Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2019

[Blue Jam]

Just booked for Seymour Mace and Simon Munnery on Saturday. Anyone checked them out yet?

[Hammer]

Really enjoyed Jacob Hawley today. He was my fave out of 7 shows. He had only about 10 people in the crowd too so hoping his crowds pick up as he warrants it.

Saw a 'best of Northern' compilation and really enjoyed Carl Hutchison and Ben Vander Velde too out of that lot.

[sevendaughters]

pal of mine is doing brief reviews on his twitter and he gave 7/10 or better for

- Paul Foot
- Gein Family Giftshop x Goose (he gave this 10 out of 10)
- The Delightful Sausage presents Ginster's Paradise
- Tom Rosenthal
- Fat Roland
- Jekyll vs Hyde
- An Evening Without Kate Bush
- Mary Houlihan (he gave this a ten too)

he also walked out of Joz Norris, for his first walkout in 16 shows. I like Joz Norris for what it's worth and would have anticipated that one greatly.

update. he's finished now but saw a few more

- John Hastings
- Joe Wells
- Mark Watson
- John-Luke Roberts ("best one liner I've heard all week" but wouldn't spoiler it)

He says Jason Byrne and a couple of others were disappointing.

[DrGreggles]

John-Luke Roberts ("best one liner I've heard all week" but wouldn't spoiler it)

Brian Logan's review will.

[JCR]

update. he's finished now but saw a few more

- John Hastings
- Joe Wells
- Mark Watson
- John-Luke Roberts ("best one liner I've heard all week" but wouldn't spoiler it)

He says Jason Byrne and a couple of others were disappointing.

I remember when Jason Byrne was in Pleasance Two, and was a hot act. Would have been 1998 or 99. Seems a long time ago now.

[hummingofevil]

Crumbs everything seems so expensive this year. Is it just me being unlucky or are they very few Friends of the Fringe show 241s available this year? I was just going to buy a few things I definitely fancy and it is pushing £200 already. Phew. Going to have to have a rethink I think.

[Wayman C. McCreery]

Anyone seen Amy Matthews? I saw her do a ten minutes at the Stand when I was in Edinburgh a few weeks ago and she was good enough to make me think she's one to watch. Think she's doing a 30-minute show at the Monkey Barrel.

As always, thanks to everyone for the reviews. It'll be a good few years till I get to the fringe again but it's good to know who to look out for on tour/at Mach/when I can get a babysitter.

[Small Man Big Horse]

update. he's finished now but saw a few more

- John Hastings
- Joe Wells
- Mark Watson
- John-Luke Roberts ("best one liner I've heard all week" but wouldn't spoiler it)

He says Jason Byrne and a couple of others were disappointing.

I liked John Hastings show, he certainly has a lot of charm and it's very funny stuff, it's missing a certain something that makes it essential viewing but it's certainly something I imagine a lot of people will enjoy.

[Blue Jam]

Anyone seen the new Police Cops show yet? I know there are a few fans here.

[CaledonianGonzo]

Crumbs everything seems so expensive this year. Is it just me being unlucky or are they very few Friends of the Fringe show 241s available this year? I was just going to buy a few things I definitely fancy and it is pushing £200 already. Phew. Going to have to have a rethink I think.

Brexit

[hummingofevil]

Brexit

Ha ha.

"The Falling Pound: An Interpretative Dance.

C Venues, Venue 4398."

I know these reviews all depend on who is reviewing but The Broadway Baby review of Courtney Pauroso is up and its ***** (5-stars not "SHITE") and it sounds right up my street. The review is ever so slightly spoilery but it doesn't give away much more than the fact it involves Doctor Brown and the Natalie Palamides producers already implies. Going Saturday.

[hummingofevil]

I liked John Hastings show, he certainly has a lot of charm and it's very funny stuff, it's missing a certain something that makes it essential viewing but it's certainly something I imagine a lot of people will enjoy.

I saw the "first" John Hastings show (the one with the "baby baby" something or other call back line) and really loved it but every year since he has been in a time slot that clashes with about half a dozen other things and he never quite makes the cut.

[the science eel]

Russell Howard was in the Indian restaurant I went to tonight with a bunch of other fellas. Luckily they all left not long after I arrived.

[Rizla]

Crumbs everything seems so expensive this year. Is it just me being unlucky or are they very few Friends of the Fringe show 241s available this year? I was just going to buy a few things I definitely fancy and it is pushing £200 already. Phew. Going to have to have a rethink I think.

