Greetings, everyone.  I'm back - and hopefully this time to stay.

Contrary to some people’s hopes and wishes, I am still alive - but have just been busy trying to find work, doing the odd bit of freelancing, arguing with the DWP for suspending my benefit when I’d done the right thing and declared the work so as not to be considered a “benefit cheat” (something that I will be letting you all in on in good time with another one of my famous open letters), and actually temping for once.  Fancy that.

This week, however, I am mostly fighting eviction.  But never mind that.

You will recall that I was shortlisted last year for E4 Radio’s Funny Ha Ha talent trawl and that I attended a pitching session in Edinburgh.  Well, despite not being one of the three winners whose works were commissioned (only to then sadly bite the dust with E4 Radio itself after Channel Four lost millions to Victoria Coren in a game of late night poker), I did get some work out of it, in the form of writing and producing some ad parodies for The Janice Forsyth Show on BBC Radio Scotland.  In doing so, I was following in the footsteps of one of my heroes, the late, great Ivor Cutler, who had been a musical contributor to the show in his later years, so I was flattered to be asked to submit stuff myself.

An initial 13-week run ended up stretching to 22 weeks in all - and probably would have continued for a month or two more, were it not for those idiots Brand and Ross, whose Sachsual abuse seems to have affected everyone bar themselves.  Comedy budgets are being slashed (which is pretty important when you’re earning £50 a pop rather than £6m a year), one assumes to pay for an increase in staff to monitor the compliance ramifications of every single funny word the BBC broadcasts, the end result of which can clearly be seen in the current series of Horne & Corden.  [Hint to Corden: go solo, find better writers.]

I didn’t want to post links to the pieces here until they had all been transmitted, which they certainly should have been by now.  In fact, I believe there are one or two out of these that didn’t make it to air, even though they were signed off, so even if you did catch some of them on Janice’s show, you may not have heard them all.

A few of them are re-recordings or edited versions of ads originally recorded for podcasts on Comedy 365; the remainder will be appearing in one form or another in the second series of Liar News, along with loads more ads that were not considered suitable for Scottish ears for one reason or another.

All these pieces were cleared for morning radio, so you have my word that they are totally suitable for workplace listening.

Click here for the first 11 weeks and here for the second.

Thanks to Holly Burn, Eirlys Bellin, Rob Clyne, David LE Davis, Susie Felber, Linda Francis, Nick Saalfeld, James Shakeshaft, and Liam J Stratton for their vocal assistance, to Nick Low at Demus for the opportunity (and the mazoomah), and to Janice Forsyth for permitting me to lower the tone of her top-notch show for five months.

Tonight on telly:

BBC1
9pm
The Secret Life of Elephants
First in a series revealing the emotional and dramatic lives of elephants in Kenya's Samburu reserve.

C4
10pm
Could You Eat an Elephant?
Chefs Fergus Henderson and Jeremy Lee embark on an epic culinary journey around the world to test their own limitations by eating taboo meats.

Sky Three
12am
Tribal Animals: Elephants
Buddhists worship them; Africans use them as a source of meat and ivory. Why are the gentle giants so feared and revered?

Nuts TV
1am
Jade Goody Sprays Herself With Water
[etc]

Happy new year, by the way.  I am still alive.  Just.

It’s that time of year again - the time of year when I look at my music listening habits…or, should I say, the music listening habits that my three-year-old 60GB iPod wants me to have, the fiendish little thing.

I’ve been at home for a considerable chunk of the past year, so most of my listening has been done on the PC, rather than the iPod, which probably goes to explain why the iPod’s actually been in better working order this year than last.  The relatively cool summer and a drastic reduction in the amount of travelling on the tube also partially explain why I haven’t felt a need to upgrade yet - not that I’ve had the money required to do so.

Some of my spare time over the last two months has been spent re-importing CDs into iTunes at 192kbps, in readiness for a combined upgrade of PC and iPod that will probably be long overdue by this time next year.  In so doing, I’ve also started to regularly submit corrected title and artist information to Gracenote, as there seems to have been little attempt to improve the quality of their (admittedly huge) database.  As per last year, if anyone from Gracenote is reading this, I could do with the regular income if you’ve got a vacancy…

The amount of accurate sleeve artwork in the iTunes database seems to have plummeted too.  Surely it’s better to match the right sleeve with the right album by looking at the ISRC number of the recording, rather than guess to which of several similarly titled albums a particular piece of artwork belongs.

I never thought I’d end up sold on a digital music player but, sure enough, the CD player is still broken and hasn’t been replaced.  No sooner is a CD bought (not a frequent occurrence at the moment, as my ever-growing wish list below right will testify) than it is imported into iTunes in preparation for the next sync.  I still maintain that a cheaper, sturdier music-only iPod with a much larger memory would be a great option for audiophiles and those with larger music collections. 

The recent iTunes 8.0.1 upgrade seems to have been well received, save for Apple’s regular annoying habit of moving certain options in the menu for no apparent reason - for example, was there heavy public opinion that the ability to change the bit rate at which tracks are imported should be moved out of the Advanced tab and into the General tab in the Preferences section?  I think not somehow.  I’m sure I wasn’t the only user who wasted time hunting for it upon importing to the new version for a first time, fruitlessly searching the iTunes Help section for its location - only to find that it rather stupidly hadn’t been updated to take account of all the changes in the new version.  I’m still getting used to the Genius facility - but I’m sure that I’ll be posting some of the stranger recommendations thrown up by it here in the months to come.

My major disappointment with the upgrade is that nothing seems to have been done to improve the sound check facility, which I swear is not working as well as it should, and that they haven’t developed a better form of RMS levelling.  Rather than wasting time on pointless EQs and the abysmal Sound Enhancer, Apple should be developing ways of improving the sound at a constant level and flat EQ.

