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.

Simon Caine seeks people to literally do elevator pitches for their comedy shows

Simon Caine – Glass half full or half empty?

Comic Simon Caine runs the Ask The Industry Podcast and two Facebook groups for comedy performers – The Comedy Collective and the Edinburgh Fringe Performer Collective.

“You are also doing this lift thing,” I said. “Or this elevator thing, for American readers.”

“It’s a concept,” he replied.

“That sounds like something in a Woody Allen film,” I told him. “A concept that could become a project that could become a…”

This is not Simon but could well be?

“I got a message the other day,” Simon said. “Out of the blue. No context. A message from a girl who saw me in Derby last year. It said: SAW THIS AND THOUGHT OF YOU… It was just an image of Woody Allen with a quote: Life is full of loneliness, misery, suffering and unhappiness. How good is that? She had seen that and thought of me.”

“What’s your Fringe show called this year?” I asked.

“Laughter Is The Best Placebo. The strapline for the show is that my life is a constant search for emotional electrical outlets – as in I’m always charging my phone and always trying to project my emotions onto other people. The opening line of the show is that the show is an attempt to work out whether comedy has improved my life or immeasurably ruined it.”

“Which is it?” I asked.

“Definitely the latter.”

“Your fan in Derbyshire is going to love it.”

“It’s on at the Sweet Grassmarket venue, 5.00pm ever day except Wednesdays, when I get rudely awoken by the dustman.”

“I have no idea what that means,” I said, “but we will get to the rubbish later… Your elevator pitch idea is in the same venue.”

The Edinburgh Fringe Apex elevator pitch lift

“Yes. In Apex, the really posh hotel in Grassmarket. They have two lifts and they’re allowing us to commandeer one of them for a couple of hours each day on the 14th and 15th of August.

“A reviewer will get in the lift with a performer, travel 3 or 4 floors and he/she has that amount of time to pitch their show to the reviewer.

“They can do anything they want as long as they don’t touch the reviewer. They can bring in props, do a little skit, sing a song – whatever. Anything they want. Then, at the chosen floor, they get out, a new act gets in and they have the same number of floors to pitch their show.”

“So,” I said, “it literally IS an elevator pitch.”

“Yes, the idea is you get through quite a lot of pitches and the reviewer is left bilious.”

“What time of day is this?”

The performance space for the elevator pitch

“In the afternoon, I think, but we can do it at any point in the day when the reviewers are free. Kate Copstick said she might do it after your Grouchy Club show.”

“So,” I said, “even though a review is not guaranteed, if the pitch is good enough, a reviewer may come and see the show.”

“It’s an opportunity for performers who can’t afford PR,” said Simon.

“Comics at the Fringe can barely afford food,” I said, “which brings us neatly to rubbish. At the end of the Fringe, you are collecting left-over food.”

“Yes,” said Simon, “it’s a food bank collection for the homeless of Edinburgh. If you’re anything like me, you buy food for your flat but, at the very end of the Fringe, there will be some left over. So, instead of throwing it away, you can give it to people who need it much more than you ever did. People you have probably passed several times during the Fringe and not given anything to, like I don’t.

An Edinburgh street during the Fringe – amid the showbiz

“The first two years of doing it, I worked with a charity and wrongly assumed they would be run the same way as the food bank charities in London. It turned out they weren’t.

“With the one I was working with, I found out the people could only go three times a year and had to bring bank statements to prove they were too poor to have enough food.

“And it turned out they were a for-profit food bank, which didn’t make any sense to me.

“Now I have moved over to a thing called The Basics Bank, who only accept food that is not opened, and the Granton Community Orchard Garden. And there’s a third charity, The Homeless Period, who help redistribute hygiene products to women because, obviously, tampons and sanitary towels are not the cheapest things in the world and, if you are broke and living on the street, you don’t necessarily have the money to afford them every month.”

“Shouldn’t,” I suggested, “the period charity get together with the food charity and they can make black puddings?”

“I’m not giving you a reaction to that in case you use it,” replied Simon.