The whole thing needs a rethink, any resident of the city will tell you. Here's a good take on the utter shiteness of the whole endeavour by Bonny Prince Bob - https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=Ex5aY7AZ4Ug

[CaledonianGonzo]

Today's weather may wash it all away anyway.

[hummingofevil]

Today's weather may wash it all away anyway.

My first fringe was 2011 and it was monsoon conditions. Is it that bad? :)

[DrGreggles]

My first fringe was 2011 and it was monsoon conditions. Is it that bad? :)

Was that the year they had to close the big cow due to fears that it might blow away?

[CaledonianGonzo]

The weekend was nice but today has been a shocker. They had to close the BBC.

[DrGreggles]

The weekend was nice but today has been a shocker. They had to close the BBC.

Not all bad then!

[DrGreggles]

Anyone seen the Tony Law/Phil Nichol thing yet?
Read the blurb and I still can't work out what it is.

[hummingofevil]

I can't remember details as was total newbie but just remember Cowgate being a river and literally getting soaked through everywhere I went for a week.

I'm seeing Tony and Phil on Saturday so will report back.

[machotrouts]

me too, but can't decide if this would be a selling point for me. WN5 represent.

Apparently I was also WN5! Pemberton, I think. I had to look that up because we left when I was 7 and I was not trusted to deal with the mail.

Mum's just been to his show and feels short-changed, because apparently he's not actually from Wigan – he's from the Metropolitan Borough of Wigan.

"He's not from Wigan. He's from Golborne. That's not a Wigan accent, is it? It's a Manc accent. He's just saying Wigan because he thinks that'll sound funny. He's using Wigan. I don't think there's even an Abrakebabra there. I asked him where exactly it was after the show, and he refused to answer."

[machotrouts]

EDINBURGH FRINGE 2019 SHOWS I'VE SEEN SO FAR PART 3


Lucy Pearman: Baggage. I've been trying to woo a man for a while now. I wanted to invite him to some Fringe shows, but he's rather genteel, and it's hard to find common ground between us. He just likes uncomplicatedly nice things, which means most things I like are off-limits. I'd never seen Lucy Pearman before, but reviews for her previous show used phrases such as "playful", "uplifting", "winsome", and "infectious charm" – she really stood out to me as a safe bet. I took him to this, and we sat together in the front row.

5 minutes into the show, Pearman looked him dead in the eye, took out her cock, and pissed directly into his face.


Adam Riches: The Beakington Town Hall Murders. A murder mystery where the audience are the suspects. One of us is randomly assigned the role of killer, and everyone knows who it is – except Riches, who has to work it out, with the help of nonsense and props. If "mass audience participation" doesn't make you want to kill yourself as a phrase, you'd be hard-pressed not to have fun. Those are the only options, suicide or fun.

I do find it distracting that Riches seemed to take genuine delight in fingering the right killer at the end – apparently the first time he'd managed it this Fringe (this was a couple of nights ago) – when one of the rules is that audience members must always tell the truth, even though they know exactly who the killer is (with the exception of one specific girl he interrogated who wasn't paying attention, to everyone's amusement). Surely it can only be as hard as Riches makes it on himself? Could just go "who's the killer, okay show over bye" and call it a night. I appreciate that it's a Fringe show and not an actual party game but I like rules.


Jack Rooke: Love Letters. Chubby curly-haired gay M.I.A. stan... went to see Jack Rooke ahhh bait and switch. An hour of gentle storytelling accompanied by a harpist. I was never not going to warm to (fancy) him, but I'm not so endeared that I feel I can let him off with spending so much time checking his notes and going "bear with me". You're selling tickets for this mate.

It's broadly about queer relationships, both sex and non-sexual friendships. I don't think the non-sex stuff is heartwarming enough to justify the title, and I don't think the sexual stuff is dirty enough to justify the harp. I'm sorry but you've got to have more than a couple of mentions of cum before the harp becomes funny. That's the rules. I don't make the rules.


Ed Night: Jokes of Love and Hate. Would never have gone if I'd done my research – until it came up in his routine, I had no idea he'd done an advert for the Internet Watch Foundation. A cop is a cop and fuck a cop. I don't make the rules (cops do).


