Edinburgh Fringe, Day 12: How to destroy a comedy career & other news

One thing I always tell performers at the Fringe is: Always perform, even if there is only one person in the audience, because you do not know who that one person might be.

The two examples I endlessly give are …

• Comic Charlie Chuck, at his first Fringe, unknown, was getting very few bums-on-seats. He was thinking of going home. I told him not to. A few days later, he performed to an audience of four… Two of them were TV producers and, as a result, he appeared on two Reeves & Mortimer TV series.
• I turned up to see a show at the old Holyrood Tavern venue. I was 50% of the audience. I was looking for acts to appear on an ITV series. The other audience member turned out to be a BBC producer. The act had gone back to London in despair because they were not getting audiences.

Perhaps nothing would have come of us seeing the act. But maybe it might.

The thing to remember is that you are not necessarily paying out large amounts of money to get money back from audiences’ bums-on-seats. You are also – perhaps mainly – performing in Edinburgh to be seen by showbiz and media people who may change your career and your life.

An empty stage in London (not the Edinburgh venue)

Today, I turned up to see an act. I had seen this English act ‘die’ on several occasions at ‘open mic’ nights in London, performing basically to other open mic acts in ‘dead’ venues. But my intuition told me the act had something that might work and I might see it in a 60-minute show.

The show was in an out-of-the-way venue and, when I arrived, I was the sole audience member.

The performer turned up about three minutes before the billed start time and, two minutes before the billed start time, apologetically cancelled the performance, saying: “It would be awkward just performing to one person.”

About to join me, but slightly delayed, was Nick Awde, playwright, producer, publisher and critic/feature writer for The Stage.

Now, maybe nothing would have come of the two of us seeing the act but, if you perform, there is a possibility, however slight, that something may result. If you do not perform, there is a certainty nothing will result.

Cancelling is never a good idea. Cancelling two minutes before the billed start time is an even more self-destructive decision.

The phrase ‘self-destructive’ is, of course, bound to lead to Lewis Schaffer, the man who, on getting a 5-star review in The Scotsman only half-jokingly said he was depressed because he feared it might destroy his image as a loser.

“Quite unlike anything else in the programme”

This week, he got a good review on the Chortle comedy website, for his show Unopened Letters From My Mother.

The review gave him three stars but started: “Look beyond the star rating here, for this is one of those shows that it’s hard to judge by the standards of a conventional Fringe offering. For some, the fact that this is quite unlike anything else in the programme will be enough to make it a must-see.”

It went on to compare him to Award-winning Kim Noble.

Lewis Schaffer decided not to share a link to the review on his social media.

This morning at Fringe Central, I bumped into American performer Peter Michael Marino. He told me:

“I found a cracked iPhone in the Lounge at the Counting House, wedged between the fireplace and the stage. I put word out to performers in the Lounge and it turned out the iPhone was Lewis Schaffer’s. Before I gave it back to him, I tried to crack the passcode, so I could access his text messages and next year I could do a show called Unread Text Messages From Lewis Schaffer.”

PM Marino – a man with saliva in his mouth

JD who runs Sweet venues told me the Fringe Office had told him that this year’s line-up included 300 more comedy shows than last year. Getting even noticed at the Fringe takes an effort of promotion.

If you don’t promote yourself, you are invisible.

The official Fringe figures are that, this year, there are 53,232 performances of 3,398 shows from 62 countries in over 300 venues, including 686 free shows with comedy making up 35% of the shows, theatre 28% and cabaret 4%.

And that is only the Fringe. There is also the official International Festival, the Jazz & Blues Festival, the Art Festival, Military Tattoo, Book Festival and Television Festival (the last being a private conference rather than public festival, but having a big influence).

People will do anything to get noticed.

Peter Michael Marino’s Show Up follows The Grouchy Club show in the Lounge at The Counting House. Have I mentioned The Grouchy Club before? The increasingly prestigious Grouchy Club hosted by me and Kate Copstick.

Flaunt it. Flaunt it.

This morning the aforementioned Peter Michael Marino told me: “I swapped saliva with Copstick yesterday.”

“I am not even going to ask…” I told him.

I may come back to this story.

Eric has filled Fringe venues under the radar for ten years

I went inside Fringe Central and bumped into Eric, who has been performing Eric’s Tales of the Sea – A Submariner’s Yarn at the Fringe now for ten years.

After a brief conversation, he told me. “I’m off now. I gotta see this werewolf.”

Nothing odd about that at the Fringe.

An hour later, I got a text from him: “The werewolf has just finished. Cracking show. You missed a great experience.”

By this time, I was going into The Hive to see Mark Dean Quinn’s You Win You Lose. A true original, he is a combination of Andy Kaufman, Dadaism, intentional shambles and (I think genuine) emotional self-flagellation. What more could anyone want in an Edinburgh Fringe show?

I had to leave quickly at the end, taking the newly-fried chips with me (don’t ask) to get to Simon Caine’s elevator pitch event at the Apex Hotel in Grassmarket.

‘Reformed Whores’ pitch their show to Robert Peacock etc

He and JD had arranged a collection of Sweet performers to get in a lift (US translation: elevator) with reviewers Nick Awde (The Stage), Robert Peacock (Wee Review) and me and they had to pitch their shows to us in the time it took the lift to travel from the Ground Floor (US translation: 1st floor) to the 5th and back.

