At the Fringe
Aug. 30th, 2013 06:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
daibhidcWe made it down to Edinburgh for a long weekend, and managed to pack in a fair load of stuff.
On the Thursday night we saw Ad Lib, a sort of chatshow affair presented by Fred MacCauley and someone else, and that night with John Lloyd and Sir Terry Pratchett (and Rob Willkins) as guests. Lloyd mentioned he was Honarary Professor of Ignorance at Southampton University (they let him pick his title and he chose the one he used on Museum of Everything) which not-MacCauley said sounded a lot like an Unseen University title. Sir Terry was asked what professorial title he'd pick if he could choose one, and he went for Professor of Serendipity.
We also learnt a few details of Raising Steam, including that the tough part of the book was working out how long it would take to build [a number I've forgotten] miles of track, because the way Discworld works you can't just wave a magic wand if you want to get something real. MacCauley came back with "Less time than getting Edinburgh a tram!" and Rob commented that you could now see the fans in the audience trying to calculate what was [that number] miles from Ankh-Morpork...
Rob explained how he became Terry's PA, saying he started out working for Terry's agent Colin Smythe, but while Colin is a lovely man, Rob quickly realised he couldn't be an agent because he has a concience!
(Terry seems to be looking a lot worse than the last time I saw him. On the other hand, that time he was looking a lot better than the time before, so you just don't know.)
On Friday we went to see John Lloyd again in Liff of QI. Fascinating stuff, talking about his whole career, with anecdotes of varying relevence. My favourite relevent anecdote was about how he got called up before the Head of BBC Comedy (who had worked on TW3) when Not the Nine O'Clock News jammed the switchboard.
"Thirty complaints! Thirty! Call that a satire show? Should be sixty!"
Then we went to the book festival, where we browsed for a while and had a cup of tea in the bookshop/coffeeshop tent, before going to see the Doctor Who books panel; Steve Cole, Justin Richards, and Ben Aaronovitch. Struck by how honest everyone was, with Cole freely admitting that the EDAs were initially run by someone who didn't care less about DW, and he was afraid that if he revealed he was a fan, he wouldn't get the job, and Ben saying that DW in any media was at its best when the BBC wasn't interested enough to interfere, which was almost always.
On Saturday we went to Mitch Benn is the 37th Beatle, an entertaining look at which of the many Fifth Beatles actually deserves the title (it's Pete Best) and where the other alleged Fifth Beatles actually rank. The list was then written down on Mitch's whiteboard. ("Actually, it's the Beatlesboard, but everybody just calls it the white board...") Breaking up what was essentially a history of popular culture from a Beatles perspective were Mitch's Beatles parody songs, including ones I'd heard before ("Dick Rowe", "Don't Release This Song" and "Somebody Decapitated Ringo") and new ones written specially for this show, which he commented were close enough that it was unlikely the show would get a CD release. Which is a shame, because if it did, I would definitely get it for my Beatles-fan sister's Christmas.
And on Sunday we saw Norman Lovett. Who was very funny, but, well, he's been funnier. He opened the show by saying he didn't care how it went because it was the last day, and I genuinely don't know how serious he was being. And he jumped to the carrier bag thing much earlier than he normally does. But his comments on the slides he showed are reliably amusing, and one riff on body language he got going was hilarious. He finished off by going on for a bit about the Sugababes, and the current version of the group which doesn't have any of the original group, who have apparently reformed but now have to call themselves something else. Norman Lovett is the 37th Sugababe?
We also saw a lot of other things happening on the streets. (It's weird walking round Edinburgh during the Festival when you're actually familiar with the city. It's like someone built another city out of tents, plywood castles and inflatable cows and superimposed it on the one you know. There were times when I genuinely couldn't work out what places looked like normally, and that was in the University/Museum/Forbidden Planet area - the part I'm most familar with!) There were a few shows I vaguely thought about going to on the spur of the moment, but needed to get lunch and so on.
Oh, and on Monday we were at the zoo and saw the pandas, as well as many other animals. We also saw the very common Bored TV Journos, whose natural habitat is outside anywhere something vaguely newsworthy might be happening, pointing their cameras even though they know they're not going to see anything. In this case, the cameras were pointed at the panda enclosure, even though the keeper must come past them every ten minutes, explaining to a new group of visitors that Tian Tian will give birth in a private hideaway...