‘Queer As Jokes’ – The new LGBT comedy night starting this weekend

Simon Caine, begetter of Queer As Jokes night

So, this Sunday, I am going to a new monthly LGBT comedy night – Queer As Jokes – at Angel Comedy’s Bill Murray venue in London. The evening is being organised by Simon Caine, who runs the comedy industry Facebook group The Comedy Collective and the interview-based Ask The Industry Podcast.

“You are full of ideas and projects,” I told him. “What do you do in your ‘day job’?”

“It is probably,” he told me, “60% or 70% writing jokes for brands for Twitter and Facebook and then 15% I do stuff for clubs and stuff – helping them out with their social media – helping them, basically, build a community around what they’re doing.”

“Do you work from home?” I asked.

“It depends on the job,” he told me, “but I have an office at home. I have psychological problems which mean I am so used to living in one room that I have put the bed in the kitchen along with a cupboard where I keep my stuff in. It’s a one-bedroom flat. So, in the room that is meant to be a bedroom, I have put a desk in the middle and do my work in there.”

“Why?” I asked.

Simon edits his prestigious Ask The Industry podcast at home

“I just like having all my stuff in one room so, when I cross the corridor, I feel like I am travelling to work. A girl who came there was a little taken aback.

“She asked me Why have you put your bed in the kitchen? and I told her Because I like all my stuff in one room. She asked me: Doesn’t that get confusing? I told her: It’s more comfortable for me. Why would it be confusing?”

“Does this one-room thing,” I asked, “go back to your student days?”

“Well,” Simon told me, “I lived at home until I was at university. I lived in one room at uni and then I moved back to my parents’ house and, when I moved in with my girlfriend, we lived in one of the rooms in a one-bedroom flat because her mum was living in the living room… It’s a long story… And then I moved back to my parents’ place and then I moved out and now I just like being in one room. I’m sure I will slowly edge back into having a bedroom separately.”

“Anyway,” I said, “why are you starting an LGBT night? You are not gay. What do you know about such things?”

“I am,” he explained, “running it with Tom Mayhew, the gay comedian. I put myself down as an ally for LGBT stuff but, no, I can’t properly relate to it, cos I’m not in that and never really been in that. For a long time, I was pansexual.”

“You are attracted to woodland creatures and play a flute?” (Photo by Viktoria DeRoy)

I asked: “You are attracted to woodland creatures and play a flute?”

“No,” Simon said, “you are attracted to someone personality-wise. You can see their sexual attractiveness but you very rarely find them sexually appealing until you’ve got to know them.

“That was how I defined my sexuality for about four or five years but, in the last three months of last year, I met two girls who I immediately found sexually appealing which was weird, because I hadn’t found that for ages. So that was interesting. I am straight, but it’s kinda complicated. I find men attractive, but I’ve never found them sexually appealing. It’s kinda weird like that.”

I asked: “You mean you find men aesthetically attractive?”

“Yeah. Yeah. I dunno. I’ve got a weird relationship with my gender at the moment. I’ve got a lot of polyamorous friends and a lot of kink friends and all of them say regular comedy nights are very heteronormative and very geared towards straight people.”

“So,” I asked, “that is why you’re starting this monthly LGBT night?”

Simon’s comedy at the Edinburgh Fringe

“It’s more because I realised I was bored of the comedy circuit. It’s awful at the moment. There are a lot of straight white men talking about Tinder and their failed dating lives. I’ve got a lot of friends who are in LGBT or another minority group who don’t get booked as often as they maybe should. Why not? And does it mean they don’t get to develop as much as other acts who get more stage time?… How many clubs have you been to in the last two weeks where they’ve had a person overtly talking about their sexuality who wasn’t straight? I just thought I would put on a new gig where I would actively look for new voices I had not heard.”

“But,” I suggested, “is having gay people talking about being gay in an LGBT night not restricting them in their own niche pigeonhole?”

“Everyone,” suggested Simon, “gets pigeonholed at some point when they get to a certain level.”

“So,” I said, “you are going to run these Sunday night LGBT shows every month?”

“We are going to do the first four monthly nights as a charity thing and then, after that, depending on how it goes, we would run them as a monthly pro gig (i.e. paying the acts).”

“They are themed?” I asked.