Then I saw Phil Ellis Has Been on Ice with unbilled co-star Pat Cahill. Phil’s breakthrough at the Fringe was with Funz & Gamez in 2014 and it has taken this long for the BBC to faff around without giving him a radio or TV show.

Phil is a successful example of one type of comedy. Post-modern originality and regular, gigantic audience Whhoooaaaaahhhs!!!!

Smug Roberts is a successful example of another type of comedy.

Neither is better than the other.

For me, the Smug Roberts show was possibly the most highly anticipated of the Fringe.

In 2006, he did a one-off, one-night performance at the Edinburgh Fringe of a show he called Me Dad’s Dead. And that is what it was about. I wrote a review of the show for the Chortle comedy website and have remembered the performance ever since.

I started the review: “Smug Roberts is a Manchester based Jongleurs-style club comic who might be described, not entirely correctly, as old-school. He is clearly a very professional Northern circuit act who can play to any audience and quickly endear himself to them rapidly.”

The intervening 11 years have not changed that, except that he is even more warm, natural and extraordinarily skilful as a performer.

He is a real person in a pub doing stand-up

Smug is 57 and had a pretty-much full audience at the Three Sisters aka Free Sisters tonight in which, I think, I was the only person over 30. It was an audience of 20-somethings (at least one was 19) and they laughed virtually non-stop for 55 minutes because this is a masterclass in comedy. Autobiographical, fanciful (at home, his dog speaks to him), seemingly effortless comedy within straight, traditional stand-up, including vocal and physical bits of ‘business’.

Smug Roberts should be a national institution.

He is a brilliantly assured comic now incapable, I would suspect, of ever putting a foot wrong with any audience.

His show is called Just Me In a Pub Doing Stand-Up.

That is more than good enough for me.

Wonderful.

Yesterday’s quirky day from The Great Terror to a woman not playing a horse

Nick Awde seemingly sings opera in Edinburgh’s streets

In my opinion, this blog may meander around a bit in its subjects, but one uniting factor is a little bit of quirky detail. And yesterday had some quirkiness woven into it.

I had bumped into Nick Awde the day before.

He is a writer and critic for entertainment industry weekly The Stage, has published books under his Desert Hearts imprint by comedy people Phil Kay and Bob Slayer and he himself co-wrote Pete and Dud: Come Again (about Peter Cook and Dudley Moore) and, solo, wrote Jimmy Savile: The Punch and Judy Show which (as a title) Ellis & Rose infamously performed at the Edinburgh Fringe – though, it has to be said, mostly without much reference to the original script.

Anyway, Nick Awde invited me to go and see the world premiere aka a rehearsed reading of Midnight at the St James’s Theatre yesterday. He told me it was a very serious Azerbaijani play about the Stalinist Terror.

In the last couple of weeks, I have seen the West End musicals Showstoppers! and Bend It Like Beckham – both bright, jolly, uplifting, toe-tapping feasts of singing and dancing and primary colours – so I cannot honesty say that an Azerbaijani play about the Great Terror seemed wildly appetising. Well, it would not be an attractive proposition at any time but – Hey! – I thought – It might be interesting or eccentric or both.

Midnight – Stalin’s Great Terror as a musical

So I went yesterday afternoon and realised I must not have been paying full attention to Nick when he described it to me, because it was a MUSICAL about the Great Terror written by Elchin Ilyas oglu Afandiyev, who has been Deputy Prime Minister of Azerbaijan since 1993.

And it was not eccentric. It was wonderful. It was a serious and very dark musical about The Great Terror which I thought owed a little bit to J.B.Priestley’s An Inspector Calls. Although, I should point out, I have never actually seen An Inspector Calls.

Well, I possibly may have seen it years ago on the London stage but, as is well documented, I have a shit memory – I can’t remember the plot but have a vague memory of a two-storey stage set.

Midnight did not have a two-storey stage set.

Anyway, Nick Awde’s involvement in Midnight is as artistic director of the Aloff Theatre company which staged the play/musical and which is “dedicated to the promotion of new and classic works from East Europe and Central Asia” and which is “currently focusing on the interchange of dramatic resources between Azerbaijan and the UK”.

So Nick Awde, in my eyes, should be described as – and, indeed, is – an Englishman raised in Africa living in France with a Georgian passport involved in an Azerbaijani theatre company who wrote about Jimmy Savile as a Punch & Judy show.

I think that qualifies as quirky.

At St James’s Theatre yesterday (left-right) Hannah Eidinow, Norman Baker, Christopher Richardson and Nick Awde

After the show, Nick told me that one of his relatives had been in the British Army and had been carried onto one of the boats evacuating the troops at Dunkirk in 1940. He had not been wounded. He had been carried on because, like many of the British troops at Dunkirk, he was paralytically drunk.

Retreating through a not-totally-devasted France, they had been taking shelter in abandoned farmhouses, most of which retained their wine cellars. His relative could remember little about the evacuation from Dunkirk except being carried onto a boat.

Inevitably, Nick had invited interesting people along to see the Midnight musical yesterday afternoon.

Notably:

• director Hannah Eidinow, winner of five Scotsman Fringe First Awards and much-associated with Phill Jupitus’ and Phil Nichol‘s regular forays into theatre.