Less capitulating to governments regarding volume limits would also be welcome - if people want to listen to music louder in noisier environments, it should be their choice.  Warning users about the dangers to their hearing is fine but forcing a limit upon them is hardly going to encourage responsible use of this or any other playback device.  There also needs to be a global way of setting the recording volume when importing CDs to iTunes, rather than having to alter it per CD, which is an absolute pain, particularly when there aren’t any proper level meters available to make a valued judgement as to whether a CD has been mastered at too low or high a volume.

Carping aside, I have already more than saved the cost of a new CD Walkman every nine months and endless batteries by buying an iPod, and so cannot see myself changing anytime soon.  For all my recent criticism of iTunes, it is the new gold standard of how to listen to music, and the choice of available repertoire is wider than ever and, thankfully, has started to become available at higher bit rates from the Music Store.

To round up, here’s my traditional list of the 25 most-played tracks over the last year, compiled whilst analysing the randomness of the iPod and iTunes shuffle facilities before I reset the play count for the coming year.

After a year’s use, just over a third of the 11,604 iPod-worthy tracks remained unplayed, whilst this number dropped to just 3% of a total of 12,209 tracks after two years’ use.

Now, at year three’s end, there are 12427-iPod worthy tracks (equivalent to just over 34 days and 15 hours’ worth of music), 301 of which still remain unplayed - that’s just 2.4%.  Conclusion: I’d say the shuffle facility on the fifth generation iPod becomes less random after a couple of years of heavy use.

Meanwhile, most tracks played continue to be scrobbled at Last FM.  In fact, give or take a few hundred tracks, the number of plays has doubled over the last 12 months.  So if you want to look at what I’m listening to in greater detail, pop along to my page...and say hello while you're at it.

Here, though, are the 25 most listened to tracks this year:

1.       CAMERA OBSCURA I Need All The Friends I Can Get

2.       THE DRAYTONES Keep Loving Me

3.       JOHN CAVACAS AND HIS ORCHESTRA Waltz Cool

4.       MADNESS Cardiac Arrest

5.       ANTHONY ADVERSE Paradise Lost

6.       SHELLEYAN ORPHAN Midsummer Pearls and Plumes

7.       ANDREW W.K. Free Jumps

8.       KRAFTWERK Morgenspaziergang

9.       THE BYRDS Lady Friend

10.   BRIAN ENO Discreet Music

11.   THE TUBES No Mercy

12.   HORACE SILVER QUINTET Que Pasa

13.   THE HIGH LLAMAS Track Goes By

14.   TURIN BRAKES Slack     

15.   BLACK CROWES Come On

16.   JIMMY PAGE & ROY HARPER Hangman

17.   LISA COLEMAN Minneapolis #2

18.   NELLIE McKAY I am Nothing       

19.   THE INCREDIBLE STRING BAND Painting Box

20.   COLOSSEUM Butty's Blues

21.   GEMMA HAYES Let a Good Thing Go

22.   FRANK ZAPPA Waka/Jawaka

23.   LOUIS PHILLIPPE If You're Missing Someone

24.   YES Looking Around

25.   PHILIP GLASS Bed

The news this morning that the UK iTunes Music Store has been censoring song titles came as no surprise to me.  I first noted this a fortnight ago whilst checking Comedy 365’s relative position to other podcasts and chose to raise the issue via the iTunes Support.

This wasn’t the first time I’d had to contact them: prior to my trip to Edinburgh in August, I had noticed that some of Comedy 365’s podcasts had not downloaded on time.  Three of July’s podcasts had downloaded several hours late, including one that took more than 24 hours and another that took close to 36 hours to appear on iTunes.

After establishing that it wasn’t being caused by a fault elsewhere by checking the RSS feed and knowing that the problem had to be sorted prior to our Edinburgh run, I got in touch with Apple.

Here’s the reply I received:

Hi Richard,

I am sorry to hear about the delay of your podcast being hosted on iTunes.  I can certainly understand how this might cause you some concern, my name is Ryan and I will be happy to clarify this for you today!

I am sorry Richard, but before a podcast is put onto the store, it's [sic] integrity must be verified.  When we receive an item, we must be sure that the feed is valid, and error free.  If a podcast has a "rocky start" with errors, we will try for a while until we get a stable feed report.

You might wish to try this from http://www.feedvalidator.org/

Also, please note, that we offer podcast hosting as a free service to help users get their podcast noticed, we are extremely busy on the Podcast front, and we try to have things updated quickly, however, at times, the delay is longer than others.

I trust that this information has resolved the matter at hand, if not feel free to reply!

Thank you for being a part of the iTunes community. Your customer service experience is of the utmost importance to myself as well as the other staff here at Apple.  I hope you have a great day!

Sincerely,

Ryan

Well, as you can imagine, this reply didn’t come anywhere near resolving the matter.  I therefore replied to “Ryan”, highlighting the fact that the feed had been live for more than three years and in the Top 100 podcasts for the majority of that period, so it couldn’t be put down to a “rocky start”.  I also questioned why them being busy administering and verifying new feeds would have an effect on the automated publishing of a single podcast episode.

I never received a reply.  Meanwhile, the problem miraculously rectified itself.

However, on returning home from Edinburgh a month later, I received an AppleCare survey asking for feedback on my customer service experience, so I took it upon myself to tear iTunes Support a collective new a******e. 

