And suddenly, via a comment on Youtube, we discover Undarntale. How long's this been going on? "Everyone (except Frisk who’s a regular puppet on a stick) is a sock puppet with a Scottish accent. Based on Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre" Flattering, it's done by someone called Lydia Prower and can be found on Deviant Art.
When will people posting on Facebook realise their posts aren't seen in real time? And they're watching sodding Game Of Thrones, which isn't even sodding shown in sodding real time! And which I've never seen! To be honest, I wouldn't know if it was being spoilered for me, even if it was.
But honestly, if I see "now that was an ending" one more time! For two days now, and they keep coming.
Okay, got a Tea Time Theme Time for you (off of BBC 6 Music's Mark & Radcliffe show). What connects these three songs? (Spoiler warning - if you know the answer, don't blurt it straight out. Let others guess, but let us know you know.)
The Night I Lost The Will To Fight - Cursive
What A Waste - Ian Dury & The Blockheads
Eton Rifles - The Jam
Who else finishes watching a movie and immediately starts googling the locations? Just watched The Man In The White Suit. Locations are actually quite hard to find, I still don't know where the factory was. But the chances are it was in Burnley. Cos the house Alec Guinness lived in was. Here's what it looked like in 1951 and what it looks like now.
The Guardian has invented a new meaning for the word "dominate". Apparently "female comics dominate the nine strong shortlist" for the Comedy Awards. Four of them. And five men. Equality achieved.
I've got a pair of tights so thick they can't feel global warming. They're Climate Change Denier.
Bruce Forsyth has offered an exceptional variety of catchphrases for people to make tribute gags from. You could draw up a Brucie Bingo card. So far I've seen a few "Didn't he do well"s, a few variations of "nice to see you to see you nice", a couple of plays on the conveyor belt with the cuddly toy, and one person doing "Keep out of the black, and in the red; nothing in this game for two in a bed" which is either cleverly ironic or awkward. Still to come "scores on the doors", "give us a twirl" and "you're my favourite". So, from Mr Comics here, a reminder that Brucie was also the cover star of Film Fun back in his Sunday Night At The London Palladium days.
He did do well, though, didn't he. Cuddly toy.
Kev F Sutherland, as well as writing and drawing for The Beano, Marvel, Doctor Who et al, runs Comic Art Masterclasses in schools, libraries and art centres - emailfor details, and follow him on Facebook and Twitter. View the promo video
The Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre do a tiny bit more Shakespeare in Halifax (Oct 26), Wolverhampton (Oct 28), Nottingham (Nov 4), and Goole (Nov 17) this autumn, returning with a brand new show in 2018. Stay tuned.
In recent weeks we've discovered a great TV show, and it only took us 55 years to stumble upon it.
It was while Googling Roald Dahl's Tales Of The Unexpected, after an episode of it had popped up on a cable channel, that we discovered we weren't as familiar with Roald Dahl's TV work as we thought. Everyone of our vintage remembers Tales Of The Unexpected. I even remember watching the first series, way back in 1979, and even a Peter Cook parody of Dahl's fireside introductions, which joked about how Dahl had made his name sound more exotic by removing the 'n' from the middle of it.
What I'd never come across before was its predecessor, 'Way Out (the apostrophe's part of the title), a similar anthology series that ran for 14 weeks on CBS in the States, from March to July 1961 (when I was just a twinkle) and never shown in the UK.
A series of horror/thriller tales, it shares one story in common with Tales Of The Unexpected, Dahl's own William And Mary, which was remade in 79 with Elaine Strich in the lead role. The other stories in Way Out are by American writers, each prefaced and back-announced by Dahl giving beautifully dark and sardonic monologues reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. His name, by the way, is pronounced Roo-ahld Dahl in these shows, which must be the way he preferred it.
The significant thing is that almost all of them are on Youtube and, though not of the highest definition (never having been given an official DVD or even VHS release, the only available copies are bootlegs) they are a treat to watch. Taking you right back in time to a primitive era of American TV, where the shows were shot on video (unlike the 35mm film classics we're used to, like The Dick Van Dyke show we're enjoying on Netflix, and of course Bilko), Way Out also has the distinction of being one of the last US TV dramas to be made in New York, before all but late night comedy and chat shows moved to LA.
