You're getting the stats whether you like it or not: there are 1,346 shows at the three-week-long Edinburgh Fringe. They represent the very best and, believe me, the very worst of what should be "innovative, exciting and dynamic" creative endeavour. Blithely ignoring anything to do with visual art, dance (or "physical theatre" as we call it on the Fringe), musicals, operas, talks and events, that still leaves 514 theatre shows and 264 comedy/ revue shows. Mission implausible.
It's not just the cauldron-like state of the venues or, later, the icy North Sea breezes that leave you in a permanent state of wide-eyed, hyped-up bewilderment - "Cocaine? No thanks, I'm doing quite nicely as it is." It's not even the fact that drink (and lots of it) is freely available for 23 and a half hours each day thanks to very relaxed festival licensing laws (which leaves half-an-hour to get to the chip shop - cheers), and it's not even that this beautiful Georgian city has almost tripled its population for the month of August. No, it's ain't even the gridlocked traffic, the Japanese coach parties who stop you on the street and ask "Are you Fringe?", the annoying militarism-as-showbusiness of the frankly anachronistic Tattoo, or the simultaneous presence of a Book Festival, a Jazz and Blues Festival, a TV Festival and the International Festival.
And it's not even the awards mania which descends - from Perriers to Fringe Firsts; Angels and Devils to Total Theatres; Best Comedy Writing to Acting Excellence gongs. Sometimes, it seems there's an award ceremony most every hour. It's more the utter exhilaration coupled with the crashing disappointment of running around as a psycho-critic catching five, six or maybe even seven shows a day - not to mention spending seven days' expenses in a day and a half (woops, sorry). Your head reels from the sheer artistic onslaught of it all, and you can be forgiven for coming over like those Victorian women of yore who, on arriving in Florence for the first time and being confronted with so many wonderful works of art in a short space of time, would have a fainting fit from the sheer sight of it all.
You're either sitting bolt upright and scribbling away manically/bored rigid and looking for the exit sign/fast asleep or, in one memorable case, having to make a dramatic rush for the door because you just knew you were going to be sick (sorry about that, Australian improvised theatre people).
More worrying still, halfway through the whole shebang you find yourself using words like "juxtaposition" and "narrative construct" in normal conversation - up to and including buying a bus ticket. Starting at the end, which was last Saturday night's Perrier Award party, this year's award went to Al Murray: Pub Landlord. In the show, Murray plays a bigoted, sexist, xenophobe of a pub owner whose opinionated rants about the monarchy, counselling culture, the Irish, women and whatever else enters his thick, fat head, prove to be some of the most comically resonant material you'll hear all year. The show was called And A Glass Of Wine For The Lady and as much as you sit there thinking "this is just Alf Garnett for the 1990s", you couldn't fail to be impressed by Murray's lethal pastiche of Little England lager lout ideology. There was major controversy about Murray's Perrier nomination this year because in Week One of the festival, he was informed by the Perrier organisers that he had achieved "star status" by dint of selling out shows in a London West End theatre and was thus ineligible for the prize (the Perrier prides itself on "discovering" new talent). In Week Two, Murray's management team successfully challenged the ruling and he was allowed back into the competition. Then there was the bizarre scenario of a local Edinburgh lawyer having to be present at the Perrier panel meetings, in case any of the judges let the media coverage of Murray's exclusion/re-inclusion affect their judgements. Bad PR, as we say in the trade. Also nominated for the Perrier this year was Terry Alderton, an old-style club comic who has been perhaps unfairly dubbed "the new Jim Davidson" and would be better described as a "crowd pleaser". Newcastle comic Ross Noble was also there for an inspired show which highlighted his remarkable ability to fashion hilarious material out of just bantering with his audience.
The fourth nominee was the mad, bad and dangerous-to-know Simon Munnery with his brilliantly demented League Against Tedium show. Apart from the technology and the sort of material that could be only be described as "abstract expressionism", Munnery still found time to throw in a few lines like "Chocolate, coffee, cocaine - whatever next will the South Americans bring us" and "I've nothing against individual Americans . . . except that there aren't any". The final nominees, and for my Scottish currency, the best show on the Fringe this year, were the team of Noel Fielding and Julian Barrett, a.k.a. The Mighty Boosh. Winners of a newcomers' award last year, they surpassed themselves this year with an enthralling account of, and get this, two postmen who are moved to a new route in the Arctic tundra. Promiscuous yetis, evil eyes and mad Spanish uncles all combined in a stormer of a show that was more Beckett and Ionesco than Morecambe and Wise. Theatre of the very absurd. "We're keen to bring the show to Ireland," says Boosh boy Noel Fielding. "We came over and did some solo stand-up stuff last March but we'd really like to do the Boosh show this time out." Ireland expects.