In addition to the unanswered points about the podcast prior to Edinburgh, I asked why Comedy 365 (along with the top rated podcast of the time, the twice-weekly E4 Laughs at Edinburgh) was not included in the Music Stores’ Fringe Funnies section for the length of the festival, particularly when we had deliberately renamed the feed Edinburgh Live: Comedy 365.  This state of affairs was particularly galling, when taking into account some of the four podcasts that were considered to be representative of the festival:

• Ewan Spence’s daily Edinburgh Fringe 2008 Show on The Podcast Network, to which we contributed
• The Guardian’s near-daily Live at the Gilded Balloon shows
• Amnesty International’s Behind the Fringe feed, which featured two batches of videos from the final week of this year’s fringe alongside twice as many from last year
• Chortle’s Stand Up Comedy Podcast, which featured absolutely no content from Edinburgh itself, preferring to merely rely on video footage shot in London and uploaded prior to the festival

Considering that we were rated third out of the podcasts from Edinburgh during its run behind the E4 and Guardian efforts, we felt that this was a glaring omission on iTunes’ part.  Not that it particularly harmed us: to date, those 23 Edinburgh podcats have been heard by 75,000 people around the world.  But it would have been nice to have received a little extra exposure during the month, if only to get a few more bums on seats down at The Dragonfly.

To date, though, no-one at iTunes has answered my questions.

And so we come to the day a fortnight ago when I discovered several podcasts whose titles included words such as “sex”, “naked”, “naughty”, “hot”, “nuts”, and - rather bizarrely - “Johnny Vaughan” had been censored with asterisks.  Something was obviously wrong, so I raised the issue with iTunes Support.

Here’s the reply I received:

Hello Richard,

I understand that you would like to know why certain podcasts which have questionable words in their titles have been censored with asterisks on iTunes UK. I can imagine how frustrating that must be, Richard, so thank you for your patience. My name is Jocelyne and I am happy to assist you with this now.

Richard, the iTunes Store has no control over podcasts, the creators of the podcasts are responsible for their content and how the content is displayed on the iTunes Store.

SInce you are not the publisher of this podcast, please use the Report a Concern form for the podcast to tell us more about the issue.

1) Launch the latest version of iTunes.

2) In the Source list, click on the iTunes Store icon.

3) Select Podcasts from the iTunes Store genre list.

4) Navigate to the podcast.

5) Click on the "Report a Concern" link on the podcast's page.

6) Select the appropriate concern from the pulldown list.

7) Enter your email address and any additional comments you have.

8) Press Submit.

I trust that you find this information helpful, Richard. Thank you for being a loyal iTunes Store customer. Have a wonderful day!

Warmest regards,

Jocelyne

Aside from its “cut and paste” nature, which is quite evident when you compare it to the reply received from Ryan a couple of months earlier, Jocelyne’s reply was just plain b******t.

The iTunes Store has “no control over podcasts”, does it?  If that’s the case, why does iTunes have to “validate the integrity” of feeds, as I’d previously been told by Ryan?  Try submitting a podcast with questionable content or a title like iTunes Customer Service is Poo and see how far you get.

Why should I have to report this issue as a concern about an individual podcast?  That function should exist for matters of legality of content only.

And as for the suggestion that Johnny Vaughan had censored his own name…well, I’d never heard such nonsense.

I replied to Jocelyne, suggesting that somewhere within Apple there was some puritan who considered it OK to censor the works of other people without it being sanctioned by their superiors.  Given that she was unable to admit or even acknowledge any wrongdoing by Apple, I asked for someone with a bit more clout to e-mail me with a more logical, sensible, and accurate reason for the occurrence.

Unfortunately, I only received a reply from Jocelyne the next day:

Hello Richard,

Thank you for your reply. I am sorry that you are disappointed.

Thank you for taking the time to contact Apple about improving iTunes. Apple recognizes that no one is better qualified to provide feedback about iTunes than the people who use it.

I encourage you to use the iTunes Feedback page to submit your comments:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/itunesapp.html

Your efforts to share your feedback are very much appreciated.

Warmest regards,

Jocelyne

Given the previous standard of response, I felt very discouraged to supply even more feedback and went to work on writing this blog entry, gaining others’ opinions.  I heard stories of changes to feeds and icons not being updated, duplicate feeds being created and then not being merged, and plenty of head-scratching over the list of Top 100 podcasts in each of iTunes 16 categories.

iTunes accounts for 85% of Comedy 365's downloads and I would imagine this is a similar figure to most other top podcasts.  Yet some that we knew to be way more popular than our own, such as Dawn & Drew and Keith & the Girl, were nowhere to be seen in iTunes' top comedy audio podcasts.  Even The Onion’s superb video offering, which receives close to a million downloads per week, has regularly appeared below Comedy 365 in the overall comedy chart, despite the fact that we achieve a much lower weekly average of around 30,000 downloads at present.

Even more peculiar, I randomly searched one subsection, Alternative Health, and found some interesting anomalies.  Many of the most popular podcasts in this subsection had just one episode, some dating back a couple of years.  The entry at #13 was a mere 17” long, and consisted of nothing more than a pre-roll and a short intro.  The entry at #43 wouldn’t even preview, let alone download.

No-one but Apple knows how the Top Podcasts chart is collated.  Many podcasters believe that it’s calculated on daily downloads, yet the fact that many valid feeds, some with hundreds of episodes, seemingly get fewer hits than a podcast that can’t be downloaded at all, suggests there’s something very wrong.

Add to this the iTunes Music Store’s decision to create a Featured Providers panel plugging most of today’s major media providers, and I’m a little worried.  What’s to stop iTunes from placing nothing but featured content from major providers who see podcasting as mere “added value” at the top of the charts, whilst independents desperately seeking funding in order to continue their efforts, be they professional enterprises or labours of love, go to the wall?  Nothing at all, it seems.

