...it's just not the sort of culture you can boast about with any great pride when you see it at the Edinburgh Festival. That said, comedy can be considerably more challenging and thought-provoking than any amount of lazy drama. And if there is one thing that Edinburgh has at this timeof year, it's an abundance of lazy, badly-acted drama. As soon as you see any reference to George Bush or Tony Blair in the blurb for a show, you know you're in for an hour of badly thought-out preaching.
Last night I saw Steve Furst at the Assembly Halls on George Street. Standing in the queue, I said to the nearest person "I think I just saw the sidekick from the Orange ads". I didn't doubt for a second that this was possible. It's Edinburgh in August, after all, and that means that you can't set off a rucksack bomb in a city-centre pub without taking down half a dozen minor celebrities. So although August usually means seeing David Baddiell in every pub, other famous types are visible too.
After some consideration, I announced that if the bloke from the Orange ad did turn up at the festival some year, I'd pay to see him. Fortunately, albeit unknowingly, I already had. And he was very good.
His show was a mixture of formats. He would alternate between live, one-man monologues and half a dozen pre-recorded scenes. The videoed scenes were based around an aging and incompetent stuntman demonstrating his art: a solid mix of 1980's-mocking pastiche and physical slapstick, it entertained well enough. The half-dozen live vignettes were, in general, far better. The premises of each were well chosen, such as a middle-aged lawyer who had had a mid-life crisis and joined a teenage gang of chavs: the Fernside Posse, or a good-natured terrorist suspect placed under house arrest in a flat full of students. Each character was to some extent fairly grotesque, with dark and disturbing elements in each, but the tone was light and sympathetic, and there were genuinely likeable elements to each.
One thing I found interesting was the fairly naked "televise me!" tone that the format suggested. The ambitious comedian at the Fringe is always looking at Al Murray, Paul Merton and others who have succeeded at the Fringe and been offered a show off the back of their success. Actually having half of the show "televised" made such ambition pretty open. I suspect that he has a fair chance of succeeding, too, although perhaps he needs to find a suitable comic partner.
On another note, I finally saw the film festival program last night, and I am truly annoyed: I would happily have gone to about ten of the movies that are showing. And unlike certain peoples' wish lists, none of them were genre. Well ok, Firefly is, but that was pretty low on the list.