight-to-video films (and talked about a lot of them, interleaved with sketches of various episodes form his own love-life, and finished with a sing-a-long of a song from The Little Mermaid), this show was cracking. Great story-telling, a lot of laughing and a panoramic mix of silliness, romance and heartbreak.
We rounded off with a recording of Do The Right Thing, a silly podcast presented by Danielle Ward (again) which featured Michael Legge, Margaret Cabourn-Smith, Susan Calman, and Nick Doody. The show's premise is simple: consider various situations, and discuss what is the right (or occasionally) wrong thing to do. The Moral Maze it ain't; most of the panellists' ideas of the right thing were on the surreal side. Susan Calman (ill and swigging cough mixture from the bottle) managed to combine actually knowing a lot of answers (she's a qualified lawyer) with really creative obscenity. I should go and see her doing stand up.
Highlight of the day: Thom Tuck. Definitely.
Tuesday (14th August)
We started off the morning by finding the Canon's Gait (it's a pub, and it has proper beer, yay) and watching Domestic Science. That's Helen Arney and Rob Wells talking about the fun you can have Doing Science in your own kitchen - it contains actual science, but is also very funny.
Having said hello to
mykreeve on the way in, I was mildly surprised when he was introduced as one of their special guests, but he was highly entertaining (as was their other guest, Ria Lina).ChrisC and I occasionally play "Today, I celebrity-spotted..." (like twenty questions, but the subject has to be a celebrity you have spotted. It ain't rocket science. He is much better at spotting celebrities than I am, I claim this is because he works in central London.) We have a reasonably flexible definition of celebrity, and had already established the ground rule that anyone seen on stage at the Fringe counts if you subsequently spot them in the wild. Also you can use someone more than once if you spot them more than once. This introduced the thorny issue of whether or not Myk constituted a celebrity every time we ran into him at another show.
Anyway, we stayed at the Canon's Gait to see Robin Ince present Carl Sagan Is My God. I was hoping that the title was indicative of some sort of actual show but it was the usual: Robin Ince waffling a bit and presenting his sciencey-inclined mates (in this case Matt Parker, Eleanor Curry, Tamandra Harkness, and Matt Kirshen). So I didn't get quite what I expected, but I did get something that I very much enjoy. Also the first occurrence of someone solving a Rubik cube as performance art. (I mean first occurrence of the Fringe, seen by us; I'm not claiming it was ground-breaking.)
We moved on to our third free event, which turned out to be in a very unprepossessing basement of a chain Mexican restaurant. Marc Burrows' An Indie Boy's Guide To Sex And Girls looked for a while like it was going to be the first truly poorly-attended show we'd been to. Eventually 15 or so people shuffled in (to a room that seated around 30) and he kicked off.
Again, I felt the title suggested something slightly better, but he waffled about sex, girls and indie music for three quarters of an hour or so.
Our flat was to the west of central Edinburgh (Dalry, for them as know it) and long way from the Fringe action. However, we were quite near a Fringe venue, and someone managed to flyer me for The 27 Club and made it sound brilliant.
This was a show about the "27 Club" - all the musicians who've died from the excesses of their lifestlyes at 27. Weirdly, there were at least 3 shows on this theme; we saw the one featuring a singer called Jack Lukeman.
It was basically a concert, by him and his band, with a projector showing pictures of the relevant artists and Mr Jackman occasionally talking a bit about them. The band were great, and I enjoyed it... but at the same time couldn't help feeling that I'd basically paid to see a covers band. It was a good show, but since it was also the priciest one we went to all week it didn't seem to be value for money :)
From there it was off to the extraordinarily oppulent Voodoo Rooms (seriously: check out their decor) for Mr B's Chap-Hop Hoorah! I've written about Mr B before - upper-crust, ukelele takes on various well-known musical numbers and some of his own compositions.
We rounded our day off with The Horne Section - Live at the Grand!, with guests Tim Vine, Hannibal Buress, Otto Kuhnle, and Kai Humphries. The Horne Section are a band, led by Alex Horne. They are absolute geniuses, the lot of them - although particular mention should go to their keyboard player, Joe Stilgoe. As they put on screen when he was introduced:
Pets? No.
Allergies? No.
Is his dad...? Yes.
As a band, they're amazing - musical comedy in the sense of playing with music and being hilarious. They introduced various guests - some of whom made random demands. "Play burgular music". "Play some old-man music". And they did. Their show kicked off when (having solicited suggestions from the audience for songs) they played a medley of It's Not Unusual, a song I have now forgotten, and the theme from Batman. Seamless and very, very clever.