The stories have an eerie quality, added to by the distancing patina of age and lo-fidelity. And, though a couple of stories are hacky and run of the mill, most stand out with moodiness, surprising twists and genuine spookiness. They do, however, share another common factor which you can't miss after you've watched a few, and that's old fashioned 1950s misogyny. More than half feature men wanting to kill their wives or vice versa.
My favourite is The Overnight Case by Nicholas Pryor, a mind-twisting dream-within-a-dream story that knocks spots off Inception. Dissolve To Black is reminiscent of a recent Inside No 9 set in a TV studio; Side Show has all the best qualities of EC's Tales From The Crypt comic; and The Croaker features a child actor who went on to be John Boy in The Waltons.
The feature that dates these Way Out episodes more than anything is the sponsorship and the product placement. There are ads throughout for L & M cigarettes, plugging them as if they're pretty well a health food, and throughout his intros Roald Dahl is rather conspicously smoking a fag.
I can heartily recommend these to everyone. (The Way Out episodes, not the L&M cigarettes which, spoiler alert, turned out not to be very good for poor Roald in the long run).
Kev F Sutherland, as well as writing and drawing for The Beano, Marvel, Doctor Who et al, runs Comic Art Masterclasses in schools, libraries and art centres - emailfor details, and follow him on Facebook and Twitter. View the promo video
The Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre do a tiny bit more Shakespeare in Halifax (Oct 26), Wolverhampton (Oct 28), Nottingham (Nov 4), and Goole (Nov 17) this autumn, returning with a brand new show in 2018. Stay tuned.
Having completed the script a month ago to the day, and delivered the line art a fortnight ago, it seems positively sluggish that I've only delivered the colour art today for The Nativity, a job that is, essentially 8 pages long (though it's broken down into A5 pages, so it's 16 really, in old money). But given that I've managed to cram in Comic Art Masterclasses in London (three times) and Andover, and Socks gigs in Derbyshire, London and Kirkcaldy, as well as trying not forget this is a holiday month when I'd normally be up in Edinburgh, I think I've done well working at this admittedly leisurely rate. It's also fun for a job to feel a bit like a labour of love. You remember, the way it was when I started drawing comics as a kid?
The timing of this job has worked out perfectly, funding me through August without the usual rigmarole of coughing up the vast expense of Edinburgh, then waiting till the Autumn for it all to come back in again. So civilised. Though not so attractive that I haven't already made plans to drain all my resources again next year by returning to Edinburgh with the Socks.
I'm hoping I'll get the go ahead soon to draw up the Women Of The Bible strips that I wrote at the start of the year but that are awaiting editorial feedback. It would be the best thing ever to have Ruth, Rahab and Jael Wife Of Heber ready to join Esther in a book by the start of the new year. Let us see what the autumn brings.
Though nobody will know it but me, the skinny one out of the Magi is supposed to be based on Brian Cox. Don't worry, it doesn't spoil his gags that I'm rubbish at caricatures.*
*NB: I'm not rubbish at caricatures, I'm brilliant at them, and available for parties. Book now for Christmas.
Kev F Sutherland, as well as writing and drawing for The Beano, Marvel, Doctor Who et al, runs Comic Art Masterclasses in schools, libraries and art centres - emailfor details, and follow him on Facebook and Twitter. View the promo video
The most common complaints about the
Edinburgh Fringe are that is too large and unwieldy, and that Comedy dominates
it to the detriment of other artforms. This is quite possibly undeniable. But
how did it get to be so? Let me have a look, possibly unscientifically but
hopefully objectively, at some of the steps along the way that have led to the
Edinburgh Fringe as we find it today.
1947 – Fringe and Festival start.
The
word ‘Fringe’ however, hasn’t been coined yet.
1948 – The term ‘Fringe’ is coined
The term ‘Fringe’ is coined thus by Robert
Kemp in the Edinburgh Evening News: “Round the fringe of official Festival
drama there seems to be more private enterprise than before.” This term goes on
to develop the meaning of Alternative Theatre. Fringe Theatre is then exported
from Edinburgh to London, and to the rest of the world, by the likes of Joan
Littlewood who brings a company up in 1949.
