Edinburgh Festival

Festival and Fringe
Seems big on quantity, low on quality this year. The comedy is lacklustre with no buzz around new talent and most of the same names as last year. It’s lost its edge. Everything is polished, packaged, rounded off and the surprises and hits seem absent. Ask people for their hot tips and you get a longer pause than usual. It doesn’t help when Gervais turns up at nearly £40 a ticket during the fringe!

The street theatre has all of the same faces and is stuck in a repetitive series of jugglers, fire-eaters and mono-cyclists. What’s wrong with this art form? There must be a secret school somewhere churning these guys out. Of course there are exceptions. There’s a Japanese guy who rolls balls, cups, metal rings and even square boxes on an umbrella. He then balances a tea pot on a stick - I know, it sounds easy, actually ‘it’s aaaaaaaa-mazing’ (his catchphrase).