• former Liberal Democrat MP and Minister of State for Crime Prevention at the Home Office, now author and rock singer, Norman Baker who bizarrely, like me, was born in Scotland, partly brought up in Aberdeen and partly brought up in Essex.

• and Christopher Richardson, founder of the Pleasance venues in Edinburgh and London who, it turned out, had previously designed theatres and theatre seats – it was suggested my buttocks may have rested on one or more of his creations – and who, in a previous incarnation as a teacher, had taught Stephen Fry.

Jody Kamali – eternally Spectacular! and eccentric

I then had to rush to see Jody Kamali’s excellent Spectacular! show at the Museum of Comedy (I had already seen it at the Edinburgh Fringe in August). Afterwards, he told me about someone he knew who had a dispute with Rowan Atkinson at a press conference at the Fringe in 1971. As a result, his friend’s show was sold out despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that Rowan (very popular on the Fringe at the time) allegedly stood outside the venue every day screaming to the public NOT to go in and see the show.

Anyway, eventually, in the early hours of this morning, I got home to an e-mail from this blog’s South Coast correspondent Sandra Smith (who seems to be spending less and less time on the South Coast).

The email said:

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I went to the Camden’s People’s Theatre in London this evening to see Lou aka LoUis CYfer, from the Admiral Duncan pub, Soho.

Lou welcomes Sandra into dressing room with open arms (Photograph by Sandra Smith)

She got a Guardian review and is booked for Glastonbury and the Edinburgh Fringe next year. I really enjoyed her one woman show Joan. 

She wove her late grandmother, Catherine, into the piece, complete with reserved empty chair. It was beautifully done.

I got to play a cannon instead of a horse and gave it my all.

My efforts were clearly not appreciated because the audience all laughed.

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As is often the case in this blog, I have no explanation and it seems wiser not to ask.

Buddhism, cats and a missing podcast at the Edinburgh Fringe. And a death.

Simon Caine, comedian and host of the disappearing podcast

So, yesterday, I went to see Simon Caine’s comedy show Buddhism and Cats at The Caves in Edinburgh.

Before the show started, I was standing outside, talking to Simon and to Nick Awde of The Stage newspaper. Simon runs a podcast called Ask The Industry where he (according to the website) interviews the most influential people from the worlds of stand up, comedy, writing, TV and radio.

Despite this, I explained to Nick Awde, Simon had recorded a podcast with me. It took two hours back in January this year.

“His logic was,” I told Nick, “I know how I can win an increasingly prestigious Malcolm Hardee Cunning Stunt Award. I won’t run the podcast until after the Fringe has finished… I did tell him this was not going to be an effective strategy.”

Nick Awde often sings opera in the streets of Edinburgh

“Well,” said Nick Awde, “it’s cunning. Sort of.”

“The actual idea,” explained Simon, “was that I wasn’t going to run it at all. I was just going to get John round to my flat and tell him about my show for an hour…”

“Two hours,” I corrected him.

“… and,” continued Simon, “just keep plugging my show during the recording and then throw the recording away. That was the cunning stunt. But John said the only way it would work as a cunning stunt was if I didn’t have a podcast to begin with and, unfortunately, I did.”

“Have you thrown the recording away yet?” I asked.

“No.”

“What else do you throw away at the Fringe?”

“Food,” replied Simon, “Every year in the past, I’ve thrown food away, because I don’t eat all the food I buy.”

“Why?” I asked.

Simon Caine: Buddhiism, cats leftover food

“Well,” explained Simon, “you buy food with the good intention of eating it but, because you end up going out a lot, you end up eating out and you end up saying Oh, I’ll just have cheesy chips for the next five hours and you don’t eat what you’ve bought.”

“Do you?” I asked. “I buy food when I want to eat something.”

“This year,” said Simon, “I’ve partnered with a homeless food charity in Edinburgh – the Basics Bank – and talked to Alex Petty of the Laughing Horse Free Festival and he’s getting me a spot at the Three Sisters venue and, at the end of the Fringe, comedians who have food left over which they have not yet opened, can come down and donate it to the homeless of Edinburgh.”

A worthy idea but is it just me who fails to understand the problem?

I have never understood the concept, in this day of 24-hour supermarkets and 0700-2300 corner shops, of storing unnecessary amounts of food in a fridge and leaving it there while the sell-by date approaches and passes.

If you want to eat food, buy it. If you don’t want to eat any food yet, don’t buy it.

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Yesterday, I saw:

Irish Steve Bennett, trying but failing to hide his ginger beard

Steve Bennett: Groan Up
Steve Bennett is the English owner and editor of the UK’s premier comedy industry website chortle.co.uk … Another Steve Bennett is an Irish comic with a large ginger beard. I saw the latter. He works. The show works.

The Double Life of Malcolm Drinkwater
Patrick Monahan’s very well plotted and scripted play about a hitman, starring himself, Gary Colman, Lucy Frederick and Archie Maddocks. This could easily be a one-hour TV drama. The slogan of the play is that everyone has secrets. Patrick Monahan is, secretly, a good playwright. He hugged every member of the audience on the way out. He is Patrick Monahan.