1958 – First Free Fringe
Yehudi Menuhin creates the Free Fringe. Or
tries to. Menuhin hires the Embassy Cinema in Pilton and wants to make
admission free. A legal technicality prevents this, meaning the one-off
performance was staged at a shilling per ticket, still well below the price of
the Kings, the Lyceum, or the Playhouse. The place was packed, and he knew he’d
succeeded in reaching non-Festival punters when "to Menuhin's delight, they
clapped in all the wrong places."
1960 – Beyond The Fringe.
Part of the official Festival, as we all know,
but establishing the implicit link between Fringe and comedy forever more. The
Cambridge Footlights, The Oxford Revue and other University groups had been
coming to Edinburgh with their amateur shows from the start. It was in the
1960s that Edinburgh began to be a showcase for their talents.
1966 – David Frost comes to town.
You can blame David Frost for many things,
and bringing together of Edinburgh comedians and the telly is one of them. He
had come up as a Cambridge Footlighter in the early 60s, and used many Oxbridge
talents on his shows. Now a major TV celebrity, he started staging late night
chat shows and cabarets at Edinburgh and attracting national press coverage. In
a talk to the Fringe Club, there was a call by John Calder (creator of the
forerunner of the Edinburgh Book Festival) for "two Fringes, professional
and amateur", suggesting that "the Fringe had taken over drama from
the official Festival."
1970s – Fringe officially “too big”.
We know it’s too big, because everyone
keeps saying so. In 1976, Cordelia Oliver writes in The Guardian, “The Edinburgh Fringe grows grosser every year like a fat old cat going to seed and
not giving a damn. The official Fringe programme lists at least two hundred
companies…” Two. Hundred. Companies. By 1979 that had grown to over 359
companies, in 2016 the total is listed as 3269 shows. In 1977 the retiring
Festival director bemoans the TV coverage, revolving around a Russell Harty
hosted chat show, saying “ it was principally the Fringe and every allusion
to 'serious' programmes was carefully avoided.” The Fringe, and by the sound of
it comedy, was taking over.
1978 – The multi-tenanted venue.
When William Burdett-Coutts hired The
Assembly Rooms and divided it up into smaller performances spaces, then curated
a programme of events to take place there, he single-handedly created the
template for much of The Fringe from then on. A multiplex of entertainment,
only possible with such a sitting-duck audience pool to draw on as was to be
found in Edinburgh in August. Other venues working on a similar principle were
The Wireworks (1978 – 92) on the Royal Mile – built by comedians, Rowan
Atkinson drove the JCB to lay the foundations – and The Circuit (82 – 86) in a
marquee on the crater of a demolished building which would go on to become the
new Traverse Theatre at the back of the Usher Hall.Those two venues were short-lived, but they
were soon joined by two with a longer lifespan.
1981 – The Perrier Award.
Won initially by The Cambridge Footlights,
whose revue was given a TV version as a result, making overnight stars of Fry,
Laurie, Slattery and Thompson, this publicity-hungry award went on to become
the centrepiece of Edinburgh’s annual month of comedy promotion.
1980s – The Alternative Comedy Boom.
The Pleasance began life as a curated
multi-tenanted venue in 1984, the Gilded Balloon joining it in 1986. With the
Assemblycompleting The Big Three, they
were home to a lot of comedy. There’d been a boom in TV comedy, largely led by
the newly born Channel 4, whose Head Of Comedy Seamus Cassidy made Edinburgh an
annual fishing trip for talent. At this time two big agencies – Off The Kerb
and Avalon – came into being, and made Edinburgh and the contest for the
Perrier Award, the hub of their comedy-to-TV promotion game.
1989 – Edinburgh Nights.
BBC TV had given sporadic coverage to the
Edinburgh Festival and Fringe since the 1960s,but from 1989 it became an extension of Newsnight’s Later arts
programme, under the name Edinburgh Nights. Presented by Mark Lamarr from the
mid-90s it reached great heights of popularity and publicised the Edinburgh
Fringe as never before.
