Standup in a swimming pool, naked tractor driving, heart attacks, heckles, walkouts, rain and an onstage marriage proposal – as the fringe turns 75, this year’s performers on the memories that make the festival unique
Mark Watson’s first 24-hour show was the maddest thing I’ve seen. Midnight, Edinburgh, 2004. Mark ambles on, skinny, an underdog, mic in one hand, vague plan scribbled out on a pad in the other. Fifty people there, not knowing precisely why. The “plan” was to freewheel until it got to midnight again. I was in that room, bewitched by it all. Mark was unheralded, not yet famous, you wouldn’t necessarily back him to get through the first 45 minutes.
In 2003 I was doing three shows. First a split bill of half an hour each with Micky Flanagan. He did his famous “out out” and I made my Monkey puppet hump a pint glass. Second was a walk-on part in Arthur Smith’s show about Dante, where I dressed as a dominatrix and hurled abuse at him. Third was a play by Henry Naylor called Finding Bin Laden. I played a fiercely earnest journalist disgusted with the sanitised taste and decency of the press.
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