Courtyard Chatter & Fringe Complaints
I was chatting with Lionel Blair and Clarke Peters yesterday afternoon - not a combination of showbiz luminaries I ever anticipated coming across - when Kate Copstick, editor of the Erotic Review, assailed us from the rear and threatened to take a photograph. What she would then have done with it, had she done so, I can’t imagine. There’s nothing much erotic about me and Lionel, though Clarke still cuts a pretty figure.
He is such a completely nice man, Clarke. He even pretended he didn’t know that I didn’t think much of the Denise van Outen show he’s just directed and started to ask what I thought of it. So there I was, in the middle of the Pleasance Courtyard, giving him notes of a slightly more extended nature than my tart paragraphs on Whatsonstage.com’s Festival website.
Lionel looked puzzled and, having told us that his wife had driven him up to Edinburgh and filled his fridge for him, fell to wondering out loud as to why there were so many four-letter words in stand-up comedy. I was about to suggest that it was because the people who perform it tend to be a bit of a four-letter word themselves, but I refrained.
Later last night I bumped into Christopher Richardson, founding director of the Pleasance, who grumbled that Sir Brian McMaster, when he was director of the international festival, always refused to come half way towards meeting the Fringe on stabilising the dates. It does seem absurd that the Festival Theatre and other major venues are dark while the rest of city buzzes with activity and thousands of tourists; the opening concert is on Friday night.
Christopher reckons the Fringe brings about £88m into the city’s economy and the International Festival should jolly well get on with cooperating with it, the senior partner in the whole festival scene. I’ll ask Jonathan Morris, Brian’s successor, about this when I next see him. Poor chap’s hobbling about on crutches after improving his acquaintanceship with Edinburgh’s ancient cobble-stoned thoroughfares in a nasty fall.
Michael Coveney’s blogs from Edinburgh - and those of a dozen other festival bloggers - can be found at www.whatsonstage.com/edinburgh2009.
August 24th, 2009 at 10:58 pm
Getcher facts straight, Michael, you old name-dropper.
Copstick owns the Erotic Review. She doesn’t edit it.
I’m the editor.
And you can always diminish your feelings of erotic inadequacy by subscribing to The Erotic Review.
It’s a snip at £25 a year, delivered free to your doorstep in a plain wrapper which will neither excite the curiosity of your postie nor cause your neighbour to think of you as an old perve.