I know what I did this August
Aug. 28th, 2025 12:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lovingbothOnce I got the agreement that I could try to see as many things as possible during the Edinburgh Fringe, I looked up what the record was. It turns out that someone saw 304 shows in 2014.
We'll come back to what I think of that later, but until then the official record was 169, done in 1994. Insert 'those are rookie numbers' meme from The Wolf of Wall Street: I knew I could do more than that.
But if I stuck to the PBH Free Fringe, not least because of how low my income is at the moment, how many are possible? A look at the 2023 'Wee Blue Book', and counting how many shows were in each hour, limiting that to no more than 23 - the PBH does three full weeks plus an additional weekend, so you can't see more than 23 shows in any hour slot - came up with 203.
This year, I managed to see 217 different shows.
There were three that I saw twice, but even though two are 'cabarets', i.e. a different set of people do short guest slots, if you allow repeats to count, it'd be possible to get to about 390 via seeing some things around 11 or 12 times.
There were also about five things I went to that simply didn't happen and I wasn't able to see something else in that hour. One was because the person doing 'tech' for the show was in Fife and no trains were running in Scotland because of an unseasonable storm, and another one was because urgent repairs to a bridge on the East Coast Mainline meant an enormous queue of people waiting to get on what southbound trains were running by the space the show was going to be. The cast were OK with doing it, the Transport Police were happy for it to happen, but someone in the station hierarchy said no. Two others were ones where the performers simply didn't show up, and another one was where the audience was too small for the performers to want to do anything.
I'm also not counting those, although "I went to 225 shows" is what I actually did. That turns out to be one more than the partner of the record holder.
A favourite book suggests that, should you win a game of Chess that you were losing badly until your opponent made a terrible blunder, you should say something like "I would have won quicker, but I have an appalling headache."
This is not the same, but it would have been at least eight higher had I not felt unwell after a meal deal pasta salad that did taste a bit odd one lunchtime and went back to the flat to lie down and watch a couple of films about to disappear from Netflix. Oh, and I could have added two or three to the total had I not met someone who had just arrived in Edinburgh with a load of luggage and gone with her to the flat one evening, and lost another opportunity to see something when moving my bike somewhere under cover because of some approaching severe thunderstorms that, in the event, just missed the city.
By sticking to the PBH Free Fringe, I missed out on a handful of musicals and operas I would normally have seen and not much else: two or three favourite performers' shows.
I also didn't manage to see about a dozen shows on the PBH that I would have liked to have seen.
I posted about those I did see on Bluesky using the usual 0-5 stars to rate them. By the time I thought that being able to give half stars would have been useful, it was really too late: I'd have needed to adjust too many older posts.
0 stars: car crash bad - 1 show
1 star: bad / just didn't work for me - 4 shows
2 stars: should have been a lot better - 16 shows
3 stars: good stuff - 73 shows
4 stars: very good to the point that if I'd paid commercial Fringe prices of around £15/show, I'd have been happy - 93 shows
5 stars: great - 29 shows
not rated: by request, but it was very good - 1 show
The single zero was the stand up comedian who had four different bigotries in their set on opening night. I spoke to someone I knew would want to know about that and I know the performer got a letter about their content. Given they stayed to the end of the run, I presume they took note: someone else lost their slot at another PBH venue on the basis of their social media posts being bigoted.
One of the one star shows had repeated biphobia / bi-erasure, another had some misogynistic content, but the other two were performance art that just didn't work for me and a very lazy improv troupe.
On the five stars side and starting with the comedy, Dickie Richardson Sexual Tyrannosaur 2025 was wonderfully stupid, including an opening 20 minutes with over three jokes per minute; Alistair Clark's On the record mixed comedy with epic vinyl nerdery; and Jon Hipkiss and Gill Cordiner were both great.
The first of the best two comedies was Theodora Van Der Beek is Mr Creep', a show that originated during Covid when her 'bubble' did a party based on the theme of an office party and she went as the office creep. I particularly liked the deliberately disturbing errors in the edges of one of the videos building on the sense of unease.
The winner of 'best comedy I saw' was Caitriona Downden's Dance like everyone's dancing which got laughs from everything from medieval Catholic theology to her experience of vaginismus. "About as unmainstream as you can get, & all the funnier for it."