John Robins: Hot Shame. Booked him because everyone seemed to like his 2017 show I didn't see. Pleasance One, which is the biggest venue I've been in so far. Apparently he has a radio show? Do people still become popular over the radio? Is this some sort of post-apocalyptic thing? I didn't want to research him too much because he seems to be a very vocal fan of Queen and I felt it would be unfair for that to put me off him.

I enjoyed the show. He's very engaging while telling what could be fairly mundane anecdotes – I can't quite believe that his story about buying a dehumidifier is the centerpiece of a Fringe show, but I didn't question it in the moment. He doesn't really have anything particularly shameful to tell us, but he can convincingly spin some Lukewarm Shames. I like his face, some nice little micro-expressions there. Must be what all those radio fans love about him.


It's All Going To Be OK – Free Festival. I asked the man at the bar where to go for "It's All Going To Be OK" and he said "I can't guarantee it will – ha ha ha! Downstairs."

Split bill of Kuan-wen Huang and Ophélie Hocquard, who faced an audience of about 6 or 7. Kuan-wen was animated and gregarious and went down well until his very last joke, I think about Princess Diana's death, failed to get a single laugh from the audience. (I didn't understand it. You have to leave on an unambiguous joke about Princess Diana's death, in my opinion.) Ophélie had a real time of it for her half, never getting more than one person laughing for any given joke, and usually less. A typical punchline would be followed by total silence, her frowning and going "hm", and checking her notebook to see what else she had. Maybe that was supposed to be a funny thing to laugh at too and we were just very unkind about it (it did sound like she had a proper set with callbacks and that, not just rattling off any random old shit). I've heard worse material go down better – think there was a joke about nuns where I was the single designated person laughing. She shrugged at the end and said "this is kind of still a preview, so... obviously we will need to change this a bit". They'll have better days.


Lou Sanders: Say Hello to Your New Step-Mummy. I think I'm the only person at the Fringe who hadn't heard of Taskmaster until maybe a week or two ago. It's 10 series deep and I'd probably like it, but to be fair it's on Dave and I have mental filters to stop me from hearing about things like that. Look forward to watching it some time! Anyway, I was not prepared for the size of that queue. Think I booked her on the strength of, like, a couple of YouTube clips of her on a Russell Howard show a few years ago.

I expected her to be... I don't know, weirder? It was a very unmemorable hour of stand-up. Best I can say is I found her sort of likeable, and even then I remember the stuff about her healer in the Pyrenees and think, hmm. She dealt generously with my friend who repeatedly fell asleep, by not drawing attention specifically to him and asking for a fan to be brought in because we were all getting warm, so there's that.


Courtney Pauroso: Gutterplum. Loved this. I've seen enough shows that I'm already struggling to remember some of them in clear enough detail to meaningfully comment here, but I feel like I could recap this beat-for-beat. A pleasure to have it seared onto my mind.

Clearly from the same orbit as Nate, if a bit less obviously describable – the life story of a woman named Dale Ravioli, and her love story with an audience member named whatever that audience member is named. You could say it's like if the bits where Nate called upon his "best friend" from the audience were spun out into its own show. It'll probably be at its best with a more open-minded stooge than the reluctant one at my show, but it was great fun and, in its own distinctive way, sort of touching regardless.

Biggest deviation from Nate: Courtney starts out playing Dale as a child, doing tricks on a gym ball and kicking around a can, and I think it's probably supposed to be quite sweet and gentle. This made me much more tense and uneasy than I felt when Nate came out stabbing cans of Perrier and squirting them over my trousers. Just sat there thinking "oh shit where is she going with this. Is this a serious piece of theatre. Is something awful going to happen." It gets a lot sillier as it goes along.

[DrGreggles]

Adam Riches: The Beakington Town Hall Murders. A murder mystery where the audience are the suspects. One of us is randomly assigned the role of killer, and everyone knows who it is – except Riches, who has to work it out, with the help of nonsense and props. If "mass audience participation" doesn't make you want to kill yourself as a phrase, you'd be hard-pressed not to have fun. Those are the only options, suicide or fun.

The phrase doesn't annoy me as much as the actual participation.

As my Dad said to Barrymore: "I'm not here to be your Mike Winters, lad."

[CaledonianGonzo]

Maybe give Gutterplum a swerve in that case.