Ashley Storrie: A Very Tall Storrie
Ashley first appeared at the Fringe in her own hour-long, very well-reviewed stand-up show aged 13. Then she lost interest. This is her second show. She is now 29. It is mostly about sex and she doesn’t put a foot wrong in the writing and comic performance. A future stage and TV star performer and writer.

Simon Caine: Buddhism and Cats
See above. Despite his inability to post podcasts, the show is very good.

A rare shot of Mark Davison as himself, not as Mr Susie…

Mr Susie: Mr Susie’s Last Chance Cabaret
Mark Davison (aka Mr Susie) was about the only person who came out of this year’s Cowgatehead fiasco with any credibility intact. This show co-stars Jayde Adams and Ali Brice with a musical mash-up (written by Laurence Owen) of Les Miserables and The Wizard of Oz – Les Misard of Oz.

Hanna Winter: Mimi Goes East
I was persuaded to see this because the Cold War story is so interesting: “based on the life of Hanna’s dad, Gabor Varszegi. A Hungarian rockstar. A legend. An absent father in communist Hungary.” This being the Fringe, exactly halfway through, two utterly drunk, very happy and fairly shouty locals came in with the cry: “You’d better be funny!” Hanna carried on, did not go out-of-character, did not lose the attention of the audience, despite the occasionally mouthy female local, and eventually DID lose the drunks, who left without feeling harassed. No mean feat. A great credit to her performance skills.

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This morning, I got an e-mail from performer Martin Soan back in London:

Jonty Wright.
Sad to hear Greatest Show on Legs member and Reg Rabbit and the Fast Breeders band member has passed away.

So it goes.

What is the point of professional critics? Would airheaded amateurs be better?

Writer Nick Awde talking from France on Skype this morning

Yesterday, I got a message from writer Nick Awde in France asking if I wanted to be interviewed because, he said, “it might give you a blog and might give me a half page feature”.

So I Skyped him this morning.

“I’m now editor on a new international literary magazine called Font,” Nick told me. “I thought I’d write something about critics, but there aren’t really such things as literary critics – just people reviewing their mates’ books – so I thought I’d talk to you, given your overview of people doing creative things in general, and then we’ve both got something. You’ve got a blog. I’ve got a piece….”

“Well,” I said, “there’s the argument that Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. And those who can’t teach, become critics. Performers at the Edinburgh Fringe are always complaining about inexperienced critics reviewing their shows. Bob Slayer talked to one comedy critic this year who had never heard of Morecambe & Wise – not just never seen them, but never heard of them. I guess it’s happening because more and more – to save money – newspapers are not having staff critics.”

“The Independent on Sunday,” Nick reminded me, “recently re-launched, with all of its staff arts writers sacked.”

“And some newspapers,” I said, “have now started using readers who write or Tweet in with their opinions. It’s ironic that newspapers are sacking staff critics to save money because, if you’re a newspaper owner, you should be building up reviewers as personalities.

“As far as I understand it, with The Times and other newspapers which are behind paywalls, one of the attractions to the paying public is not that they can read news on the website – you can get that 24-hours-a-day on TV – The attraction is you can read features written by known columnists.

“So presumably if you have a critic whose opinions you trust – it used to be Dilys Powell on British cinema or Clive Barnes on the New York theatre scene and now maybe it’s Bruce Dessau on London comedy and Kate Copstick on Edinburgh comedy – if you have an ongoing, named, trusted critic, then that’s going to increase your brand awareness and get more punters reading your product.

“The counter-argument is that the audience is not made up of people who have been going to comedy shows four times a week for the last 15 years. You read reviews to decide whether or not to go to a show or a film or to buy a book. Do you actually want to read reviews written by people you actually share nothing with – they live in Islington in three-storey Georgian houses – or do you want to hear the views of the sort of people you might actually go to the performance with?

“Why are professional critics writing reviews? Is it because they want to sound very knowledgable and refer to arcane events 35 years ago at the London Palladium when they should be telling you I thought this new show was quite good and you should go? Maybe the more experienced critics get, the more out-of-touch they get with the people they’re writing for.

“The comedy audience is mostly maybe between 19 and 30. So maybe you want those sort of people writing reviews.

“The argument against that is you will then have 1,000 opinions by people who may not know what the hell they’re talking about and may actually just be friends of the performer who are ‘bigging’ him or her up.

“I would argue that having ongoing, paid, Big Name critics is better but it IS arguable. You could equally argue that having 100 different people will average out to what the punter may like or not like.”

“Also, in Britain,” said Nick, “we’ve got different words. We’ve got ‘critic’, ‘reviewer’, ‘pundit’.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “When people talk about critics, they’re mostly talking about reviewers. There are very few critics who analyse things.”

“We don’t like that any more, do we?” asked Nick.

Jerry Lewis – hailed as a true comedy genius in France

“Well, that’s too French for us,” I said. “It’s too intellectual. The British are suspicious of intellectualising. If someone writes a critique – which is a French word – it’s viewed as someone being up their own arse. Whereas a ‘reviewer’ is just someone saying Oh, this is quite good. The British don’t like intellectualising… Having said that, yesterday I went to a lecture on The Science of Laughter at University College, London. And, this afternoon, I’m going to the launch of the Centre For Comedy Studies Research at Brunel University. What are critics like in France?”

