The greatest shows on EARTH
He’s one of Britain’s best-loved comedians and a veteran of the Edinburgh Fringe. Here, in a riotous and deeply personal account, Al Murray explores the wonders of the festival – and reveals what keeps him coming back...
IDON’T know what your idea of a perfect summer is but I found mine in 1988. It rained a lot and I had to sleep on the floor in a Masonic lodge, but it was my idea of heaven.
It’s 31 years since I started going to the Edinburgh Fringe and this year, like last year, and the year before that, and many, many years stretching back, I’ll be there again, plying my wares and playing to festival crowds.
Why would I keep going? Surely by now, you might ask, three decades in, the novelty must have worn off? In short, no. Because the point of the Fringe – and frankly it’s always been the Fringe to me, if there’s a Festival on somewhere in Edinburgh, good luck to ’em – is its relentless and perpetual state of novelty and change.
Being someone wary of nostalgia and suspicious of looking back and thinking everything was rosy back in the good old days... look where that can get you – I can’t and won’t find myself saying “Oh it’s too big, it’s lost focus, it’s not got the same spirit it used to have”, and whatever else people might be complaining about.
Because, if you are complaining about the Fringe, and the Festival I suppose, then honestly I’d say you have no idea how lucky you are. It’s the Greatest Show On Earth, for Peter Cook’s sake.
Certainly when I first came to Edinburgh in the late 1980s with a kids’ show and a sketch group of friends who I’d bullied into performing (they’re all sensibly professional people, doing sensibly professional things now) the feeling of being part of something astonishing and exciting was almost overwhelming.
In 1989 I saw Fringe darlings the Doug Anthony Allstars – profane, profound and very, very smelly. I saw Paul McDermott with, as he says, ‘the voice of a Meadowlark’, climbing the columns in the old Fringe Club at Teviot and hurling insults with a s***-eating grin and burning Australian larrikin spirit.
There was Arnold Brown, dead-panning perfectly, Simon Munnery’s early double act – God And Jesus – and the Jools Holland Big Band, too, along with Hattie Hayridge and Tony Allen, the self-styled Godfather of Alternative Comedy.
The Oxford Revue show I was appearing in was declared the Worst Show On The Fringe in not one but two broadsheets – an arrival of sorts. It certainly didn’t deter me, nor its director, Stewart Lee. It gave us something to disprove, something to mobilise against, something to flick Vs at.
BACK in the early 1990s, when I really got going at the Fringe, the whole thing was much smaller: but then again, so were the arts. After all, we only had four channels of telly to watch back then, and nobody goes on about how much better that was.
I played at the Pleasance in those days, the courtyard that for the rest of the year is an unprepossessing car park.
Just like during the Fringe today, it was an artistic beehive – people hoovering up shows like nectar, milling around in their queues, going from show to show via the bars in the courtyard, and when it rained avoiding the trestle tables with inadequate cover, politely parrying away the leaflets from people trying to persuade you to see the show they’re appearing in in 45 minutes’ time and, over the hubbub of conversation, the cries
of ‘the house is now open for….!’. It’s heaven, and it’ll be happening this year, and not just at the Pleasance, but all over the city now that the Fringe has grown so.
I always make sure I go to the Pleasance every year, even though I haven’t played there in a while, to suck up some of this atmosphere. And I always meet folk who used to come to see me back in the Nineties, and there they are, still visiting the Fringe, still filling up on the dazzling amount of stuff that’s on – although, like me, they’re probably wondering where the hot dog stand has got to and which room is Pleasance Above?
At the Pleasance I did my first full show with my old act that involved impressions of machine guns and car boots and the like (another reason not to be nostalgic). I also sat in on Harry Hill’s show Eggs, doing funny voices for when he would answer the phone and stuff like that.
Harry was incredibly hot at the Fringe that year. The act on before us used to run short, and we assured ourselves that must mean he didn’t have an act and was crap. His name was Graham Norton. Wonder what happened to him.
The next year Harry and I, along with a dear friend, the late Matt Bradstock-Smith, who used to play Little Alan Hill, took a punt on a show called Pub Internationale. We had a band called the Pub Band – being direct was in, back then. I played the drums, Harry sang, Matt played a frantic busking style of keyboards.
The shows consisted of various bits and pieces of Harry Hill absurdity and downright daftness, and ended with the band – but we had no linking device, no way of threading it all together until, while performing in the Cabaret Bar at the Pleasance, inspiration struck. ‘Why not,’ I said, ‘say the compere hasn’t turned up and the barman has offered to fill in?’
‘Sure, fine,’ said Harry – he had enough to occupy his mind with his own stuff, rather than worry about what I might be doing. I jotted down some ideas – quickly, mind – and went on and tried out this barman, and somehow it worked. The next day I cut off my hair, and there in the mirror was the Pub Landlord – he emerged over the next few shows. I wonder what I’d have come up with had we been in another kind of room.