I figure podcasters will never truly know how Apple works.  But most of us will never leave the iTunes Music Store because a) when it works, it’s superb and b) it makes no business sense to remove yourself from a podcatcher that accounts for so much of your audience.  Imagine what would happen if the new James Bond movie was only shown in small rural cinemas with no promotional budget, and that’s the sort of situation in which podcasters would be placing themselves.

Anyway, back to the iTunes “computer glitch”.  Within hours of the story going public, the issue was rectified and the asterisks vanished.  What a difference the intense gaze of the world’s mainstream media makes, eh?

Naturally, I have written to Jocelyne and asked whether iTunes Support will now be reconsidering their original response to me.  I shall publish any reply…but I wouldn’t hold your breath.

I think it’s fair to say that never before have I had cause to compare Norman Tebbit to Lily Savage - but that’s exactly what happened as a result of my popping into a local book shop yesterday.

First off, here’s a famous quote from Tebbit, speaking to the Conservative Party Conference on October 15th, 1981:

“I grew up in the '30s with an unemployed father.  He didn't riot; he got on his bike and looked for work, and he kept looking until he found it.”

Now here’s a quote from the man behind Lily Savage (figuratively at least), comedian and daytime chat show host Paul O’Grady, from an interview with the Daily Mirror on September 29th, ostensibly to promote his new autobiography:

“I've worked out that I've paid so much tax I won't earn a penny from the rest of this show until Christmas. I wouldn't mind if the money was going to charity, but it's spent on wasters and layabouts*. I was taught that the only way to get on is to get off your backside.”

Now compare this to a quote from an interview with the Daily Express on June 7th, 2007, when O’Grady still had 50,000 words of the said book to write with little over a month to go before it was due to be delivered to the publisher:

“I had Peter Kay on my show this week and he called me lazy - and he's right.”

Hmm, maybe that explains why the title of the book is not as “unique” as the publisher thinks it is**. 

For the book, which was published on September 18th and currently finds itself atop the Sunday Times hardback non-fiction bestseller list, is titled At My Mothers Knee and Other Low Joints...which strangely enough sounds quite a bit like Songs I Learned At My Mothers Knee and Other Low Joints, an album by Marty Grosz & Destiny’s Tots, released in 1994.

But then, of course, one can’t copyright a title.

However, one can, apparently, trademark a dog...and O’Grady has indeed done so, applying to register the full name of his Shih Tzu, Buster Elvis Savage, for merchandising opportunities two years ago.

No wonder he’s got no money left after his tax bill.

[*DEFINITION: The kind of people who find themselves conked out on the sofa at 5pm on a weekday afternoon watching Channel Four.]

[**But then again, this is a publisher whose barely-there e-commerce site informs us that The Boy in the Stripped Pajamas has just been made into a motion picture.  Does the NSPCC know about this..?]

It’s Serendipity Hour…

UKTV HISTORY: Infamous Assassinations

CHANNEL 4+1: Just Shoot Me

I cannot believe that OFCOM considers the British public to be so stupid that they have to be told that the sight of a carrot morphing into a raw chicken leg is a dramatization.  The offending moment is ten seconds in, for those of you who haven't yet seen this insult to our collective intelligence.

Hello again, by the way.  Posts coming a lot more frequently from now on.  Fact.

OK, so shoot me.

I had planned to be so organized with my dispatches from this year’s Edinburgh Fringe.  I know I promised previews and daily reports, but I truly have no idea where the time went.  Oh, and I accidentally overwrote the draft version of my account of the whole period upon returning home.  What can I say?  Je suis un dick massive.

I can, however, follow up on the previous post in one respect: The Faulty [sic] Towers Dining Experience show garnered some terrific reviews from individuals far more cynical than myself.  Perhaps us Brits revel in being served up reheated sadism after all.  Oh well.  Credit where credit’s due and all that.

So how was it for me, the Edinburgh virgin?  Well, the answer is not bad at all.  And yes, I have certainly got the bug to return at some point – maybe next year, maybe later.

Of course, it helped that my travel, accommodation, and subsistence costs were all paid.  Even though our show was part of PBH’s Free Fringe and thus bypassed the substantial expenses associated with staging a show at one of the major venues, it was estimated by The Luffster that had he not been able to rely on sponsorship for part of his costs he still would have been close to £4k out of pocket from the show.

Our venue, The Dragonfly cocktail bar in West Port, turned out to be close to perfect for the show.  Its staff were welcoming, friendly, and accommodating towards pretty much every request we made - although, sadly, the get-out was rushed and therefore we didn’t have a chance to say goodbye and thanks.  They’ve some ruddy brilliant cocktails on the menu and their music choices shuffled from an iPod behind the bar during off-peak hours were so up my street that I had to satisfy myself several times that they hadn’t nicked my 60GB Classic. Plus I finally got to taste Cherry Marnier, which until recently was the sole preserve of the French and Canadians.

The stone floor in the venue’s Parlour Bar managed to more than adequately amplify the noise of audiences when they were a bit on the low side, which thankfully wasn’t often.  After a slow start in single figures for the first three days, audience numbers largely hovered around the 15 mark, which was just right in terms of atmosphere.  Fridays and Saturdays were strong right from week 1 and remained so through to the end.  In all, we only had to cancel two shows: one on the Tuesday in week 2, owing to a day-long downpour that put paid to many shows that evening, and the other on the Wednesday in week 3, where our two audience members turned up nearly 25 minutes into what would have been a show had we not already recorded the requisite bits for the podcast and packed up.