“They still have a big newspaper industry here,” said Nick, “and you can have about four pages of daily opinions and two pages of that you can give over to your theatre critic, because he will work in a mention of the President’s latest hairstyle or a politician’s toilet habits. This is permitted… plus they all fucking know their philosophy. So they just throw that into it. They can do it. Whereas in Britain, as we all know, no-one will pay you to do that. Our ‘opinion pieces’ are people talking about the size of Katie Price’s tits or the width of her latest autobiography.”

“This interview,” I asked, “is possibly going to appear where?”

“In Font magazine,” said Nick. “It’s a literary magazine but really about the Arts in general – from a UK perspective but on what the rest of the world are doing.”

“Does Font have a website?” I asked.

“It should be up by the end of this week, I think,” said Nick, “at www.fontmagazine.org.”

“But I have a much bigger project called Open Theatres, which I’ve been working on for about five years. It would work for comedy or anything. You have a sort of shop window website in which everyone puts up what they do with their contact details and they just update it occasionally. It’s not Facebook, it’s not pretending to be any of that. There’s no privacy, no chats but if someone gets a mention in your blog, for example, they can add a link. It’s just that, on one site, you find all of it. For international theatre, there’s nothing like that out there. For international comedy and for the book world, there’s nothing like that out there.

“You can be a performer, a pundit, a critic, a production company, a physical venue and you just put everything up there. The thing to do is to work out the search patterns for it.”

“Presumably,” I said, “you don’t want me to mention that, though, because someone may steal the idea.”

“Well,” replied Nick, “I’ve been telling everyone about it and no-one’s done it so far, because it needs someone insane like you or me or Bob Slayer to do it.”

Comedian Phil Kay’s crowdfunded anarchic autobiography was inspired by rock bands and British holiday camps

You could be forgiven for thinking that being the creator of new Edinburgh Fringe venue Bob’s Bookshop must have gone to comedian Bob Slayer’s head.

Yesterday, he began a Kickstarter crowdfinding campaign to publish comedian Phil Kay’s autobiography.

There are 17 levels of pledges running from £5 (for which you get an eBook of the opus) through £25 (you get a signed, numbered  and personalised hardback copy with a doodle and note from Phil in the front and your name printed in the book itself) up to £1,001 (for which you can get pretty much whatever you want to get).

The Kickstarter campaign aims to raise £3,333 and will run until 7.00pm UK time on 7th July – that is, 7 on the 7th of the 7th.

The book will be published on 1st August and be on sale in Bob’s Bookshop in Edinburgh and elsewhere

“So,” I said to Bob when I met him, “Phil Kay’s never written a book and you know nothing about publishing.”

“Well,” said Bob “you COULD start from that angle. But I do know about putting out records and we are working with Nick Awde who you blogged about a few days ago and who does know a lot about publishing through his Desert Hearts and Bennett & Bloom publishing companies.”

“So Phil Kay’s book will be published by…?” I asked.

Bob Slayer – He aims to get a head in publishing

“We will do it as a Heroes imprint because our stage shows are promoted as Heroes of Comedy/Heroes of Fringe,” Bob told me. “Part of the inspiration for doing the Heroes shows was that, in 2009, I saw Phil Kay’s show at the Fringe.”

“When last heard of,” I pointed out, “you were writing your own book about your exploits in Australia last year with Gary The Goat.”

“I was trying to finish my books,” said Bob, “but I got very busy doing other things and happened to mention to Phil Kay that I was chatting to Nick Awde about putting out books by comedians and he said Funny you should say that; I’ve just sacked my literary agent because they looked at what I’d done and asked if I could make it more coherent. What the agent was really saying was could Phil follow the agent’s idea of coherence.”

In the Kickstarter pitch, Phil Kay says: “Books are expressions of newness, of self. I am doing what I consider coherent.”

Book is not normal. Nor is its author. Wholly Viable Phil Kay

“This is not a normal biography,” Bob told me. “It’s a collection of wonderful stories with Phil’s life philosophy in it. Like he says: “Imagine what you’d get up to if your job was telling tales of what you’d been getting up to… What would a man do with the blessing to do anything and be paid to retell it..?

“In the book, he talks about how, if he’s on the way to any gig, it has the potential to be the best gig in the world.

“If you stick to a script, you can only be as good as that script is. You are saving yourself from being worse than that script is; you will give an adequate performance. But, if you have a fluidity in what you are performing, you have got the potential for that gig to be the best gig in the world, because there’s no upper limit.”

A Phil Kay show – blink and you’ll very likely miss something

“Well, Phil’s gigs are never less than unique and very interesting,” I said.

“Everyone has a story about Phil,” enthused Bob. “The follow-up book might be a compilation of all the people who have wonderful Phil Kay stories. Quite a bit of the book was written when Phil Kay was sharing accommodation with Phil Nichol.”

“Bloody hell!” I said. “That must have been an interesting slice of life.”

“Doing books this way – independently,” explained Bob, “is like my Heroes venue at the Edinburgh Fringe. We cut out the middle man and put out things which are truly creative and original. It’s more like a collective.

“I used to work in the music industry and saw it go through a massive change – and change was an opportunity for different people to come along and do things differently.