“Yes. The themes we have down for the four shows are… January – New Years… February – Anti-Valentines… March – Anti Steak and Blowjob Day… And, for April, we will probably do April Fools.”

“Anti steak and blowjobs?” I asked.

Simon Caine strikes me as a glass half full man

“Yes,” said Simon. “Some men got together and said they hated Valentine’s Day because it was ‘for women’ and they wanted ‘a day for men’ so they started a steakandblowjobs website for men. Ours would be an Anti Steak & Blowjob Day night.”

“Ah,” I said. “And, given that you are always full of new ideas…beyond the monthly Queer As Jokes nights… any other projects?”

“I have,” said Simon, “briefly talked to a friend of mine – a black comedian – about starting a black gig later in the year. Obviously, I would not be performing in that.”

“You could black up?” I suggested.

“No,” said Simon.

Do some Edinburgh Fringe acts screw themselves by advertising their shows?

Street art at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2012 probably told a home truth beyond the prevailing weather

Yesterday, I took part in a recording by Simon Caine, he of the Ask The Industry podcast. It is online HERE.

It was nominally about comedy awards at the Edinburgh Fringe and the participants were Steve Bennett (Chortle Student Awards), Kate Copstick (Malcolm Hardees and formerly Perriers), Bruce Dessau (Malcolm Hardees and formerly Perriers), Barry Ferns (the Barrys), Hils Jago (the Amused Mooses) and me (the Malcolm Hardees).

It turned into a discussion of the Edinburgh Fringe in general and I did not contribute much, but one thing I did mention was the giant show posters which appear all over Edinburgh during August. My point was this…

Sometimes in London you see massive posters in prime roadside sites and on the tube promoting TV programmes.

These are NOT paid for from the budget of the TV station’s Promotion Dept which publicises programmes. They are paid for by the TV station’s Marketing Dept which is responsible for selling the station itself to advertisers.

The primary object of these ads is NOT to increase the audience of the TV show being advertised. The object of these posters is to let advertisers know that the TV station is a successful, confident, currently buzzing one and that they are prepared to spend big money on promoting their programmes in prime sites and that, therefore, the station itself is a good place for an advertising agency to pay for positioning ads for their clients.

The target audience is not the punters. It is the advertising industry itself.

In the same way, massive street ads at the Edinburgh Fringe promoting shows are pretty certainly not a financially sensible way to get extra bums-on-seats.

Balancing the cost of the advertising against the number of extra punters likely to buy tickets, these massive ads probably each lose the act a lot of money.

These big ads have two main purposes. One is to say to the media – press, TV and radio – that some promoter, manager or agency has sufficient confidence in this particular act that they are prepared to splash out on this big publicity. And, more important, these posters show which promoters, managers or agencies are the alpha males in the Fringe jungle.

In effect, the promoters, managers or agencies tell their acts that these giant ads will ‘big up’ both them and their show. But, in fact, the acts (because the performers are the ones actually paying) are forking out to publicise and ‘big up’ their own promoters, managers and agents.

There may be collateral publicity for the acts, but it makes no financial sense in terms of getting bums-on-seats for their shows.

A lesson in life at the Edinburgh Fringe.

You get screwed from all angles.

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.

How do you win an increasingly prestigious Cunning Stunt Award?

The Malcolm Hardee Awards await collection near Edinburgh

Every August at the Edinburgh Fringe, I give away three increasingly prestigious Malcolm Hardee Comedy Awards in memory of the godfather of British alternative comedy. One of these is a Cunning Stunt Award for the best stunt publicising a Fringe show or act.

And every year, around this time, people ask me for the definition of Cunning.

Well, non-cunning stunts are easy to think up. You can walk up and down the High Street in Edinburgh wearing a read nose and handing out flyers.

That is a stunt but is in no way cunning.

Kate Talbot’s increasingly prestigious Cunning Stunt Award

Last year, the Cunning Stunt Award went to comedian Christian Talbot and his 12 year-old daughter Kate.

Cute Kate would wander around the streets outside Christian’s venue looking sad and distraught, go up to strangers and say plaintively: “Have you seen my daddy?”