[CaledonianGonzo]

Desiree Burch – The sheer force of her personality alone would be enough to power this show through to the finish line, but as it is the shaggy dog story at the heart of it is sufficiently off-beam and the digressions into black culture, feminism and the like good natured, well-rounded and punchy enough with jokes that the show flits easily between good and great.  She's a natural.

Sophie Duker – Speaking of naturals.  Reminded me of Aisling Bea's debut in that the quality of the show is more or less irrelevant to the fact she'll soon be mainstream TV fixture.  Given her degree of polish and pizazz I got the sense that someone's maybe been advising her to hold off doing a full hour at the Fringe until she was ready to take a full tilt punt at best newcomer and the fast track to Taskmaster and the like.  Luckily, though, the show's pretty good.  It's a debut so there's sometimes a bit too much autobiography at the expense of theme and some of the joke-writing is a bit rote, but it zips by, is reliably entertaining and Duker herself is more than pleasant company for an hour.

Moon – Reaffirms them as amongst the best sketch troupes out there (albeit that's a pretty low bar at the moment).  The running through-line of the show (that their venue is trying to kill them) doesn't amount to much of great import, but there's nary a duffer in their repertoire of sketches – they actually know how to finish them on a punchline, the performances are strong, and they're refreshingly off-kilter without being tedious edgelords.  Is it as good as last year's hour – maybe not quite, but then they had the element of surprise on their side.

[sevendaughters]

Apparently I was also WN5! Pemberton, I think. I had to look that up because we left when I was 7 and I was not trusted to deal with the mail.

Mum's just been to his show and feels short-changed, because apparently he's not actually from Wigan – he's from the Metropolitan Borough of Wigan.

"He's not from Wigan. He's from Golborne. That's not a Wigan accent, is it? It's a Manc accent. He's just saying Wigan because he thinks that'll sound funny. He's using Wigan. I don't think there's even an Abrakebabra there. I asked him where exactly it was after the show, and he refused to answer."

She's right, Golborne is bloody Warrington!

Enjoying your write-ups btw

[An Actual Propeller]

Lucy Pearman: Baggage. I've been trying to woo a man for a while now. I wanted to invite him to some Fringe shows, but he's rather genteel, and it's hard to find common ground between us. He just likes uncomplicatedly nice things, which means most things I like are off-limits. I'd never seen Lucy Pearman before, but reviews for her previous show used phrases such as "playful", "uplifting", "winsome", and "infectious charm" – she really stood out to me as a safe bet. I took him to this, and we sat together in the front row.

5 minutes into the show, Pearman looked him dead in the eye, took out her cock, and pissed directly into his face.

I've been laughing at this all day, wonderful.

[hummingofevil]

I saw Michael Legg and then Olga Koch today (I am now watching wrestling in the flat babysitting two very tired children who are trying to fall asleep to Ben 10 - inverse parenting - see if  they can defeat ME). Both equally enjoyable for the absolutely opposite reasons. 7.5/10s

Michael Legg - A man who has clearly treaded the boards and has earned his comedy chops. The Cabber comedy nerds would find it at least 20% funnier than your floating punter as he is more than happy to go into the mechanics of comedy and diss Linehan, Louis CK and Gervais. Has some really funny lines and I really like the guy but for me there was just something missing. There are two general themes to the show and they weave together really well but one of them wasn't just that interesting to me. Not that it was a bad thing just wasn't blown away; if you like the thing that he really like and makes it central to the show then I am sure your enjoyment of it would be increased by at least half a star or so - it's simply that I wasnt. But overall a really good show to start the day.

Olga Koch - What they have in common is that they both have a few wild manic lines that are just really silly and funny. They both made me laugh a lot. She is much more of a natural talent - funny bones if you want - and I really enjoyed being in her company for an hour. The difference in the two shows is that the two themes of her show weren't so strong; it wasn't that I wasn't that interested but the material from that (in those bits - a lot of it was really strong) was a bit weaker. She is really funny when she is just fucking about - Lou Sanders is a good reference point who was sat two seats away from me at the back - and you totally believe in the sincere aspects of the show, its just that when she talks about the *spoiler* computer science stuff *spoiler* for the fifth time it feels a bit like an over reach. That said, there is a subtlety to it all that I really appreciated. Like I said... a talent.

Sorry for the slightly criptic review but I don't like spoiling things.

A decent start. Would recommend both.

[RenegadeScrew]

Hello all - I've got two tickets for Stewart Lee tomorrow and I'm not going to make it home this year.  Does anyone want them?