In fact, I've have happily listened to the Horne Section all night and never mind the guests. Tim Vine was his usual one-liner self; all the others I could have done without (although Kai Humphries was the second performance-art Rubik-solver of the day).
Highlight of the day: The Horne Section. Check out their podcast.
Wednesday (15th August)
Fancy starting your day with a bit of odd? Go and see Bridget Christie: War Donkey. Possibly the only show to feature donkey costumes, fart jokes, an attack on male attitudes towards feminist literature, a lot of ranting about the way female comics are treated and be really funny.
Many comedians refer to their partner - often disparagingly - on stage. Bridget Christie does the same, quoting various banal or foolish things "my husband" has said. She clarified part way through the show: by the way, this is my fictional, on-stage husband :)
Having gone through the Half-Price Hut like a scythe in the morning, buying tickets for everything we were next off to see Porphyria which was Proper Theatre instead of comedy.
A three-person play about a couple, and their au-pair... it was... really good, actually. Some flyer-ers by the Hut had regaled us with a plot summary and made it sound interesting, and it really was. The characters were well-drawn, the dialogue was cleverly written and (often a gamble in experimental theatre) it had proper plot.
Weirdly, we were ambushed by one of the actors on the way out asking if we had any feedback. We blithered vaguely at her for a bit, and by the time we were halfway across town we'd almost evolved some sensible things to have said. Had we evolved them in time.
Then back to the Voodoo Rooms to see Paul Dabek presents Thurston, a one-man show covering the history of Thurston, an American magician who was the contemporary (and rival) of Houdini but is now all-but forgotten. Story-telling and genuine history, interspersed with proper, old-fashioned stage magic. What's not to like?
I remain largely unconvinced by Richard Wiseman, but we had a free slot and he had a free show so we went to see Psychobabble. It was a fairly aimless wander through some interesting bits of pop pyschology, illusions and general trickery. I'm not sure I learned much, but it was a pleasantly entertaining hour.
I'd been flyered by someone dishing out free sweets, and decided I wanted to go and see Baby Wants Candy: The Completely Improvised Full Band Musical! It was pretty much what it said on the tin: a bit like watching the Comedy Store Players, but with a band and performing a coherent one-hour show.
In many ways it was great: the musicians amazing, the cast on stage hugely creative and bouncing off one another in some impressive ways. We laughed a lot. On the other hnd, it was just what you'd expect something like that to be like, and given that it was in the hugely busy half-sevenish slot, I wonder with hindsight whether there were things I would have liked to have seen more.
Our plan to end the day had been to go and see The Boy With Tape On His Face, but sadly too many other people had had that plan, too. Instead, we headed off to Peacock & Gamble: Don't Even Want To Be On Telly Anyway for an hour of silliness and slapstick. On paper, I don't expect me to like Peacock & Gamble. In reality, they seem to be having such a lot of fun that it's kind of infectious.
Highlight of the day: really not sure. Bridget Christie, Porphyria and Paul Dabek were all great, but I'm not sure any one of them stands out as a clear winner.
Thursday (16th August)
Another case of me mutinously demanding something based entirely on caprice and having been flyered was Photographing The Dead. Knowing virtually nothing about this, we headed to a slightly odd, tiny, vaulted room under a bridge (inevitably there sat behind us arty students discussing what an amazing space it was).
It turned out to be a one-woman play (or monologue, or dramatic recitation, or thingy...) in which a character described some chance meetings with a man on the Underground. The language was poetic and beautiful, and I found myself really caught up in the story.
Most interesting, to me was some of the technical aspects of the writing. The character was dressed in shabby, 40s clothes and talked about the war and its aftermath without ever specifically alluding to the war. It amazed me how clearly you can fix a time or an event in mind without being precise - I'd be curious to know how well it would work without the visual cues of post-war dress.
Anyway. I thought this was great; £3.50 well spent at the Half-Price Hut.
At the Fringe this year there were at least three productions of Proof, a multi-award winning play about an aging mathematician, his daughter, and one of his students.
I enjoyed the play, but it didn't blow me away. A lot of it is basically people having fairly stressed-out arguments with each other and - no matter how well it's performed - that's just not something I'm all that keen to watch. Although I didn't notice at the time, ChrisC pointed out the complete lack of believable tension between characters, which I think probably added to the overall lack of enthusiasm.
Breaking away briefly from our day of theatrics, we saw the ever-bizarre Simon Munnery: Fylm-Makker in a pub basement. This is a live show, but performed to a small camera at the back of the room and projected onto a screen. Fortunately, being late, we ended up at the back where we could see both the real Munnery and his projected image.