Sadly, three of our 30+ guest acts, all of whom had confirmed their appearances as being “in the diary” more than once both verbally and in writing failed to show.  The fact that the minds of two of those acts might have been distracted by their forthcoming forays into television simply isn’t an excuse, especially as one of them still hasn’t realized her mistake and bothered to apologise.  It’s plain fucking rude and I won’t be booking them for anything else I do in the future.  They know who they are, and shame on them.

On a more positive note, Brian, Georgina, and I met several long-time Comedy 365 listeners during the run – many more than we ever imagined we would – and have certainly gained a few extra subscribers who were, shall we say, intrigued enough by the live show to find out more about what we’ve been doing these last three years.

In addition, we had some great company at The Dragonfly in terms of other performers: Jake Yapp, Brendan Naughton, Dan McKee, Pab Roberts, and Elise Harris, all of whom made the experience a lot less stressful than it might have been had we been performing and recording at another venue.

There is plenty to be said about both PBH’s Free Fringe and the Laughing Horse Free Festival, particularly with reference to the more established fringe venues, but I’ll save that for another day.  I want to get my thoughts straight before I commit to the web what I consider to be right and wrong about the current situation based on my experiences this August.

The podcasts we recorded, all of which will continue to be available for download via iTunes and at www.comedy365.co.uk for the remainder of 2008, didn’t quite turn out the way we had originally anticipated, owing to reasons beyond our control – but, as things would have it, the lack of a set format throughout the 22-day run actually resulted in a more varied online offering.  If only we could have planned things that way, we might have saved ourselves a lot of work!  Brian particularly enjoyed walking down the Royal Mile speaking to breathless pretty young things every other day rather than once a week as originally planned, and we’ve already had some e-mails from listeners far and wide who felt as if they were in Edinburgh with us.  Plus we’ve made more people aware of what the main fringe and its two free equivalents have got to offer, which can only be a good thing.

And, even though we weren’t seeking to be reviewed, as the podcast was always going to take precedence over the live show, it was very flattering to get three-stars from Dana Acharya at Three Weeks, particularly when other podcast-related shows on the Free Fringe only got two stars on average.  It didn’t matter that it was published the morning of our last show: anyone who wants to hear what they missed can still do so.

It read:

“Georgina and Brian are a pleasant and friendly duo whose independent comedic styles compliment each other well. While Brian is confident and strong, Georgina is slightly timid and shy as well as flirty, giggly and full of wonder. I do feel a bit sorry for sluggish pandas though. They introduced two enjoyable stand up acts, of young, new talent. The first act [Lorcan McGrane] offered quite straight faced comedy and had a good sense of comic timing while the second, Chris Martin, was impressively original, and had great stage presence and charisma. Chris and his friends are also planning a huge charity event for Comic Relief, 'Cricket on Mount Everest'. A fun hour and all for the price of diddly squat.”

The show in question can be heard on Sowerby & Luff in Edinburgh Programme #20, if you’re interested.  Click here to listen – and click here to read more about Chris’s challenge for charity.  There are also clips from that live show in the video podcast, which is Programme #23.  However, for the full and proper Edinburgh experience, I heartily encourage you to listen to the shows in order.

As for memories I’ve brought south of the border with me…well, I’ve several, and they’re not all positive:

1)      The new pastime of Kate Copstick Spotting, whereby The Scotsman’s most feared yet respected reviewer appears out of nowhere upon a mere three mentions of her name, rather like Beetlejuice.  This happened three times in the first three days - once outside The Roxy, once outside our venue during the show, and once in the Underbelly bar – and seven times in all over the whole length of the festival.

2)      Drinking with Liam McEneaney on a Wednesday afternoon, hours before he was due to appear on The Liar Show (it wasn’t intentional, Ophira, honest).  In fact, generally hanging out with comedic chums from New York that I don’t get to see too often, including Liam himself and Rob Paravonian – although we could have all done without the puzzling and paranoid behaviour of a certain well-known comedian’s husband in week two, which led to a broken pair of glasses, a dislocated shoulder, and half a night in the Royal Infirmary.  Celebrities’ spouses, eh?  I shit ‘em.

3)      One neighbour playing the intro and opening line to Sting’s Fields of Gold 17 times over at 5am on not one but two Sunday mornings.  Fortunately (and inexplicably, given my history as a trainee insomniac), I slept through both of these instances.

4)      The E4 Radio workshop and pitching sessions I attended – not just because I learnt a lot but also because I walked away safe in the knowledge that even if I am not selected to make a pilot of some description for the DAB station, which is due to launch early next year, there are more than enough creative and talented people out there to ensure Radio 4 and BBC7 are finally given a run for their money comedically.

5)      Jay Foreman getting a full house at The Dragonfly to sing along on his internet hit Moon Chavs - you can hear this in Programme #14.

6)      Our local chip shop.  Where the terms “small” and “large” each meant different things on different days of the week and at different times of day.  Where loyal customers were encouraged to take a seat and partake of a free cup of tea that would then be forgotten about.  Where there was an “under new management” sign in the window, despite the owner (an Italian-monikered Turk) recounting stories of having been there for the last 20 years.  Where one of two portions of chips specifically ordered with brown sauce would be delivered without the sauce.  Where customers at random would be encouraged to have a taste of a very special burger that wasn’t very special at all.  Where the slowest serving assistant in the world put sweetcorn in a doner kebab.  Where a kofte kebab was actually a doner kebab served with a skewer underneath it.  Where three identical doner kebab orders were respectively served in pitta bread, with pitta bread on the side, and without pitta bread.  I could go on but it’s making me way too hungry.

