The Edinburgh Fringe finished yesterday.
Fringe performers Phil Jarvis and Consignia have occasionally turned up in this blog. I think you might call them – eh – erm – unconventional, even by Fringe comedy standards. In 2016, they won an Alternative New Comedian of the Year award.
I once attended one of their late shows in Edinburgh at around 1.00am in the morning. When it ended after an hour, they decided they would immediately repeat it in its entirety, which they did. It ended around 3.00am.
At the Edinburgh Fringe last year, they staged as the final show in their run, one in which they did not turn up, because they were on a train back to London. I think they may have publicised the fact they would not be there. Maybe they didn’t. No-one knows if any audience turned up.
Consignia are named after the failed re-branding of the UK Post Office in 2001-2002 – which BBC News at the time described as “The most ruinous decision since the biblical scam that saw Esau swap his birthright for a bowl of stew.”
That referred to the Post Office’s choice of name, not the comedy group who have not yet, as far as I know, featured on BBC News, although they may have appeared on Crimewatch.
A random promotion image for Consignia’s Lemondale show featured a hole in the road
This year, Consignia were, again, performing a run of shows – titled Lemondale – at the Edinburgh Fringe and Phil Jarvis revealed to me that their marketing strategy, ever original, was: “We are not promoting the run until it’s finished.”
That did not altogether happen. See below..
Consignia’s membership varies much like the vivid events in a surreal dream. This year, in theory, they were: Andy Barr, Alexander Bennett, Phil Jarvis, Sean Morley, Mark Dean Quinn, Alwin Solanky and Nathan Willcock.
They billed their show as: “about potholes, lemons and lost utopian ideals. A late night/early morning fever dream for fans of concrete.”
These hour-long daily shows started at 1.45am in the morning.
A couple of days ago, lamenting the lack of any reviews, Phil Jarvis said he would write his own review of the show. I suggested he write about the overall Fringe experience.
Now he has done. Mea culpa.
Phil, promoting the movie Kes in Lemondale
Our show this year was called Lemondale. We were in the Banshee Labryrinth’s Cinema Room. It was what is called a ‘ghost show’: a show that is not listed in the main Fringe guide. We did not make any flyers or posters this year, so relied on people just turning up, possibly thinking that a film was on. The Banshee Labryrinth had great footfall through the night and had shows running throughout the evening, so people (we hoped) would pop in after seeing the shows before us.
By July, I had co-written two full shows that had both been canned as Consignia member Nathan Willcock sensibly took up the offer of paid work instead of going to Edinburgh.
Originally, the show was going to be about the history of a fictional New Town told by a monorail that falls into eventual decline.
But Mark Dean Quinn came to visit me before Fringe and we chatted over some ideas. In effect, Mark became the director of Lemondale.
I had spent about three hours in a queue at Stansted Airport for a Ryanair flight and that became the starting point – how you cope with the boredom of waiting in an airport.
The day of the only preview we did in London, Mark delivered a two page script that was the backbone to the show.
Consignia’s Lemondale – Don’t ask who or why
I started trolling a bit too much on Facebook’s Edinburgh Fringe Performers’ Forum. Eventually, I got myself banned from the forum. So I decided to set up my own Facebook forum with the same name. It would prove quite handy.
I get quite bored of having to repeat the same show each night, so we started to add things.
For example, Alwin Solanky, an integral member of Consignia, failed to turn up on time for the first show. So we added the fact Alwin hadn’t turned up into the show. With Alwin in the room, we would get the audience to chant ‘Where is Alwin?”.
Eventually, Alwin would get to the stage, don a bird mask, and then be pelted with bread that had been handed out to the audience.
Sean Morley became a member of Consignia halfway through the run, so we decided to change the show more.
We made it an ASMR experience.
(An Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response is an experience characterized by a static-like or tingling sensation on the skin that typically begins on the scalp and moves down the back of the neck and upper spine, creating ‘low-grade euphoria’.)
We started whispering and shushing the audience whenever they laughed and amplifying ourselves eating fruit and downing beer slowly.
Actor Danny Dyer made some comments
We also had a menu screen behind us: from the DVD Danny Dyer’s Football Foul-Ups. Every now and then, Danny Dyer would interject with some comment that would somehow seem fitting in the bread-filled mess.
No journalists seemed up for coming to the show so late at night.
So Nathan Willcock (made head of our shoestring PR) approached the online blog The Mumble who said he wanted £25 to come and review it. Nathan said we would try and fund the £25 after the show but The Mumble didn’t seem happy with that idea and said he wouldn’t come. You can’t even buy a journalist these days!
We seemed to be getting about 20 to 25 people in every night for this 1.45am show.
The Edinburgh Fringe Forum provided an interesting opportunity when a presenter from BBC Radio Leeds asked if anyone from Yorkshire wanted to appear on his show.
Sean Morley lives in Sheffield, so he ended up delivering an ASMR interview on a lunch time show on BBC Radio Leeds.
Consigbnia’s final Lemondale show (Photo by Sean Morley)
I am not sure if this brought any curious people from Leeds to Edinburgh for a show at 1.45am but, when we brought the show back for a final time on the last Saturday of the Fringe, we had a packed room.
I have learnt that you do not need to go in the Fringe guide or even flyer to get people in to your show.
Oddly, the time of our show worked in our favour and the location of a great venue was probably what really made it work for us.
Also, having Nathan Willcock in control of our Social Media helped – with such gems as reTweeting the fact that the Consignia Twitter page is now blocked by poet Pam Ayers.
Next year’s Edinburgh Fringe show from Consignia is claimed to be entitled Welcome to Dungeness.
Next year – The Dungeness B nuclear power station in Kent
Dungeness is a piece of coastline in Kent with one working nuclear power station and one abandoned nuclear power station. The Guardian has called Dungeness “the desert of England, though experts observe that, lacking both the dearth of water and the extreme differential in night and day temperatures, it fulfils none of the desert criteria.”
Phil Jarvis says that his next planned solo project is to create “a coffee table book on UK motorway service stations at night time”.
I pointed out to him that there is already a book – Food On The Move: the Extraordinary World of the Motorway Service Area – written by David Lawrence, a “writer, broadcaster, educator and collector who holds a doctorate in motorway service area history, design and culture.”
Phil’s response?
“Looks good, but I would do mine at night time.”
He is a man with a mission and the determination to carry it through.
SO IT GOES - John Fleming's blog 