1990s – Comedy Is The New Rock & Roll.
Baddiel and Newman off the telly sold out
Wembley Stadium and the revolving door between stand up comedy and Edinburgh
and TV success seemed firmly established.The list of Perrier Newcomers alone is a roll call of names that remain
giants of TV comedy today, from Tim Vine & Harry Hill to The Mighty Boosh
and The League Of Gentlemen.In 1999 600
companies give 15,000 performances at The Fringe (these not-quite-the-same
figures make comparisons hard. We do know, though, that the total number of
performances in 2016 was 50,266. So, by some measure or other, the Fringe grows
by over 200% in a little over 15 years).
1996 – Bridget Jones Diary.
In Helen Fielding’s novel, her eponymous
hero and her London friends go to the Edinburgh Fringe for the weekend, setting
into cultural concrete, more firmly than a decade of Edinburgh Nights had done,
The Fringe as a thing one did if one was one of the fashionable crowd. A slice of their experience: "Arthur
Smith's Hamlet is completely booked up, so we could go to the Coen brothers
instead at five, but that means we'll be too late for Richard Herring. So shall
we not go to Jenny Eclair ... - chuh! I frankly I don't know why she still
bothers - and do Lanark, then try to get into Harry Hill or Bondages and Julian
Clary. Hang on, I'll try the Gilded Balloon. No, Harry Hill's booked up, so
shall we skip the Coen brothers?"
In
the same way that was happening to Glastonbury, gentrification was coming to
Edinburgh. With it, ever-increasing prices.
2000s – Explosion (and burning down) of venues.
2000 – C Venues, 2002 – Underbelly, 2007 –
Udderbelly, and from then on we have Zoo venues, Space Venues, Greenside,
Southside,and every side inbetween. The
multi-tenanted venue, devised by Assembly in 1978, became the repeated model
across Edinburgh seeing an expansion which, thankfully, redressed the balance
away from the domination of stand up comedy, but greatly increased the number
of performers and shows competing for a finite audience. My own venue, The
Gilded Balloon, survived burning down, and being sponsored by a tobacco
company. In so many ways, we weren’t in the 1980s any more.
2001 - I start bringing shows up to Edinburgh
This doesn't make much of a dent on Edinburgh Fringe's history, but it helps to explain my obsession with it. In 2001, having been performing stand up for a few years, compering The Comedy Box in Bristol and schlepping round the circuit, I had devised the stage show The Sitcom Trials, which was proving quite popular in London and Bristol. Miranda Hart had been performing The Orange Girls with Charity Trimm at the Gilded Balloon in previous years and had an offer for a slot but couldn't take it. Since Miranda was appearing in my regular London shows, I took the opportunity to seize that slot and take myself and a cast of four - Miranda, Charity, Gez Foster, and Dan Clegg - up to Edinburgh. We performed The Sitcom Trials at The Gilded Balloon's venue on Blair St to such success that I returned in 2002 and 2004.
2006 – Free Fringe Returns
Free Fringe, Free Festival, and later
Heroes and others, developed new ways of funding shows, taking performers away
for the Pay-To-Play Fringe model by now established in the curated venues, and
again increasing the number of shows on offer. Now more was free than ever
before and, ten years on from Bridget Jones, everything from food to tickets to
accommodation cost twice as much as it ever had.
Feeling almost like the bubble had burst,
the Olympics in London coinciding with the Edinburgh Fringe had a devastating effect. As Richard Herring put it,the
Olympics “sucked the punters out of Edinburgh like someone opening the door on
a spaceship.” We all recovered and came back the next year.
2017 – Lots of moaning. So, business as
usual.
Which brings us to the present day (when this post was originally written). 2017
was a year when I read more negativity than I can remember reading before. From
the chair of the Cockburn Association (me neither) saying the Fringe is “choking the city” and urging some restraint or changes,
to Tommy Shepard of the Stand continuing to suggest the Fringe should move to
earlier in the summer so as to minimize the clash with the Festival and Tattoo,
and to coincide more with the Scottish school holidays. More observations
collected below.
