Edinburgh Festival - Part 1

Last Saturday I went through to the Edinburgh Festival with two friends to see comedians Mark Thomas and Phil Kay. I had been to The Fringe once before but this was my first proper taste of the Festival and I was looking forward to the experience. The bus journey was not long but it gave me enough time to catch up with Alan and hear about his Swine Flu scare. It was probably only a bad cold but I kept a safe distance from him just in case. Mark Thomas was performing at The Stand comedy club and when we arrived a queue had already formed. I had never heard of Mark Thomas before but Alan told me that his comedy is very political. I don't know much about politics so I was a bit worried that it would go above my head. While waiting in line everybody was handed a slip of paper which invited the audience to suggest policies that they would like to see passed in Parliament. He would read out some of the suggestions during the show and the favorites would be voted in and presented to a cross party group of MSP's at the end of his two week stint at the Festival. Interesting idea and it worked very well. It got the audience involved and allowed him to react with a sharp wit and some thought provoking insights. He was equally enlightening as he was funny. My own policy was something along the lines of people in Britain being encouraged to rent their property instead of being under pressure to buy. Most Europeans rent and they are able to live within their means and not be burdened with a huge mortgage. I should have written 'Scrap tuition fees and replace student loans with student grants, the bastards!' but anyway he didn't read my policy out. The winning policy was 'To have a national bring and buy or swap every Tuesday. When it starts working we start swapping with other countries until everyone is involved and we don't need money.' Very good. It could be way of defeating rampant capitalism. He showed us other policies from previous shows on a powerpoint screen, which included 'To introduce a national maximum wage' and 'Instead of being able to vote you should be able to 'unvote', so insteads of voting for a party you can opt to vote against your least favourite. Every 'unvote' against a party cancels out a vote for them'. I agree with my friend Tony that the best part was when Mark suggested that the National Anthem should be changed from 'God Save The Queen' to the imperial march tune from Star Wars. Like Mark pointed out, the national anthem should be about the people of Britain and not all about the Queen, and also the imperial march tune would scare the shit out of other competitors at the Olympics. Overall the show was very good. Plenty of laughs and food for thought. I would definitely see him again. We had plenty of time to kill before Phil Kay so we had a bite to eat and a few pints at a variety of nice traditional pubs, admiring some of the beautiful girls that Edinburgh seems to have in abundance. Phil Kay was a late start and he buzzed onto stage just before midnight. I had heard of him before but never seen him perform. Alan told me that he is very hit and miss so I wasn't sure what to expect. Unfortunately this was not one of Phil's better performances. He did not have much material to draw on except talking about the pregnancy of his wife and most of the show was ad-libed. There were some funny moments and it was obvious that he has plenty of raw talent but it just did not work on the night. He is a likeable character and there was something manic about his performance that was quite funny in itself (possible case of bi-polar?) but he should spend more time on having material to fall back on if his ad-libing is not going well. The show only lasted about 45 minutes and we all came away disappointed. We caught the 1.30 am bus back to Glasgow and I did not get home until about 3am. I was tired but it had been a good day and I look forward to seeing Paul Merton and Alistar McGowan next weekend.