When they replied in the negative, she would tell them: “Well, you should, because Kate Copstick of The Scotsman says he’s an engaging performer” and give them a flyer.

Lewis Schaffer – a man not unused to cunning publicity stunts

In 2009 – a year when Perrier stopped sponsoring some other less increasingly prestigious awards – Lewis Schaffer won the Cunning Stunt Award for a fake press release which fooled several publications into printing stories (which they believed) saying he was taking over sponsorship of the awards for £99 and was re-naming them The Lewies. This resulted in a threat of legal action from the awards’ organiser and his agent sacked him. But he did win the Cunning Stunt Award, so it wasn’t all gloom and doom..

The Award started in 2008 when performer Gill Smith sent me an email saying she was nominating herself for the main Malcolm Hardee Award on the basis that, if she nominated herself in the email, she could justifiably put on her posters: MALCOLM HARDEE AWARD NOMINEE. She thought Malcolm would have approved. I agreed and gave her the first Malcolm Hardee Cunning Stunt Award.

One of Malcolm’s own cunning stunts at the Fringe, of course, was the year when he and Arthur Smith wrote a glowing review of Malcolm’s own show and put it in a tray at The Scotsman under the name of that august publication’s own reviewer William Cook. The Scotsman printed it, thinking it was a legitimate review.

Bob Slayer found another way to influence  Kate Copstick

Another legendary stunt was the year Scotsman critic Kate Copstick (a Malcolm Hardee Awards judge) gave comedian Jason Wood’s show a 1-star review. He immediately plastered his posters and flyers with the strapline: “A STAR” – THE SCOTSMAN.

These are definitive cunning stunts.

Last year (or it might have been two years ago – I have a shit memory) an act publicised his show by having lots of ginger haired people march through Glasgow.

I got a vitriolic letter later from a PR man berating me for not nominating this for the Cunning Stunt Award because the stunt had got worldwide press and TV coverage.

But it was not in any way a cunning stunt. It was just a stunt – and a little odd as it happened in Glasgow. It was no different to walking up and down the Royal Mile wearing a red nose. There was no con involved.

In 2013, Barry Ferns rightly won the Cunning Stunt Award for a series of stunts including publishing fake editions of Edinburgh Fringe review sheets Broadway Baby and Three Weeks publicising his own show, but we sort-of gave a second award (which we called the Pound of Flesh Award) to Ellis & Rose.

Comic Ellis was prepared to do anything for publicity…

Ellis had been beaten-up in the street by a punter angry about the duo’s Jimmy Savile comedy show.

Except it never happened. In fact, Ellis’ comedy partner Rose had repeatedly punched him in the face to give him a bruised cheek and genuine black eye… all to get a few inches of column space publicising themselves and their shows.

Like Lewis Schaffer doing a stunt in 2009 which lost him his agent, this seemed commendably OTT in stunt terms. And definitely cunning.

All this comes to mind because, a couple of weeks ago, Simon Caine invited me to be on his Ask The Industry podcast in the mistaken belief that I am increasingly prestigious in the comedy world and that he might get a Cunning Stunt Award for setting up a podcast solely so he could plug himself to allegedly influential people.

Previous interviewees had included Julian Hall (former comedy reviewer for the Independent and former Malcolm Hardee Awards judge), Alex Petty of the Laughing Horse comedy clubs and Edinburgh Free Festival) and Hils Jago (of the Amused Moose clubs and Comedy Awards).

Simon Caine has another cunning idea – interviewing clothes

I told Simon that, if you set up a podcast simply to plug yourself to the people you invite on it, that is a commendable stunt but not a cunning stunt.

It would only be a cunning stunt if you invited people to the podcast recording, spoke to them for an hour and actually there was no podcast.

Sadly, he has scuppered his chances because there is a (very good) ongoing series of podcasts.

He has suggested he can get round this by never uploading the podcast with me or by not uploading it until September – after the Fringe has finished – but I am currently not convinced.

Watch this space.

This year, Ellis & Rose already have a cunning stunt up-and-running. I have told them, if they can keep it going successfully until August without anyone noticing, I will nominate them for a Cunning Stunt Award (provided they actually do use it in August to publicise an Edinburgh Fringe show).