There were eleven magic shows I loved. Charlie Caper's sleight of hand is astonishingly good. This year's show on the PBH was slightly different to previous ones I have seen, but I still knew what was about to happen in most of it, knew how he'd do it, and yet still didn't see him do most of it. For the first time, I did catch a couple of his moves, but only because I was very actively looking for them.
Had his robot magic show been on the PBH, I would have seen that too, but the two robot based sequences that were in last year's PBH show (one of which remains) are less impressive than his sleight of hand.
Arron Jones' 1 Hour Straitjacket Escape Magic Show remains one of the cleverest I have seen: how do you do magic when you can't use your hands for the vast bulk of the show? This was probably its last outing at the Fringe but it might be revised in the way that his Rock'n'roll Magician show became the #1 Greatest Hit Rock'n'roll Magic Show this year. Some of the actual tricks in both are easy to work out, but the presentation of them is just great.
Stuart Lightbody's two shows were also great in terms of their presentation. As a bonus, he gave me one of the biggest laughs when, talking with him afterwards, I mentioned that it would be good to see someone do one card trick where a particular card wasn't a court card and he started talking about that being a matter of "chance". Ha ha ha, no, it's not.
Fascinatingly, someone else did do the trick in the way that I wanted to see, but their presentation of it was less impressive than the way Stuart and Chris Cook did it.
Two 'for children' magic shows were excellent, particularly Magic Gareth: Balllonatic, where one trick is done with him inside a balloon, and the classic 'flea circus' 'magic' Unbefleavable Magic.
The PBH Best of Magic I saw lived up to the title, and Andy Boyd - the Professional Showoff combined magic, (better) robotics, and juggling to great effect.
That leaves an excellent improvised show in a tiny room that was one of David Alnwick: Secret Magic Shows and Fake - Presented by Chris Cook which combined art history and magic and is the joint winner of 'best magic I saw' alongside Charlie Caper.
A couple of one-offs were also wonderful. A couple of short films from one director plus a series of music videos for a Jazz Emu album had me asking where I could see them all again.
The other one was the 16th edition of A Young Man Dressed as a Gorilla Dressed as an Old Man Sits Rocking in a Rocking Chair for Fifty-six Minutes... and Then Leaves. I'd not gone to one before, but it started for me over an hour earlier when someone asked if the queue I was in at the venue was for "the (shows me a banana) show". It wasn't, but that's the sort of cult following it has: the biggest room on the PBH is standing room only to see what's in the title. Oh, and the audience interacting with him by putting bananas in his lap / money in the suit pocket / cheering when his hat falls off / picking it up / adding different hats / booing when someone isn't respectful etc etc etc.
A more conventional audience participation show, James Ross Does Guess Who 2: Now Even Guessier, where people have to guess sometimes very silly stuff about a chosen stranger was great fun. People take it in turn to pick one other (unknown to them, and not revealed to anyone else) audience member, everyone stands up (or raises a paddle), then answers whether or not the member not the person is like silly thing or not. Everyone who isn't sits down. Repeat until your chosen person sits down or you're left with only your chosen person standing (and so win!) Astonishingly, at least on the day I went, no-one cheated, including me, and partly as a result every one of the something-teen people who tried lost.
The lines are somewhat blurry, but I'm counting six more shows I loved as 'performance art'.
Guy Carries a Door: Up Arthur's Seat was literally that: partly to promote his other (very good) show and partly in penance for all the doors knocked on while a Jehovah's Witness, a full-size heavy door was carried up and down Arthur's Seat. We were apparently the only people he didn't already know to join him in the walk from start to finish. What made it so good was not just the chat on the way, but seeing the reactions from the other people on what is one of Edinburgh's most popular spots. One woman was almost jumping up and down going "WTF?!?" even before she felt how heavy the door was.
The first thing I saw this year was Bancroft To You, You Can Call Me Crofty which was a wonderful comedy of incompetence - "I don't even remember the name of me own show". The same person also did a couple of performances of the CU Real Star Awards, with similar themes but a different character.
Funny How Hard We Try was a physical clown's attempt to fill the void within her, while Sam Dodgshon Tries to Hold Your Attention for One Hour (Running Time 45 Minutes) was from one of the people behind last year's fabulous Bot Brothers (a version of Blood Brothers, but with two robot twins, both of whom have sex with the same toaster at some point in the show). Following the twisty little passages of a presentation, he does stuff, is killed, resurrected, and punished until the audience have had enough.