Even then, there was talk of how the Fringe was too big and not as good as it used to be, and this talk goes on today, but it is always held in tension with matching grumbles of how there’s not enough arts, they don’t get enough money and aren’t taken seriously.
CAN these contradictions coexist? I expect they can, but it is striking – more and more young people being involved in the arts, which is what has happened at the Fringe, is a good thing, right?
In a way it reminds me of the logic of people who say they want comedians to be edgy, but not be edgy about THAT (whatever THAT might be, these days).
It’s true, the Fringe is expensive to perform at, it is difficult to carve your way through the crowd as a performer, to make your name, burnish your reputation, but it
always was – and though no one would like to admit it, it’s a competitive environment and performers can be competitive people.
In a way, the grumbling isn’t as good as it used to be – the Fringe has found ways of changing with the times, and changing the times, too. Time was, I’d get back to London and nobody even knew the darned thing was happening – that’s changed, and that’s surely a change for the better. In the late Nineties I had the kind of Fringes you dream of when you start out, with good reviews, even though you try not to read them.
Inevitably the venue will post them on your way into the bloody place, and you’re confronted by a blizzard of opinion. I played to full houses – full houses of people generally there to enjoy themselves, rather than check you out and try to reconcile themselves to the review they read of you.
In the middle of all this, awards are being decided on – and comedians (I can’t speak for the theatre people, who have their own awards stuff going on, too) are basically driven mad by the whole thing. Every effort to say they don’t matter proves they do, and vice versa.
In 1999 I was fortunate enough to win the Perrier Award, though this was somewhat put into its place by my eldest daughter being born the Monday of the final week. I had to cancel a couple of shows and Ed Byrne took over the empty slots – he overheard two women say the baby’s arrival was a pretty lame excuse for pulling a show.
I like to tell my daughter she’s Scottish – she was born at the Simpson Memorial Hospital. This year, I’m staying in one of those swanky flats that’s there instead. I wonder if we will have the same view of The Meadows as the maternity ward.
THEN, and largely because of my daughter, I stayed away for a few years. I played the Fringe again in 2009, relearning the four shows I’d done in the late Nineties and doing them on successive days. No one particularly noticed – I was, quite rightly, old news.
The place was totally different. In the ten years that had passed, new venues had broken through, the Free Fringe was under way, Underbelly’s vast purple cow tent, which has to be something sketched on a napkin at four in the morning in a Fringe bar, had established itself.
Assembly venues had moved to the other side of town, The Stand had expanded from its club origins but retained its seminal stand-up edge. Brilliant new people had elbowed their way through. Everything was different, but it was all exactly the same, changing, moving forward, drawing in new audiences, new arguments, new entertainments.
I remember beat boxing being huge in 2009. I’ve come back every year since then. My kids have come every year, too, and have grown up with it. I give them a Fringe guide, they pick all sorts of weird stuff, and definitely not just comedy... they love the place.
The truth is the Fringe has me and my kids now in its tractor
beam, there is no escape. I’m drawn back by the sense of adventure and excitement that affects even an old lag like me.
So I’m back this year in the Spiegeltent at George Square Assembly, late afternoon, to stay out of the way of anyone worth seeing. I’m bringing the Pub Landlord back to the city of his birth, and playing a show with the Scottish band I find myself in – another by-product of the Fringe and Edinburgh’s lifelong magnetic pull on me. We’re called Fat Cops.
We look like a dad band, smell like one, but we don’t do Alright Now at weddings. We are a heady mix of power pop and mid-life crisis poetry and, with The Bluebells’ Bobby Hodgens on rhythm guitar, the songs have to pass muster.
The Spiegeltent is one of my favourite venues, the sort of place I wanted to play way back at the beginning. It has a sort of carny feel that you don’t quite get in a lecture hall or a portable cabin – Fringe venues are anything you can get some chairs into.
George Square Gardens are buzzing with people, and leafletters, like wasps, bother everyone. A few years ago we put on a pub quiz in the afternoons, reviewed by one Fringe sheet as ‘hideously ill-conceived’ – yeah, well, just because you didn’t win it.
Punters played for the chance to win a frozen chicken which, after one show, we saw jammed into a bin. A few days later, we found a chicken someone had lobbed onto the roof of the dressing-rooms backstage, and it had expanded to three times its size in that summer’s unseasonal sunshine.
Yes, the rain... did I mention the rain? Even Edinburgh’s challenging microclimate can’t keep the Fringe down. Because when you’re at the Greatest Show On Earth, what’s being damp?
Al Murray: Landlord of Hope and Glory, Assembly George Square Gardens, August 2-11. Fat Cops, Assembly George Square Gardens, August 7