2021 saw an odd year where most shows weren't confident enough in advance to be able to plan to come to Edinburgh, lockdowns and emergency regulations were still happening right through the spring, so come August Edinburgh saw a Fringe with a fraction of its usual number of shows, a much higher proportion of them being by local performers, and almost all of them making a killing.
When I returned in 2022 it seemed to be business as usual, and I got more reviews during my shortest ever run (just 10 days) than I'd had in any of my previous month-long sojourns. I then found myself unable to afford to return in 2023 or 2024 (at time of writing this update I am missing it like crazy), and I'm making plans to return in 2025.
As for how the bigger picture has changed, you'd better ask someone who's up there. Accommodation has become even more cripplingly expensive. But has that deterred the number of people taking shows up? There are 3317 shows in the 2024 Edfringe programme. (Up from 2023's 3013, but not quite back to 2019's record 3800 shows)
Expect this blog to be updated again in the future. I am addicted to the Edinburgh Fringe and I can't see that changing in a hurry.
Kev F Sutherland 2017, 2024
Sweet Smell Of Sockscess - Putting A Show On At The Edinburgh Fringe by the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre (2024). Amazon-ebook
(From original blog post 2017: The Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre do a tiny bit more Shakespeare in Halifax (Oct 26), Wolverhampton (Oct 28), Nottingham (Nov 4), and Goole (Nov 17) this autumn, returning with a brand new show in 2018. Stay tuned.) EDINBURGH TALES - Online reports from 2017 Big Four Venues (Gilded Balloon, Assembly, Underbelly, Pleasance) announce record-breaking ticket sales across the festival, with 1,520,435 tickets sold, an increase of 15% on Fringe 2016.
Kev F's Comic Art Masterclasses, booking into 2018
As you've probably heard, The Beano has been named as the theme for the Reading Agency's Summer Reading Challenge 2018.
As a writer & artist for the Beano (& Marvel & Doctor Who comics) I'll be continuing to bring my Comic Art Masterclasses to schools, libraries and art centres across the country, giving children an insight into the way it's done in The Beano, and in all comic genres from superhero to indie to manga and beyond. In my many classes over a decade of working in schools, I've found comics to be a vital missing link in teaching literacy. I'm regularly told I get kids who don't read to start reading, and kids who don't write to start telling stories in pictures.
I'd love to deliver workshops to
your schoolkids, if you'd like "The Man From The Beano" to come to town.
My workshop (which you can see in action here: https://youtu.be/XrV_rgutWHg )
is for pupils aged 7 and older. By the end of two & a half hours, a class
of up to 30 at a time has produced a comic to take away, containing a
strip by each of them, plus an individual caricature by me, and learned
all there is to know about comics and manga.
For any further details, please feel free to ring or email. I look forward to being able to pay you a visit at some time soon.
Brand new video from the Scottish Falsetto Socks, 50 Money Jokes (click to play), was inspired by the winner of this year's Edinburgh Fringe Best Joke Of The Fringe. Also available without subtitles. After a couple of days the Facebook version has 1700 views, 50 shares and 6688 people reached. (Facebook page currently stands on 2608 likes and 2577 follows. I ought to start keeping tabs on these things.)
This year's Joke Of The Fringe, which is a contest sponsored by Dave that supposedly involves jokes being judges at this year's Edinburgh Fringe (though that subterfuge was blown when the shortlist of gags was published before the Fringe had even started, showing that it's a promotional campaign contrived between an ad agency and PR companies, leaving most Edinburgh performers totally out of the loop) was won by Cambridge Footlighter Ken Cheng.
His joke was "I'm not a fan of the new £1 coin, but then I hate all change". I immediately looked on Twitter to see how original that gag was. I found examples of it from March this year.
I posted this rather arsey observation and, to his credit, Ken Cheng tweeted me back with minutes.
I googled a bit further and found examples of the gag going back to 2015...
Then, revelation of revelations I went back to 2014, and who do I find tweeting the gag on March 21st 2014? Only Ken blooming Cheng himself!
So he is vindicated and justice is done. Ken Cheng tweeted the gag on March 21st 2014. Just nobody mention these tweets from a couple of days earlier...