Partly because new people kept coming in even at 2am, it took about an hour for that to happen on the night I saw it. It was usually shorter, I'm told, but took 75 minutes one night by which point he was begging the audience to stop. One reason is the punishments: things like being 'force fed' a bunch of grapes, shot at with Nerf guns, and being shocked by a Slendertone belt.
Never having used one, I am not sure, but TENS machines are basically the same idea and those can be very painful on high settings. The rest of audience bays for it to be set to the highest setting, and he managed to get someone else to wear it, on the grounds that the slide said 'Sam' must be punished... and they were also named Sam. Fortunately for them / sadly for the sadists, no shocks were delivered: the power setting on the belt wouldn't go up, just down. I suspect that was a genuine problem rather than being nice, so the other, slightly drunk, Sam had a very lucky escape.
The 'best performance art I saw' was Choin, an amazing show of acting / clown work that included, amongst much more, raptor dinosaurs, Mussolini, and Bob Dylan singing the Spider-man TV theme tune, before some flying.
That leaves three 5* shows I'm classifying as 'theatre'.
The Day My Sugar Daddy Dumped Me absolutely spoke (and sung) its truths about the performer's experiences. Some of it had me wincing, some of it had me laughing in recognition.
My final show at the 2025 Fringe was Comedians Performing Rocky Horror From Memory - Again!, which was a riotous singalong of most of the songs from the film plus a few bits of the dialogue.
But the best thing I saw, the non-cabaret show I saw twice, was Joan Cooper-Snark: Between a Cock and a Bard Place, a fabulous exploration of why only people with penises are classed as 'bards' like Shakespeare, what they write about, and what she'd write about if she had one. With a translation of 15th C Welsh poet Gwerful Mechain's poem on the joys of female genitals - getting her name was one of the reasons for going a second time.
Both those were filmed by someone, so I hope they'll be available online somewhere. It had one-offs in four venues and two in another: I suspect the Fringe Society would count that as five different shows. Five of the shows were lunchtime-ish, and the sixth one was at 22:45 in a pub basement. I'd like to have seen that one too, just for the likely different sort of audience.
Overall, probably the best 'three weeks and two days' of my life. As a bonus, just as I've never had the 'BiCon comedown', I haven't had one following this either.
Assorted stuff:
That record: it was only made possible by getting free passes to everything at several of the big commercial venues: the Pleasance / Gilded Balloon / Just the Tonic / Underbelly etc. Given they start earlier and don't finish much sooner than most of the PBH venues you can see a lot more shows that way. (One 'help plan your Fringe' app reckons you could have seen 320 shows this year.)
But these were performers who would have paid those venues 'around' £4k - £7k for their hour slot, and while they'd be happy to have a critic from one of the major publications in, 'some guy with a blog' getting a freebie, often alongside his partner, must have been a somewhat mixed feeling.
Had I got to 305, it wouldn't have counted: it costs around £400 to get a show that runs for six performances or more in the Fringe Society's 'official' programme - so about 2/3rds of PBH shows don't do that - and that's what the record is based on.
Why stick to the PBH, apart from not having much money: In an interview with the record holder, he said: "...free shows tend to be of a lower overall quality. It stands to reason, as the paid shows usually have performers investing many £1,000s putting on their show, so it is in their own interest to make it as good as possible, a pressure not associated with the free shows."
That's the biggest load of crap I have heard since I went to A history of the last Conservative government in their own stupid words, a show that looked at the memoirs etc of various Tory politicians in this year's Fringe. I have been to some utter crap on the commercial Fringe in past years, where the publicity was great but the actual show was terrible. They got my money and didn't have to deliver. On the PBH, people don't pay until after they've seen your show: what bigger pressure to be good is there?
It is true that on the commercial Fringe, as mentioned, virtually everyone pays for their slots. But the result of that, plus accommodation costs for people outside commuting distance and various other costs that many are told are necessary, is that almost every performer loses money, no matter how much they fill their seats. That's really bad!
Talking to some performers, one reckoned paying £4k to their commercial Fringe venue this year got them nothing over what they had for free on the PBH Free Fringe last year. I also saw what someone else got for £7k: a 2m by 1m taped out space on the floor for their show's props etc plus use of a shared dressing room.
It was particularly galling to read the chief exec of one of those big commercial venues moaning about how tough their job was earlier this year while knowing they're being paid at least twice what the whole PBH Free Fringe costs to put on. The PBH provides free slots to its performers as well making it clear that, if you can't afford to donate to them afterwards, that's completely fine.