7)      The worst pizza restaurant in Edinburgh (or “Wine, Wine Everywhere but Not a Drop to Drink”) – the tale of which can be heard in Programme #19.

8)      The dubious if.comedy award nominations, where the judges could only find seven shows out of more than 2,000 that they considered worthy enough for one of the two awards.  The fact that all of the Best Comedy Show nominees were ineligible, yet one sketch troupe that should have been nominated were withdrawn from the list over a “technicality” (probably the same technicality that should have put paid to at least three of the four nominees).  Plus the panel prize of £4k awarded to be shared between all of the comedy performers at the fringe, which was – in typically shambolic Fringe 2008 style – put behind the bar at The Spiegelent (a cabaret venue with inflated bar prices rather than a comedy venue selling drinks at the market rate) to consume within 90 minutes late on the following Monday evening.  By this time, a lot of the acts, particularly those who’d lost money...I mean, performed for free, had left town, so less than 10% of performers were lucky enough to drink up the prize money meant for all of us.  The only benefit of this, as has been highlighted by several comedians, is that we can all legitimately claim to have won the if.comedy panel award on our posters in years to come.  Hurrah!  The downside is that the panel may well have had that in mind when they made the decision.  Boo!

And here are some of the lessons learnt:

1)      Anyone even remotely considering taking a show up to Edinburgh needs to go to the festival the year before to weigh up the pros and cons of the venues they are likely to have at their disposal.  Some of the venues on the main fringe are simply not fit for purpose and it is not uncommon for the venues hosting free shows to suit certain types of performance more than others.  You just can’t go in there blind and expect your show to be a success.  I’ve worked on the London fringe on and off now for nearly four years, yet those three and a bit weeks in Edinburgh have taught me twice as much as I already (thought I) knew.  There is simply no substitute for being there, even for just a few days, to encourage clarity in thought.

2)      Unless you’ve got a gullible bank manager or a sizeable trust fund, pool your efforts with other people.  There is strength in numbers – and not just from a financial aspect.

3)      Keep your show as uncomplicated as possible.  Save the pyrotechnics and dancing elephants until Avalon starts waving money in your face.

4)      When choosing accommodation, try to find somewhere away from the Old Town, such as over the other side of The Meadows.  The more you need to take to and from your venue daily, the closer to The Meadows you need to be.

5)      Parking is a nightmare, so ensure your get-in and get-out are planned well in advance, particularly if you’re not performing at a full-time venue and you’ve equipment, scenery, or props.  Plan your arrival and departure around this.

6)      Make what passes for a Scottish summer work for you.  If you’re at a venue with passing trade (particularly a free venue), work with the other acts at the venue and its management to advertise your shows directly outside.  Put as many posters in the window as possible and put out a weatherproof A-board an hour before you go on stage, so that you’ll benefit if it starts raining close to curtain up time.  If your show is free, make sure this is made clear in all “point of sale” promotions.

7)      Be aware of the inefficiency of flyering for hours on end.  Most of our audience came because they’d seen our ad in the main festival programme or our listing in the Free Fringe programme.  These, along with a constantly monitored supply of about 2,000 flyers and a couple of dozen posters at both your own venue and others (where permitted), should be sufficient.  Sure, if you want to flyer for an hour or so once a week because the shower at your digs is broken, do – but it’s not the most fruitful use of time.  You could achieve as many bums on seats by flyering those coming out of the show immediately before your own for five minutes a day or (particularly with venues that are inside existing pubs and bars) sticking a flyer on every table a couple of times a day, rather than fighting hundreds of other shows on the Royal Mile.  Go and see some shows instead.  Network with other performers.  And look at other ways of promoting your show.  For example, if you’re in a bar and see other patrons leafing through the programme, don’t be afraid of pointing out your listing and / or ad to them.  An ad in the programme costs about £1,000, which is not cheap when added to the £300 or so for the listing – but it does get you noticed, not just during the fringe itself but in the weeks leading up to week zero as well.  A lot of people who come to Edinburgh specifically to see shows on the fringe have already decided what they intend to see prior to setting foot inside the city, so waving flyers in their faces is a waste of time, money, energy, and paper.

8)      Avoid the Grassmarket and its immediate surroundings on Friday and Saturday evenings.  If you’re performing at a venue in the area, budget enough to have the venue call you a cab when you’re ready to go.  If someone wants to pick a fight with you for no reason, they will - and there’s no quicker way of forcing the cancellation of your show.

9)      Make full use of the Gilded Balloon Library Bar on the quieter nights – you’re more likely to be able to hear yourself and others enough to network, and you never know who you might bump into.  Try to visit the Pleasance Courtyard daily just to see and be seen.  But pace yourself socially, otherwise the lethargy will kick in at the start of week three, when the industry people arrive in town for the television festival.

10)   And finally, ask for your prize money from the if.comedy awards panel up front.

Long-suffering readers will probably be wondering why I’ve not published my annual guide to shows worth seeing (or, in a few cases, probably worth avoiding) at the Edinburgh Fringe.  That’s because – unlike other years – I am actually in the city.  But it was difficult work getting here.

Since the beginning of July, I’ve been suffering from cluster headaches – or, to be precise, post-coital headaches…which, when you consider my almost monk-like reputation for relationships, is quite ironic.  I’m not going to go into detail here - but although the pain is continuing (most of it mental from being on an enforced period of abstinence), I was fortunate enough to get a CT scan before I left London and I’ve been told there’s no internal bleeding in my head and nothing wrong with my brain, although many readers may wish to argue that latter point.

The end result of all this illness is that a great deal of my preparation for Edinburgh had to be compressed into the 72 hours before I left, only for me to leave six hours later than planned because both my GP and consultant didn’t want me to leave for Scotland without being checked out.  My consultant appreciated that I was under pressure, as he’d been in a medical revue at the festival twice in the early 90s.

