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Catch Up

Ok, so I’m spectacularly behind. Where to begin?

Well, Edinburgh was great again this year. Our hotel sadly wasn’t quite as swanky as the Glasshouse, where we stayed last year, but much better located, being just a short walk away from the Underbelly, where we saw the most of our comedy gigs, including Robin Ince’s The Book Club, which I enjoyed more than I thought I would (and must make an effort to catch it when it’s back at the Albany) and the excellent Richard Herring.

After a full Saturday of comedy, we spent much of the Sunday daytime hanging around the Pleasance Courtyard, which, although sadly lacking the Hoegaarden/Leffe tent from last year, did instead have a bit at the back with some really comfy leather seats (and an exhibition about ashtrays, I mean what more could you want?) where we sat drinking for most of the day.

And it was from these seats, that we scored two seleb spots:

I dunno his name,
but it’s that bloke off Lovejoy

(not ian mcshane)

“Look!” says Sal, “it’s him.”
Next table, it’s Les Dennis
And! He broke his chair.

[I decided not to (a) ask him to do his Mavis Riley, or (b) tell him about how we had tickets to see him and his comedy partner of the time, Dustin Gee, in panto at the Southport theatre in January 1986, and were very disappointed that they were replaced by, of all people, Jim Bowen, because Dustin had died of a heart attack in the dressing room a few days earlier (and we used to joke at the time that this was because my dad had booked the tickets, because something always seemed to go wrong when he made the arrangements for something; looking back, I’m not sure that was entirely appropriate…)]

The only slight downer of our Edinburgh this year was, unfortunately, our last comedy event of the weekend: I’d taken a punt on some random stand-up by booking to see the BBC’s Stand Up Show Live. And it should have been really good, as this was the last show of the run, and all the compères from the whole month were on the bill together. I very much enjoyed Mark Watson, but much of the rest of the show just wasn’t as good as it could have been.

The bill also featured Phil Nichol, (not so) fresh from winning the Perrier (or whatever it’s called now) the previous evening. We’d seen him before, ages ago, at a Simon Amstell charity thing in London. I didn’t like him then, and I didn’t like him now. He’s supposed to be “outrageous” or something, but I just think he’s not very funny. His “Chinese Proclaimers” version of 500 Miles was particularly jarring: if this was Bernard Manning, I’m sure most of the room would have been rightfully appalled, but instead I found myself surrounded by people my own age laughing at what was essentially lazy 70s-esque racism. I’m not even sure if you could justify it as ironic or post-modern; I just thought it wasn’t very funny.

We returned, as last year, with serious colds, but unfortunately had a big week of stuff lined up: including Alex Lloyd at the Islington Academy, Beck at Shepherd’s Bush, and Ang’s final London Brick Lane curry (where we inadvertently ended up in Café Bangla, overlooked by the giant painting of Princess Diana, 9 years to the day after she died; it’s what she would have wanted, I’m sure).

Having triple-booked ourselves on Saturday night, Sal opted to go to the first of the night’s two birthday events, while I went to Beck with my workmates. That, of course, left me having to shift her ticket on the mean streets of She Bu. It wasn’t that hard: leaving my workmates in the Defector’s Weld I wandered over to the venue to pick up my tickets. Barely half way there, a tout had already offered to take my spare ticket off my hands, and it didn’t take much persuading for me to barter him up to the face value. That in itself tells me that I could have got a lot more for it (and he no doubt sold it on for an awful lot more), but if I needed any more evidence of this fact, then I guess the way that he was prepared to give me the money before I’d even picked up the ticket, walk down to the venue with me, and wait while I collected it, speaks volumes about how much in demand spare tickets were. Ah well.

I really enjoyed the gig, though–all of which was replicated in miniature by a set of puppets at the back of the stage (and I particularly enjoyed the video between the main set and the encore, filmed earlier in the day with the puppets messing about on the green). It was almost worth going just for that.