The Scottish Falsetto Socks will be eligible for Dave's Joke Of The Fringe when they return in 2018. But since they don't hire a PR company to send their jokes in advance to Dave's ad agency, they won't be appearing on next year's shortlist (some jokes of which will have been written many many years ago).
The Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre do a tiny bit more Shakespeare in Halifax, Wolverhampton, Nottingham and Goole this autumn, returning with a brand new show in 2018. Stay tuned.
After a quiet month for the Socks, we crammed quite the variety of gigs into a week, giving ourselves a mini Edinburgh Fringe experience to boot.
Last Saturday saw the Socks playing the New Blood stage at Bloodstock, a Heavy Metal festival in Derbyshire. And very heavy metal it is too, the sort where the vocalists scream constantly and the guitars don't stop for breath. Quite how comedy was going to go down there was hard to predict. But what do you know, being the middle of three acts, doing just 20 minutes, we went down brilliantly.
We gave them I'm A Sock, Halloween, Michael Jackson, Walk On The Wild Side and Sweary Poppins, all self-teched by me from my ipod taped to the set, and that was twenty minutes flown by in a blink. Smashing crowd.
The on Wednesday and Thursday the Socks played The Bill Murray pub as part of The Camden Fringe (thanks to Louisa Gummer for the photo). Advance sales were slow, though I have to say I enjoyed having the Red61 ticket sales to check every day, giving me a small taste of the Edinburgh experience that we're missing this year. When it came to it though, Wednesday had about 30 in, and Thursday looked dangerously close to a sellout (the room only holds 50). At time of writing I only know the advance sales and can't see the door sales, but they were both cracking gigs, getting us a 4 star review and being a perfect end to the Socks Do Shakespeare spring tour.
Then on Friday it was off to Kirkcaldy. A booking that I'd agreed to, initially hoping I'd surround it with classes in libraries up there and maybe make a week of it, it ended up with me flying, hiring a car, and staying over in a B&B, all to play a 10 minute slot (shortest slot of the year I think) in a variety show. So not a very profitable gig, but an enjoyable one.
And an interesting one. A young magician called Liam Black had organised it, and put together quite the most diverse bill I've ever been on. The Socks followed a childrens Pipe Band. Liam himself did fifty-year-old gags, some of which hadn't gone through a 21st century filter but the audience seemed to like them, and he did a lot of trad magic tricks, which again the coothy audience warmed to. There was a mind reader, a singer from a kids show called The Singing Kettle which I hadn't heard of but which was apparently massive in Scotland back in the day, and there was Dean Park, who's been in panto for 40 years and who tells The Comedians style of 1960s jokes (luckily racism free) in a cracking professional style, opening and closing with a cheesy song.
My favourite act was stand up David Kay, an actual circuit comic with a unique dry style which only some of the audience got, and with whom I went for a drink afterwards, learning a lot about the working of Scottish TV comedy (he;s had a few TV things, including a sitcom pilot made by the Absolutely guys).
To round off my whistle stop Scottish tour, I made it into Edinburgh on Saturday morning before anyone was awake (well, from 10 - 11.30, so before any comedians were up) and got to feel a tiny bit of the Edinburgh vibe I've been missing. I smelled the Edinburgh smell! Also revisited our haunts of Bristo Square, seeing its remodelled look, Worlds End Close where we've stayed for two years, up the Royal Mile, down the Mound, past the Assembly Rooms, through Princes St Gardens, up The Vennel where we stayed two years ago, and away. And do you know what, I felt almost like I'd done Edinburgh, without having to form out six thousand quid for the privilege.
In the airport I started writing ideas, and even some bad gags, for what might turn out to be next year's show. I'm starting with Art as the subject, but that could change (art was to be the subject for 2015's show, before it morphed into Minging Detectives, so anything could happen). Best gag so far? "I discovered I could do modern art when I was tracing maps of the Middle East. I couldn’t do a trace of Beirut, I couldn’t do a trace of Egypt, but I could do a good Trace o’Yemen." So, a lot of work to do yet, eh.
The Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre do a tiny bit more Shakespeare in Halifax, Wolverhampton, Nottingham and Goole this autumn, returning with a brand new show in 2018. Stay tuned.