Anyway, I’m here now and have spent my first night wandering around, getting my bearings.  I’ve only been to the city once before, in the early 80s, and didn’t see much apart from the castle and Princes Street (bloody tourist), so it’s good to finally see what August in this fine city is really about.  Such is the magnetic aspect of the Pleasance Courtyard that within the space of 90 minutes, I’d bumped into at least four people I knew and spotted several others from a distance.  One is never alone during the fringe.

I’m here primarily because I’m producing Sowerby and Luff’s daily live show and podcast at The Dragonfly for Comedy 365, but, as things turned out, I would have been making a journey up here even if Brian and Georgina hadn’t.  For a couple of weeks ago, I learnt that I’d been successful in making the shortlist of a recent E4 Radio search for new talent.  Out of 600 applicants, I was one of the lucky nine to be selected for a day of mentoring and workshops, followed by a day of pitching ideas.  Should my pitch be considered the best, I get a pilot of some description.  I will keep you posted, naturally.

By now, we should have been all set up and raring to go – but our original get-in of 3pm yesterday was cancelled, as the venue had been hired for a private function.  Fortunately, we were able to store some stuff in the basement, thus negating the need to find a parking space from which to deliver the gear a second time - Edinburgh really has become no place for the car.  We are now due to get in at 11am this morning and need to be all fully set up and tested by 3pm, when the first show goes up.  Our first show – essentially a preview – is at 6:40pm tonight, and then it’s a runaway train for the next three weeks.  Hopefully, I’ll be able to relax for a couple of hours and watch the Arsenal-Juventus game somewhere close by, but we shall see…

As for the fringe festival itself, it seems that the bubble may finally have burst with only a very minor increase in the number of shows (2088 compared to 2050 last year in slightly fewer venues).  There’s been an increase in the amount of bigger name artists choosing to perform as part of the PBH Free Fringe or the Laughing Horse Free Festival, rather than at a venue operated by one of the big four organizations.

Indeed, rumours have abounded these last few months that those organizations are looking to break away and attract sponsorship to further ingrain themselves as “the heart of the fringe”.  The problems many audience members have had booking tickets on the official fringe website over the last couple of months could well be karmic payback for this, not to mention a potential shot in the arm for the two free fringe organizations.  Mind you, when the listing for one of the two if.comeddie award shows in the official programme has the wrong start time, you know that things really aren’t going as well as they should.

Looking through the programme prior to the festival, I noticed several trends, a few of which are making a repeat appearance.  Many show listings fail to credit their casts, although that could be down to the early copy deadline of the official Edinburgh brochure more than any ignorance of the basics of PR on the part of producers.  Comedy shows continue to promise “guaranteed laughs” (long-term readers will be familiar with my inherent aversion to that phrase), there’s a larger-than-usual number of comparisons to Python and Morecambe & Wise, and literally hundreds of shows claim to feature the “best comedians”, the “future of comedy”, and “stars of BBC Three / BBC7” (they can’t all have radio and TV shows, surely).

Once again, there are plenty of Best Of the Fringe shows on offer, even though a number of the performers already confirmed are coming up just to perform on those shows.  Some of these shows have even used their 2007 line-ups to sell this year’s tickets, even when some of those acts have no intention of attending this year’s festival, thanks to being otherwise engaged.

Medical revues are very much back in fashion, the usual Australian contingent of performers have been joined by a larger than usual number of North American and Scandinavian comedians, and the must-have stage accessory of 2008 is the ukulele.  Whether this means we’ll see a surprise appearance from The Hazzards is anyone’s guess but they should certainly start planning to come over in 2009.

Most notably, there seems to have been a vast increase in the number of comedy shows with the word “Fuck” in their title, which then has to be censored on posters and listings, thus rendering the whole process utterly futile.

There are four MacBeths, three different interpretations each of Romeo & Juliet, Little Shop of Horrors, Teechers, and I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change, plus two High School Musicals and Returns to the Forbidden Planet.  Surprisingly, there is no Woyczek in the programme this year – but it would not surprise me if some awful profit-share theatre company decided to come up for a few days and perform it on a platform at Waverley station.

If you like musicals, you’re spoilt for choice with new works about child molestation, cannibalism, the plague, the apocalypse, and Big Brother (although the latter three could very well be the same show), plus – rather surreally - Gordonstoun School, the alma mater of half of the royal family, performing We Will Rock You.

Special mention must go to Faulty Towers: The Dining Experience, where, for a touch under £40, you can experience a two-hour dinner at a restaurant in Drummond Street, whilst being insulted by Basil, patronized by Sybil, and covered in pasta sauce by Manuel.  However, the deliberate misspelling in the title says it all: the show is comedy’s answer to a Butlins weekend of tribute bands and has no connection to the authors or the BBC.  Given the BBC’s desire to protect its intellectual property, I’m surprised there haven’t been words…

Anyhow, once the first couple of days are over, I’ll pick out some shows from the programme, using the usual three-tiered method from previous years (friends, people I’ve seen, and things that just look interesting in either a positive or negative light), and hopefully I’ll be able to report back with a post mortem of events on a daily basis from tomorrow.

But now, I gotta have a shower and motor…

Our second “oops, I’ve just found myself encroaching on a celebrity photoshoot” picture is of Mischa Barton loading or unloading her bags (or rather watching her driver load or unload them) at an airport somewhere (probably Los Angeles).