Honestly, I'd love to see the commercial venues fail disastrously one year because of performers refusing to pay the outrageous fees. Doubly so for the 'not free' "Free Festival" which charges the performers for their slots and then allows anyone to come in without paying. No performers = they'd have to change their ways.
Oh guess which lot didn't get a Covid-19 grant, but saw another one use its grant to pay a couple of PBH venues to have their shows instead? Oops, that gave it away...
Hot meals eaten: four. One ready meal at the flat late one night, two burgers on the days there's an offer on them, plus a meal at one of the PBH venues on the last day. The rest of my food was the usual fruit + cereal + yogurt breakfasts plus Sainsbury's / Tesco meal deals with the odd thing from Lidl / Aldi.
Earliest start time for a show: 09:00 Guy Carries a Door: Up Arthur's Seat. Also the longest one at nearly two hours.
Latest start time for a show: 01:45 Dibneyland, a guest spot cabaret.
Biggest revelation: There's one magician on the PBH who I have not been impressed with over the past few years. Andrew McKinley's scripted shows have not been good: two years ago he reckoned I cost him a star in one review because, as an audience member, I didn't hide that I knew exactly how he'd done all of his obviously (to me) entirely bought magic show. Looking, it turns out that it wasn't me but clearly I was not the only unimpressed audience member.
This year, I saw him do an improvised show for a few people and it turns out that he is actually very good. It was much better than any of his scripted shows. The owner of the bar he was in, the Sandport Tavern in Leith, have offered him a residency (i.e. he performs for the customers at their tables one night a week) and if you're in Edinburgh, it will be well worth going to see him.
Best emcee: The Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang ("it was all going so well at work until a flying car turned up") in The Night Mouth. Sadly the guest acts didn't match him on the evening I saw it.
Best joke: a bisexual male comedian talking about being like a tomato: people don't believe they're a fruit, but they have lots of seed inside them.
Worst trend: far too many of the magic shows - I think it was over half of the thirty four I saw - had the same 'this audience member has turned this Rubik's Cube to exactly the same random looking pattern as on this other one and look, I can 'solve' it in about two seconds' trick using a gimmicked cube.
One piece of advice to Fringe magicians I saw a few years ago was that if someone else is doing the same trick, find another trick to replace it in your act. I wish people had listened. A handful of people doing rope / rings routines, fine: they tended to be presented differently. But seeing the same Cube routine less than an hour after someone else has done the same thing got very boring. It is a very impressive effect, so I can see why so many bought it, but it was the magical cliche of the year.
Number of shows the Guardian also reviewed: one, Theodora Van Der Beek is Mr Creep. I think that was the only one out of the 120ish shows they gave stars to on the Fringe and the International Festival that was part of the PBH Free Fringe. PBH shows make up well over 10% of the total of Fringe shows, hmmm. They gave Mr Creep three stars, but as mentioned earlier I thought it was wonderful and rated it five.
Amount donated at the end of shows: about £75 in total. Had I been able to follow my usual pattern of giving a fiver to the good shows, a tenner to the very good, and twenty to the excellent ones, it would have been almost £1,900... which I don't have. My will now includes a bequest of more than that to the charity behind the PBH though.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-08-28 09:03 pm (UTC)How tired are you now?!
(no subject)
Date: 2025-08-28 09:43 pm (UTC)Not at all!
The one problem I did have during the first week was neck ache: sitting looking at one place for an hour about ten times a day can do that, it turns out :)
Doing a pillow swap at the flat for a lower feather one rather than a higher poly-something one and then consciously moving my head much more from then on cured that.
Having a big bladder and the ability to be fine on that breakfast plus one other meal on most days helped enormously with the rest of the potential issues. It's going to be interesting to see what weight I am when I get home.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-08-30 08:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-08-30 10:51 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-08-30 08:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-08-31 08:39 am (UTC)The variety of shows helps.
Even during The World's Most Boring Card Trick - a single trick stretched out to 50 minutes - there was variation. It helped that, by sitting at the front, I had the hand bell to ring if things were getting too interesting (and did so twice!) but even without that, extending the choice of the card gave the opportunity to go "Aha! This looks staggeringly random with 51 'this one or that one' choices, but if the magician knows which one he wants, it's actually a very simple 'force' (making the audience member end up with the one you want)".