Fest Blog

I spent a day at the Edinburgh Festival on Sunday. The first thing Nicola and I went to see was a phoned-in piece of rubbish from Radio 4 called The Storyman. This is how it was billed "With his vivid imagination and a stage full of actors in his head, Andrew Clover leads his special guest as they improvise a strange but magical story, invariably reaching a surprising end for his guest and the audience alike." This is what it actually was. Some smarmy guy interviewed Tony Parsons and after about 15 minutes in, he ‘makes up’ a story, using his limited improvisational abilities. A really nauseating exercise and a beautiful example of how BBC is happy to churn out a cheap, flimsy idea in order to bolster its ‘comedy’ schedule. It was only 45 minutes but felt about 2 hours long. We couldn’t wait to get out of the room.

The second thing we saw was Nancy Cartwright – My Life as a 10 Year Old Boy. In the bar of the Assembly Rooms where the show was, there was a sale of framed cells from The Simpsons. We spent the best part of an hour looking at them, so much so that the guy from the gallery (second from the right in the picture on the site) took 15 minutes explaining the various types of cells and even took an unframed one from the back in order to show us the layers that go into the making of a frame of The Simpsons.

The show starts with a montage of Simpsons clips, it was kind of weird watching The Simpsons in a packed auditorium, but we did all howl with laughter. Once the show itself got going, we were treated to the voices of Bart Simpson, Nelson Muntz and Ralph Wiggum right in front of us. She appeared however, to be unaware that The Simpsons has never been shown as a proper series here. We can’t base our schedules round the Halloween episodes of The Simpsons even if we wanted to, cos we’ve no idea when they’re on. We’re treated to daily random episodes on cable and stochastically scheduled random episodes on terrestrial television. She perhaps should have been aware of her feat of selling out a decent sized venue at 15 quid plus a ticket night after night for a show that’s never been in a regular slot for 90% of TV viewers for the majority of its run here.

Nicola said to me afterwards that she felt the show was rather self indulgent and it does amble along a bit with no real direction, other than really to entertain herself. But then again it is a one woman show. There’s no real insight and no juicy gossip. She’s very complimentary about everyone that she works with, and that’s just it, she still works with them. If this was a show done after the end of the show, then perhaps it may have been a bit more meat on it. If you love The Simpsons you’ll enjoy this show. And you do get to hear Bart Simpson say the words ‘mother-fucking cocksucker…’

After that we went to see Demetri Martin last year’s Perrier Award winner. It was the first night of his show and therefore termed a ‘preview.’ He was really good. Nicola had never heard of him before and she loved him. It was more a long funny story, than a series of jokes, though it seems that most festival shows have to be themed around something. He’s quite surreal (his show was about him being trapped inside his spiral notebook) and very clever. He flowed constantly for the whole hour and made me laugh out loud several times. Cat People, the computer game Super Busy Hospital 2 and “fat anyway,” were some of the highlights. Go see him if you can.

He also uses a lot of music in the background, which is something I know Nicola always likes in her comedians. He did apologise at the end for not being as good as he thought he should have been, but he was pretty good. We were lucky to get in to see him at the last minute as technically the show was sold out.

As for celeb spotting, it was a day thin on the ground, we spotted renowned gay comedian Scott Capurro and American comic Todd Barry. We also saw Nancy Cartwright before and after her show, though that doesn’t really count.

To end my evening, a girl at the bus stop in Glasgow got onto me for wearing a walkman after dark, because it was ‘dangerous.’ I pointed out to her that it’s never been a problem so far, but she was having none of it. I like the idea though that you have to be super sensitive to who’s ready to jump you from behind everywhere you go. Actually wearing a personal stereo probably stops me from getting into fights cos I tend to ignore the numerous people who want to pester me in the street much easier that way, therefore having less chance of succumbing to my underlying rage. A case in point being the guy on the bus who got on about 3 stops from mine, with an out of date day ticket. He kept waving it at the driver pointing out that it was ‘a day ticket,’ oblivious to the driver’s comments that, yes it was, but not for THIS day. The fanny then decided to walk straight to me, to see if I’d pay his fare for him. I wouldn’t. Nor would the other two passengers on the bus. He then seemed to think that the driver would understand that he’d obviously drank every last penny he had and was therefore entitled to free public transport. He didn’t.