“A friend of mine was a roadie for Marillion, a then long-forgotten band who were still touring, still putting out albums and selling maybe 100,000 copies and they, really, were the first band to do crowdfunding. Their record sales were going down, but they still had this hardcore fanbase who would organise themselves on a messageboard.

Marillion in 2007 owed some of their renewed success to fans

“There were a bunch of American fans saying: Why don’t you come to America? Marillion told them: We can’t get the tour support. We can’t afford to. And the fans said: Well, if we can cover the cost, would you come? And Marillion went: Well, yes, of course, but…

“So these fans emailed round their usergroup – remember this is back around 1999 or 2000 – and they raised enough money to fly the band over. The tour got put together and the band decided to record a live album during the tour to give to all the people who had paid in advance. That was the start of Marillion crowdfunding and the fans said: What can we do to help you next?

“So Marillion said: Right. Instead of haggling with a record label over budgets, will you help to fund our next album?

“I certainly know that, with their second crowdfunded album, they raised half a million pounds and a single from the album went Top Ten in the UK charts.

“They now run Marillion weekenders at Pontins Holiday Camps. They take them over completely and it becomes Marillion’s holiday camp for the weekend. They play entire albums live and do requests.

“All Tomorrow’s Parties were the first people to do that: to realise what a great place to do a festival a holiday camp is, with everybody totally into the same thing.

“With Marillion, it wasn’t just about getting money. It was about finding people who went: Wow! We’ve given ourselves the chance to see Marillion live!

“That lead to crowdfunding for other bands and Amanda Palmer and so on and Radiohead doing their own thing.

Bob Slayer managed Electric Eel Shock

“I suggested crowdfunding to a Japanese band I was managing – Electric Eel Shock – and they said: Oh, it’s OK for Marillion: they’ve already got a fanbase. But then their record label started to really mess us about and I needed to raise £10,000 in two weeks to get us out of this record deal and I just emailed the fans, told them why we needed the money and I said: I need 100 fans to give £100 and you’ll be on the Electric Eel Shock guestlist for life. And we got the money straight away.

“After that, I did other crowdfunding and advised on Public Enemy’s crowdfunding.

“In comedy, we’ve seen similar things with Louis CK and Bo Burnham. Look what Paul Foot’s doing now.

Paul Foot shares secret gigs with his fans

“He’s doing his Secret Gigs, which is wonderful for just connecting with his audience, because you can only go to the gigs if you’ve already been to a previous Paul Foot gig. He says: We don’t want people in here unless they are confirmed Paul Foot fans. It takes half an hour to get into the venue because Paul chats to everybody and processes them for five minutes and then seats them and asks them what they’ve been up to. And fans get to know each other: Oh. How many times have you seen him? Those things are three hours of Paul Foot: they are the equivalent of the Marillion weekender.

“When we put Electric Eel Shock fans on the guestlist for life, the motivation was just to get immediate money, but the result was much more than that. Instead of coming to see them once, when they did a ten-day gig of the UK, people would say to each other: How many gigs have you been to? How many COUNTRIES have you been to to see them?

“Their Ichiban Fan – Number One Fan – was the first fan to see them on four continents and he eventually became their tour manager.”

“And the title of Phil Kay’s book?” I asked.

“The Wholly Viable,” said Bob. “And I know from experience that it is.”

Jimmy Savile writer in tabloid storm labels my blog as ‘revolutionary’ and drunken UK comic Slayer as ‘political’

Nick Awde as he wants to be seen on his Facebook page

Writer Nick Awde wanted to interview me for a book he is currently writing.

UK comedian and Edinburgh Fringe venue runner Bob Slayer told me that Nick had received a death threat because he has written a play called Jimmy Savile: The Punch and Judy Show for the upcoming Fringe in August. The truth is more complicated than that. And it is not the first time he has been threatened.

“I did an anthology on Women in Islam and got at least one death threat out of that.,” Nick told me this morning, when I Skyped him at his home in Paris.

“So are you actually doing a physical Punch & Judy show in Edinburgh?” I asked.

“No,” he told me. “No puppets. No-one wants to put their hand up Jimmy Savile.”

“So how are you doing it?” I asked.

“It will be live actors,” Nick explained, “playing all the characters in a Punch & Judy way.”

“Dressed as Punch & Judy?” I asked.

“Still don’t know,” said Nick. “Budgetry constraints.”

“Will you be making a guest appearance in the show at Edinburgh?” I asked.

Nick laughed: “What? So the audience can beat the crap out of me? No.”

“You could be the policemen or the crocodile,” I suggested.

“Well, trying to get the crocodile into it is difficult. I don’t think there were any crocodiles supporting Jimmy Savile although, God knows, everyone was in on it. Maybe he was given the keys to the zoos as well.

Jimmy Savile: The Punch and Judy Show

“Jimmy Savile was there because Society put him there and Society’s problem after his death is trying to deal with the fact that we all put him there, especially all the pillars of Society – but we support the pillars. We all looked at him and thought There’s a creepy old man and probably a lot of people did think There’s a dirty old man. But we still went along with it.”

“So why Punch & Judy?” I asked.

“We take our children – we encourage our children,” explained Nick, “to go see Punch & Judy like we did as children and our parents and parents’ parents did before them. We go off and we laugh and joke and are wowed and throw money at the puppet master afterwards… but we are watching a man who is a wife-beater, a child-killer and who also takes on every single pillar of Society. Even if he does get beaten up by them, he ends up beating them up or avoiding them or avoiding the issue entirely. This is Jimmy Savile. He did exactly the same thing. He bullied his way through Society.”