With the Irish doing so well out of the Perrier during the past few years, the anticipated backlash kicked in this year and feeling the full force of it was Dublin comic and Dionysian performer Jason Byrne who, despite some rave reviews in The Guardian and the all-important Scotsman newspaper, failed to make the shortlist.
Elsewhere though, Irish comics Sean Hughes and Owen O'Neill were busy picking up a Fringe First Award for their pair of half-hour theatre shows, Travelling Light and Dehydrated. The former was a very clever and quite droll parody of the Irish theatrical tradition, including as it did, knowing nods to Waiting For Godot, The Playboy Of The Western World, Dancing At Lughnasa and particularly The Lonesome West. The two plays are due in for the Dublin Fringe Festival at the end of September. Other Irish successes included Dara O'Briain having a stormer of a festival and winning over a lot of new friends. Material about the local delights of Bray, Co Wicklow, and Gabriel Byrne's acting career (a must hear sketch) ensured that he and colleague Deirdre O'Kane played to sold-out houses for each of their 26 nights. An excellent worker of a crowd, O'Briain is getting better all the time. Dublin comic Eddie Bannon eschewed the stand-up for his own one-man show called Big Fat Dog. A gripping piece of work, Bannon plays himself as a pre-adolescent, whose obsession with big words and medical symptoms is well realised. A rite-of-passage style of work, the death of the family dog leads the young Bannon into a world of adult deceit. This show is also coming to the Dublin Fringe Festival and is highly recommended. And Father Ted writer, Graham Linehan, made his stand-up debut on the Fringe this year with an exhilarating 10-minute open-spot. More to come from him, I suspect.
Elsewhere, Dublin-based Australian comic Adam Hills was mightily impressive with his My Own Little Word Show, the thrilling centrepoint of which was his re-working of national anthems - particularly good was his version of the Canadian national anthem played to the tune of Bryan Adams's Summer of '69.
Meanwhile, reformed Aussie soap star (from Home and Away, I think) Nicholas Papademetriou was excellent in a show called S.N.A.G. (Sensitive New Age Guy). Papademetriou plays a yuppie advertising executive who returns home one day to find his wife in bed with his twin sister (oh, very Fringe). He seeks out a "Male Awareness Group" to "workshop his grief" and we watch on as the whole wretched, wimpy and pathetic nature of the "Male Liberation" movement is parodied to death. A thoughtful and very amusing work.
Cult show alert: if you're a fan of the wonderful John Shuttleworth, get ready for his creator's new character, the equally sad Brian Apppleton whose History Of Rock 'n' Roll show/lecture was one of the real finds of the Fringe. Appleton is a Zelig-like character who, he tells us, has been involved in every pivotal moment of rock history but remains mysteriously uncredited for his contribution. This is a brilliant show and could well become a sort of theatrical Spinal Tap for the musical community. Remember the name. Another real find was the "only Iranian comic in the world", Omid Djalili - previously known for his "Short, Fat Son of a Kebab Shop Owner" persona. Presenting an "Iranian ceilidh" (song, dance and gags, basically), Djalili excelled in comically twisting and turning his way through the much misunderstood Islamic culture. Whether he was talking about being patronised by the English or being the victim of subtle prejudice, you soon realised that this is the sort of "outsider" material that so many Irish comics have done over the years to great effect. You heard it here first then, in comedy terms Iran is the new Ireland.
All in all, an invigorating, surprising and rewarding Fringe, but it wouldn't be Edinburgh without an Irish comic winning an award, and we had to wait until last Sunday night for this year's victor. Young Dublin comic, David O'Doherty (23) beat off over 500 acts from all over Britain and Ireland to take first prize in the Channel 4 So You Think You're Funny competition. This, you might remember, is known as the "baby Perrier award" and is given to the best first time performer on the Fringe. Both Tommy Tiernan and Dylan Moran have won it in previous years. O'Doherty, who is a younger brother of the actor/comic Mark Doherty is a gifted act with some highly incisive and fresh material (a routine about how to promote the Irish language springs to mind, but can't be printed here). He won £1,500 for his troubles and has already been signed up for some major gigs. Another Edinburgh, another Irish star.