It was, of course, bonkers. Puppetry, silly cardboard animations, songs, short films about possessed wheelie bins, puns... He continues with the amazing of talent at making you laugh at things that really actually aren't funny, but are delivered with such conviction.
Sealand claimed to be a show based on "real events", but as far as we could tell was simply a fictional story set on a Sealand-like nation/gun platform. It was probably the closest thing we saw to standard student drama; fine, but not outstanding (ditto the actual play, which I didn't rate much).
Having found it sold out on our first evening, we subsequently got tickets for Pappy's: Last Show Ever!. I'm familiar with Pappy's by name only (thanks, Answer Me This): it turns out to be a very small comedy troupe of three blokes (one of whom is disturbingly
ulfilias-like).They do songs, sketch comedy, extreme swearing and minor pyrotechnics, with lots of mild costume changes, all to really quite good effect. The show's schtick is that three old members of Pappy's are reminiscing about performing what turned out to be their last show ever, running through the show as they describe what happened. As a construct, it was really well put together and very entertaining (and featured a were-vicar).
On a recommendation from David Mitchell (not a personal one, he tweeted it) we rounded off the day with Alfie Moore - I Predicted A Riot. Mr Moore is a policeman, who last year wrote a show called I Predict A Riot. Except he never got to take it to the Fringe in the end, because, well, he's a policeman. And last year, policemen were quite busy in early August. With, y'know, riots.
So we got an hour of quite interesting stand-up and information about police matters, interspersed with really quite tired jokes. He struck me as a very old-school comedian, who'd probably go down well in Working Men's Clubs. I don't think he actually was particularly sexist, but I always had the uncomfortable feeling that he was just about to be.
However, I learned some things about police procedure and behaviour in riots that I didn't know.
Highlight of the day: hard to call. Could be Photographing the Dead, could be Pappy's. They're so different it's a bit difficult to decide.
Friday (17th August)
We started off the morning at a Free Fringe event in a huge nightclub, hearing about Josie Long & Sam Schafer's Awkward Romance. This was basically Josie Long being Josie Long, on the topic if romance (and various other things as she got distracted), followed by Sam Schafer being vaguely lugubrious about his failed relationships and social ineptitude.
Which was, actually, rather better than I just made it sound.
We shot off to a bar to hear (based on name alone) Love In The Key of Britpop. Which turned out to be Emily Andersen on a stage, telling a long, rambling poetic tale of meeting, marrying and divorcing an English boy in Australia. The whole story is told alongside their shared love of Britpop, and it was completely, compellingly delightful from beginning to end.
Apart from the sheer feat of memory required to stand and recite a poem for an hour, it was so beautifully written and passionately told that this nudged itself rapidly into the running for top show of the festival.
Our final show before leaping on the train was Raf Shirley's Computer Programmer Extraordinaire. An unknown show is a gamble; it might suck, it might be performed to one man and half a dog. We'd had 24 decent-to-fabulous shows, and we blew it all on the last one which was royally, epically shit.
Raf Shirley started out by stating that a lot of people would leave (they did). And his blurb cites him as an unfunny comedian (he is). I've seen stand-ups die on stage, I've seen people tell jokes that don't work out, I've seen people misjudge a crowd. I tend to think that I'll happily enjoy what ChrisC calls "high-effort low-return comedy". But this? This was just bizarre. He told long, rambling anecdotes with no point, each of which abruptly ended "and then I shat my pants". He explained (and demonstrated) a wire device he'd invented to prevent embarassing bulges in gentlemen's tracksuit bottoms. At one point he - for no observable reason - blew a raspberry for around a minute.
We contemplated leaving, but I elected to stick it out out of sheer curiosity: I assumed there would be some pay off. There was not. It was the only free show where we deliberately left without putting something in the bucket. I still think that he was conducting some sort of bizarre experiment into what audiences will put up with, possibly ready for his next show.
Highlight of the day: Love in the Key of Britpop.
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I've actually seen a few of those comedians since Edinburgh - Danielle Ward and Tony Law. Both tolerable in short doses. They were at a monthly comedy night in Camden called Lolitics, worth coming to as it was short slots for comedians to test out more political material, there were five of them including Robin Ince. If you find Chris Coltrane on twitter, he runs it. V good and only £3
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Yes, I did know she was married to Stewart Lee. Who has also has the capacity to be a bit weird in places.
Lolitics sounds interesting, I'll check it out, thanks.
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As bad as that sounds, it's still more appealing to me than Marc Burrows' show!
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