On the Thursday night we saw Ad Lib, a sort of chatshow affair presented by Fred MacCauley and someone else, and that night with John Lloyd and Sir Terry Pratchett (and Rob Willkins) as guests. Lloyd mentioned he was Honarary Professor of Ignorance at Southampton University (they let him pick his title and he chose the one he used on Museum of Everything) which not-MacCauley said sounded a lot like an Unseen University title. Sir Terry was asked what professorial title he'd pick if he could choose one, and he went for Professor of Serendipity.
We also learnt a few details of Raising Steam, including that the tough part of the book was working out how long it would take to build [a number I've forgotten] miles of track, because the way Discworld works you can't just wave a magic wand if you want to get something real. MacCauley came back with "Less time than getting Edinburgh a tram!" and Rob commented that you could now see the fans in the audience trying to calculate what was [that number] miles from Ankh-Morpork...
Rob explained how he became Terry's PA, saying he started out working for Terry's agent Colin Smythe, but while Colin is a lovely man, Rob quickly realised he couldn't be an agent because he has a concience!
(Terry seems to be looking a lot worse than the last time I saw him. On the other hand, that time he was looking a lot better than the time before, so you just don't know.)
On Friday we went to see John Lloyd again in Liff of QI. Fascinating stuff, talking about his whole career, with anecdotes of varying relevence. My favourite relevent anecdote was about how he got called up before the Head of BBC Comedy (who had worked on TW3) when Not the Nine O'Clock News jammed the switchboard.
"Thirty complaints! Thirty! Call that a satire show? Should be sixty!"
Then we went to the book festival, where we browsed for a while and had a cup of tea in the bookshop/coffeeshop tent, before going to see the Doctor Who books panel; Steve Cole, Justin Richards, and Ben Aaronovitch. Struck by how honest everyone was, with Cole freely admitting that the EDAs were initially run by someone who didn't care less about DW, and he was afraid that if he revealed he was a fan, he wouldn't get the job, and Ben saying that DW in any media was at its best when the BBC wasn't interested enough to interfere, which was almost always.
On Saturday we went to Mitch Benn is the 37th Beatle, an entertaining look at which of the many Fifth Beatles actually deserves the title (it's Pete Best) and where the other alleged Fifth Beatles actually rank. The list was then written down on Mitch's whiteboard. ("Actually, it's the Beatlesboard, but everybody just calls it the white board...") Breaking up what was essentially a history of popular culture from a Beatles perspective were Mitch's Beatles parody songs, including ones I'd heard before ("Dick Rowe", "Don't Release This Song" and "Somebody Decapitated Ringo") and new ones written specially for this show, which he commented were close enough that it was unlikely the show would get a CD release. Which is a shame, because if it did, I would definitely get it for my Beatles-fan sister's Christmas.
And on Sunday we saw Norman Lovett. Who was very funny, but, well, he's been funnier. He opened the show by saying he didn't care how it went because it was the last day, and I genuinely don't know how serious he was being. And he jumped to the carrier bag thing much earlier than he normally does. But his comments on the slides he showed are reliably amusing, and one riff on body language he got going was hilarious. He finished off by going on for a bit about the Sugababes, and the current version of the group which doesn't have any of the original group, who have apparently reformed but now have to call themselves something else. Norman Lovett is the 37th Sugababe?
We also saw a lot of other things happening on the streets. (It's weird walking round Edinburgh during the Festival when you're actually familiar with the city. It's like someone built another city out of tents, plywood castles and inflatable cows and superimposed it on the one you know. There were times when I genuinely couldn't work out what places looked like normally, and that was in the University/Museum/Forbidden Planet area - the part I'm most familar with!) There were a few shows I vaguely thought about going to on the spur of the moment, but needed to get lunch and so on.
Oh, and on Monday we were at the zoo and saw the pandas, as well as many other animals. We also saw the very common Bored TV Journos, whose natural habitat is outside anywhere something vaguely newsworthy might be happening, pointing their cameras even though they know they're not going to see anything. In this case, the cameras were pointed at the panda enclosure, even though the keeper must come past them every ten minutes, explaining to a new group of visitors that Tian Tian will give birth in a private hideaway...
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Date: 2013-09-02 03:17 pm (UTC)