“And,” I said, “the press reaction to the show’s imminent staging has been what?”

“The tabloid reaction so far is interesting,” said Nick. “Oh! What about the victims? they ask. Well, in fact, this format avoids the victims. The format of Punch & Judy is a great way to avoid anything to do with the victims. The match is perfect. You concentrate on Jimmy Savile and his dealings with Society.”

“But it’s not a puppet show,” I double-checked.

“Everyone said they did not want to do it as a puppet show,” said Nick. “I think it should be done as a puppet show but I don’t have any money to put it on because – guess what? – I won’t personally profit from the show. So I can’t be accused of trying to cash in.”

“So the tabloids at least can’t accuse you of that,” I said.

Nick Awde talking to me from Paris this morning, via Skype

“The tabloids who are going to come gunning for me,” said Nick, “indeed gunning for anyone who wants to try and address things that they don’t want to be addressed or which they don’t want to be addressed in their way… These are the same tabloids who are sitting on the files which they have on people like Jimmy Savile and a lot of other people in Society, a lot of whom are big names, who are still alive and still doing it.”

“You mean in showbiz or politics?” I asked.

“Everything,” said Nick. “There’s no conspiracy about it. You and I, we understand this. We understand why they do it. Like me, I think you are very much up for the independence of the press. We don’t want the government being able to force people to hand over things like the Obama government recently did to Associated Press in America.

“I’ve seen these files. Anyone who’s worked for a long time on national newspapers will have come across a file somewhere and it’s not Da Vinci Code stuff. It makes perfect common sense that people will come to a newspaper for whatever reason. Some will come wanting money. Some will come because the police or institutions have put them down and they will go to a newspaper and say Please help me. It could be whistleblowers or victims themselves. In this case, it’s child abuse or institutionalised child abuse.

“The newspapers put it on record. They think about whether they have enough to publish and also whether it’s a juicy-enough story. Very rarely do they hand the files over to PC Plod because you never know… You could use it one day for one reason or another.”

“And these,” I said, “are the same tabloids who have been attacking your upcoming play without having seen it.”

“Yes,” said Nick, “these are the same tabloids who’ve been sitting on these documents and possibly also have files on a lot of victims – a lot more than we think – accumulated over the years. These are the same ones who want to criticise someone for trying to address Jimmy Savile’s relationship with the institutions which kept him in power for sixty years.”

“Surely,” I said, “being attacked by the tabloids is great because it’s publicity for your play?”

“Sure,” said Nick. “But incitement to violence is something different.”

“Who was inciting violence?” I asked.

“The Daily Star,” he replied and held up a double-page spread headlined:

Nick holds up Daily Star double spread for me this morning

SICK NICK DESERVES A PUNCH FOR SAVILE PLAY

Nick has written, edited or illustrated more than 50 books.

He has freelanced as a feature writer and critic for The Stage for more than twenty years, as well as being a political journalist and, more recently, a book publisher.

“What sort of books do you publish?” I asked him this morning.

Things like phrasebooks for non-European languages spoken in countries where people have been generally fucked around by things like oil politics,” he replied. “Places where it’s the ordinary people who lose out, like Chechnya, Somalia, Armenia.”

“So how does a Chechen-Somali phrasebook publisher end up with a drunken ne’er-do-well like comedian Bob Slayer?” I asked.

Nick Awde + Bob Slayer being piratical rather than political

“Because I think he’s very political in what he does,” said Nick.

“Is he?” I asked, incredulous. “This presumably is political with a small pee?”

“Oh yes,” said Nick. “But I’m political with a small ‘p’ too. I think Bob’s Alternative Fringe is extraordinarily political in terms of what it is. It evolves, whereas things like the Free Fringe don’t evolve.

“I write in theatre very much as a political thing, because theatre really gives people a voice. You know that. The way you write about comedy and report on comedy in your blog – not just the young blood that’s coming up, but the old revolutionaries and all the rest of it. I think you can see the effect the revolutionary side of live comedy has had on people over the years.”

“Well, that’ll go straight onto my publicity,” I said. “John Fleming – Revolutionary. I can see it up in lights now.”

“I really do believe it,” insisted Nick.

“I’m all for anything provided there are knob gags in it,” I said.

“I don’t think there will be knob gags in Jimmy Savile: The Punch and Judy Show,” said Nick, “unless there might be a knob gag which would have existed in a real Punch & Judy show.”

Daily Express – ‘Outrage’

“Well, rude bits are part of traditional satire,” I said.

“Yes,” agreed Nick. “Tits, knobs, poo, crap, dicks and farting. In satire, you are literally throwing all that at the people at the top and telling them: You are the same as us! It’s a bit of a rocky road to follow – you will be excoriated by all sides at some points – but the people who have done it well have made people think. People time and time again quote satire.”

“And I gather your Jimmy Savile show is going to be satire,” I said.

“Obviously,” said Nick, “you can’t do the hardcore stuff on television or radio but, live on stage, there can be far more hard-hitting stuff.”

