Performer Richard Gadd (right) appeared to be preparing to punch comic Joz Norris in an Edinburgh street yesterday
My yesterday at the Edinburgh Fringe started with a Danish man playing the bagpipes and ended with a policeman.
There were stunts along the way, but none of them cunning stunts.
I saw seven shows yesterday. Five of them were:
Claus Reis: Return of the Danish Bagpipe Comedian
The show works, but there’s a presentation problem. If your USP is confounding expectations by being a Danish bagpiper and you dress up in a kilt and traditional Scots piper costume and you look fairly Scottish, then there is no real visual USP. Naff as it may sound, you should be wearing Viking horns or some equally stock cliché Danish costume while playing the pipes.
Candy Gigi: Award-winner with a new face this year
Candy Gigi: Chicken Soup
Last year’s Malcolm Hardee Award winner for comic originality. This year, she has developed the madness, adding in more glimpses of her acting and great singing voice and, yesterday, picked a perfect punter to unleash her insanity on. She handled him so well, I thought he might be a plant. He wasn’t. It was like watching a mescaline-crazed Cilla Black. Her shows tread a narrow line between sunshine and darkness.
Joz Norris: Hey Guys!
Always talented and charismatic, Joz’s new show now holds together as an entity. Tremendously enjoyable, with hints of a genuinely interesting autobiographical back story. If he has the nerve to increase the true stories while retaining the surrealism, he could break through massively. Perfect TV face.
Martha McBrier: Pigeon Puncher
It is easy to think she is ‘just’ a naturally very, very funny storyteller, but there is a lot of preparation and an enormous talent in audience control behind this show and her performance. Very very very funny indeed.
Bob Slayer conducting his BlundaBus show
Bob Slayer’s BlundaBus: Never Mind the BusStops
With anyone else, this unplanned rambling shambles of comic chattery in a double decker bus would be a car crash. With Bob (nominally) in charge, it still is – but that is the point of it. It’s a success! Not so much as a show but as an event.
Nathan (right, in red) with DeLorean before the wind came
In among all the above, I also went to the Three Sisters pub in the Cowgate, where Nathan Cassidy had managed to get hold of and park a DeLorean car to plug his Back To The Future trilogy of shows.
People could wear the hero’s red jacket and get photographed in the car and the bonnet was covered in flyers for Nathan’s shows: a good stunt undercut by the fact this is eternally-windy Edinburgh and occasional gusts blew the flyers off the bonnet into the street.
On second thoughts, though, perhaps that was not a negative factor. That was publicity. This is the Fringe.
John Robertson: very Dark in The Underbelly
Walking away from that, I bumped into John Robertson in a rubber suit (no change there, then) plugging his Dark Room show… and then photographer Garry Platt, who has been wandering round photographing shows and events.
As Garry and I wandered off, I looked up. The Old Town of Edinburgh is built on two levels. Above out heads was the George IV Bridge from which a giant trapeze was dangling and a young gent was climbing down a rope towards it.
I said to a girl standing on the pavement: “He has eleven minutes to kill himself.”
“What?” she said, slightly surprised.
“I have to leave in ten minutes,” I explained, “so he only has eleven minutes to fall onto the road and plug whatever show it is by killing himself.”
It turned out she was doing the PR for the show.
Dolls duo dangling dangerously above the Cowgate yesterday (Photographs by Garry Platt)
The young man dangled and was followed by a young woman who dangled. They both dangled. By the time I left, a fair crowd had gathered on the bridge above and on both the pavements below to watch them dangle.
The traffic slowed as drivers looked up and small flyers were handed out to publicise the show Dolls.
But I think, to be truly effective, it needed a banner dangling from the bridge itself, above the two dangling trapeze people risking their lives for a line in The Scotsman.
Semi-ironically, the next event I went to was a 90-minute event publicising Death on the Fringe, an umbrella organisation which I blogged about last month.
It aims to stimulate discussion of death, end-of-life issues, bereavement and grief.
It was held in the Old Anatomy Lecture Theatre in the Medical School building of Edinburgh Universally.
All the talk was of death, terminal illnesses and mortality, but it seemed strangely refreshing amid the incestuous atmosphere of egos swirling around in the streets outside.
There have been sadly few cunning stunts so far this year.
Mark Dean Quinn – King of Fringe Flyerers
But I bumped into Mark Dean Quinn yesterday. Last year, he got a Malcolm Hardee Cunning Stunt nomination for his flyering techniques.
This year, he is mostly plugging his own show More Observation Without Comedy Is Not On Today about which he was strangely quiet, perhaps because it does not start until ten days time and is only on for two days. But he is also plugging Ben Target’s show Imagine There’s No Ben Target (It’s Easy If You Try) by handing out imaginary flyers and paper bags which say:
A BAG IN WHICH TO PLACE
YOUR IMAGINARY FLYER FOR
IMAGINE THERE’S NO BEN
TARGET (IT’S EASY IF YOU TRY)
3pm
THE HIVE
WEAR SENSIBLE SHOES
“How does Ben Target pronounce Ben Target?” I asked.
“Well,” explained Mark, “he pronounces Target as target and Tarjay as tarjay
“Each day,” Mark told me, Ben has given me a precise number of people he wants me to get into his show by flyering.”
“A different number each day?” I asked.
“Oh yes,” said Mark.
“What,” I asked, “happens if you miss the target for Ben Target?”
“Well, I don’t intend to fail on any particular day, because I’m sure there will be serious ramifications and I have seen what he carries in his suitcase.”
Janey Godley in a suitcase. There is no Ben Target on view
“What does he carry in his suitcase?” I asked.
“I have signed an actual written document to say I can’t say what’s in it, but it’s quite special.”
“Is the penalty different,” I asked if you are over or under on the audience numbers?”
“If you want to find out what the penalty is – and see what’s in the suitcase – come to the show at 3.00pm at The Hive daily, you’ll actually see the inside.”
Now THAT is effective promotion with a hint of cunning stunt.
As I walked back to my flat at around 2.00am last night/this morning, I turned down a side street. On the other side, walking in the opposite direction, back into the centre of Edinburgh, were a ballerina and a policeman hand-in-hand. They were not publicising anything. Just happy to be with each other.
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