Cue a mature woman (Mother? Agent? Fellow frequent flyer?) suddenly caught unawares by the presence of a paparazzo…

Last night, as I failed to recover from a third cluster headache in as many days, I curled up on the sofa and happened to catch five’s Greatest Ever Disaster Movies, which I missed on its original screening, probably because I was still able to go out and do things back then.

I wish I hadn't bothered; it was bollocks.

Look at the word “disaster” in any reputable dictionary and the definition is crystal:

Disaster (n.) -

1. an occurrence that causes great distress or destruction
2. something that has failed or is ruined
3. Gigli, a film starring Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez 

It seems the majority of those who voted via five’s website at the time along with readers of The Times, who I would have thought were intelligent enough to know better, wouldn’t know a disaster if it fell on their heads from a great height, exploded, and washed them out to sea on a huge tsunami that, in turn, overturned a cruise liner on New Year’s Eve.  The paper was even too ashamed to provide a decent host for the show, preferring instead to send its restaurant critic, Giles Coren, last seen in BBC2’s The Supersizers Go KFC throwing up alongside Sue Perkins, which couldn’t have done much for her self-esteem.

Coren’s presentation was at best patronizing, so unlike his sister and late father that I started to wonder whether he might have been adopted.  At worst, it was insulting to both its viewers and some of its guests, with one knowledgeable talking head twice being described as a “posh boy” when he probably was no posher than the presenter (Westminster and Keble, Oxford), whilst another, who was described as an “entrepreneur” but had, in reality, come second in The Apprentice, wasn’t chided at all for her less than enlightening comments, which seemed to have been written with the aid of Jonathan Ross Movie Review Fridge Magnets™ (i.e., “X is a film where Y does something and Z happens, and I thought it was good / bad / no better or worse than average).

Sure, there’s always a grey area when trying to be genre-specific about movies but there must have been a point at which the few experts amongst the 60 or so contributors (Andrew Collins, Derek Malcolm, Kim Newman, and Barry “Pickles” Norman) looked at the list and went: “You’re shittin’ us, right?”

When you look at a list of disaster movies and Earthquake’s as low as #34, the benchmark Poseidon Adventure only scrapes the top ten (despite coming top of a recent UCI Cinemas poll of people who actually watch movies before they're asked to by a production intern), and the epic Towering Inferno doesn’t even make the top three, you know something in the machine is horribly wrong.  But along they came: Critters (horror), Evolution (comedy), Passenger 57 (action), Arachnophobia (horror), Event Horizon (sci-fi), and Cliffhanger (action).

I nearly spat out what was left of my brain when The Taking of Pelham 123 came in at #25, championed as one of the top disaster films by Radio Times film critic Emma “Daughter of Pickles” Norman because it was “poignant” as “it could happen to any one of us”.  Well, actually, Emma…no, it couldn’t because the layout of the London Underground is far different from that of the New York Subway, so what happens to the 6 train couldn't happen on the Victoria Line.  Thanks for playing anyway. 

And still they continued: The Day of the Triffids (sci-fi), Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (sci-fi), The Day the Earth Stood Still (sci-fi), Air Force One (action thriller), Mars Attacks (comedy sci-fi), The Rock (action), Final Destination (horror), Predator (sci-fi action horror), Speed (action), Con Air (action thriller)…the list was pointless mindless meaningless endless.

And when Die Hard was unveiled as the top “disaster movie” of all time, I have to say I felt more than a little melancholic, having finally realized that I would never get those last three hours back.

I mean, really...Die Hard a disaster movie, for fuck's sake.  Honestly, using the programme makers’ criteria, The Wizard of Oz would be classed as a disaster movie because it features a tornado, Singing in the Rain would become a triumph over adversity in the face of chronic precipitation, and Ice Age: The Meltdown would probably be rated higher than An Inconvenient Truth.  And rightly so.

Notable omissions?  Well, Independence Day, for starters (a true sci-fi / disaster hybrid, if not a very good one).  Rollercoaster, perhaps.  If one were to include TV movies, Hillsborough would surely have had to be considered - although I’m not sure the producers would have had the balls, let alone been able to get a cohesive overview from the majority of its contributors.  Either Threads or its US TV equivalent, The Day After, should definitely have been on the list - but perhaps Times readers don’t see nuclear annihilation as being as much of a disaster as Sandra Bullock behind the wheel of a speeding bus.  It's close, I grant you, but not close enough.

As for dramatizations of real events, the 9/11 double whammy (if you'll pardon the expression) of World Trade Center and United 93 would still have been eligible despite both films having only been released a few months before voting took place - but five probably didn’t have enough loose change to cover the cost of airing clips from either movie.  For all the liberties taken, The Hindenberg might still have deserved a place within the top 40, thanks to its special effects.  And as for Titanic, the highest grossing movie of all time…well, that was obviously a romance and not a disaster movie.  How could I have been so stupid?

Strangely, even though five’s Greatest Ever Movies website still exists, its list of the greatest disaster movies has been deleted.  The channel is quite evidently embarrassed about the list appearing on the web, yet not embarrassed enough not to air the show again, which says quite a lot about its peak-time scheduling these days.

In retrospect, perhaps the biggest disaster of all was that no-one at five had deleted the transmission master in time for last night’s repeat.  I could have done with some real entertainment.

Tetra Pak heir Hans Rausing and his wife Eva have been charged with possession of drugs.

The charge stems from an incident in April when Mrs Rausing is alleged to have tried smuggling Class A and Class C narcotics into the American embassy here in London.

It is rumoured that the couple were arrested as Mrs Rausing made several attempts to prise open the embassy’s fiddly doors, only to result in her stash of crack cocaine and heroin being spilt all over the floor.

What a waste.  There are addicts desperate for a fix in China...