Comedian Bob Slayer swooped on by armed response police unit in London

Critic Nick Awde (left) and Bob Slayer (with spoon) yesterday

Yesterday, I had a meal with comedian Bob Slayer and Nick Awde, theatre critic and feature writer for theatrical trade paper The Stage and head of their Edinburgh Festival reviewing team.

In my blog yesterday, I mentioned that I had intended the previous night to go to the Alternative Comedy Memorial Society gig at the Lion pub in King’s Cross… but I got distracted talking to Comedy Cafe owner Noel Faulkner and stayed to see a show at his venue instead.

It turned out that, unknown to me, Bob Slayer had been performing at the Alternative Comedy Memorial Society show.

“I felt a bit old during that gig,” he told me yesterday. “They were a young audience, but it went down well. So I felt Oh! I’m not too old for this after all!

“After the show, outside in the street at King’s Cross, these youngsters are going We liked you! and somebody asked me why I had a guitar case when I hadn’t played a guitar in my act and I told them I have long props.

“He said Can I see one of your long props?

“So I got out my extendable fishing rod, which has a stuffed rubber glove on the end, and these youngsters are laughing at my hand. Just then some pedestrians were crossing the road and I went Woooh! and cast my fishing rod so the hand shot out, as if to grab them.

“The oncoming traffic was a little way away but, as soon as I did it, I saw the lead car was a police Land Rover type thing which immediately pulled over while I’m winding my fishing rod back in and it was an Armed Response Unit. I had a big stuffed hand on my fishing rod and they had their arms.

“A policeman who was much younger than me came over and just looked me up and down. All he said was How old are you? very disparagingly. I told him and said Sorree! and they drove off.

“Did you see how big his weapon was?” I asked.

“I think the kids saw it, but we wasn’t waving it about. I don’t think they sit around in their cars holding big Dirty Harry guns and Kalashnikovs,” said Bob.

“How old are you?” asked Nick Awde.

“Older than that policemen,” said Bob evasively. “When I told him my age, he went very polite and said Oh, very sorry to trouble you, sir.”

“He said that?” I asked.

“No,” laughed Bob. “If anything, he looked down on me even more.”

“Did you call him a Pleb?” asked Nick.

“No,” said Bob, “I didn’t call him a Pleb because I don’t think he was, really. He was a dickhead but he was not a Pleb.”

“I remember when the IRA set off a bomb near the NatWest Tower and the Stock Exchange,” said Nick, “I went down with a friend because it was very symbolic and we were like knee-deep in glass and debris, picking our way through it. And we started picking up pieces of glass on the grounds that was a piece of London history. It would eventually be found by archaeologists one day, but we thought we’d find it immediately and take it off to the Museum of London.

“So this policeman comes over and says What are you doing?

“And we say: We’re just picking up this stuff.

“And he says: How old are you? so obviously that’s an opening gambit they have.

“Is it illegal? we asked him and he said No so we said Fine and carried on picking up things and he walked off.”

“How illegal can it be to use a fishing rod in King’s Cross?” asked Bob. “As soon as they say How old are you? maybe you should say Fuck you, rozzer! and there’s nothing they can do about it. Well, probably they can arrest you for saying Fuck you, rozzer!”

“I did know a barrister,” said Nick,” who swore blind – and other people have said this before – that, if you do get nicked, the police always have to take down exactly what you say in their notes, so you should say: Alright, guv. It’s a fair cop, guv, and no mistake and then, in court, you get your barrister to ask the policeman And what did my client say to you when you arrested him?

“The Plod has to go to his notebook and say Alright, guv. It’s a fair cop, guv, and no mistake and it instantly demolishes their credibility in the court and you get off.”

“You should try it next time,” I told Bob.

“I was once,” said Nick, “walking around the West End with a black bin bag and this group of American tourists came up to me in Charing Cross and asked What’s in the bin bag? and they said Can we see? and I said It’ll cost you ten pence to have a look.

“They paid me ten pence, I opened it up…”

“And?” I asked.

“Two dead foxes in my bag,” said Nick.

“Why?” I asked.

“That’s another story,” he replied.

“That’s another story,” I said to Bob.

“Why” said Bob to me, “ would he have two dead foxes in a bag?”

“Well,” I said, “you wouldn’t have two live foxes in a bag. It would be ridiculous to walk round the West End with two live foxes in a bag.”

“And they’d get out,” added Bob. “I saw two foxes trotting along the street in Walthamstow the other day. Two together. I don’t think I’ve ever seem that before. You always see them alone. I think if I’d followed them, I could have seen them have sex.”

“Is there some line here about a fox being out of the question?” I asked.

“No,” said Bob. “But I would like it to be known that I met two people at the gig last night. One was a man called Andy, who ran customer service for gay chat lines, and his friend was an Eton & Cambridge educated sub-editor at the Sun newspaper. They will be the basis of my Edinburgh Fringe show next year.”

I took this with a pinch of salt.

When I got home, there was an e-mail waiting for me from Noel Faulkner of the Comedy Cafe.

“When we were speaking about the Edinburgh Fringe yesterday,” it said, “I forgot to mention that I am trying to rent a cruise ship to tie up in Portobello harbour and rent out accommodation to all the comics and run two double decker buses back and forth and do charity gigs in the ship’s ballroom. I will be dressed in my full admiral’s uniform with an all-girl crew.”