Still Got It - drawings by Mum

Mum’s cartoon of the day she was moved from the hospital in Harborough to the Knoll by a taxi driver who seemed to be outstandingly inept. Having asked to be paid in cash, he stopped by the cashpoint and promptly ran out of petrol. Being only half a mile from the Knoll, he then wheeled Mum in a wheelchair up the road, in the rain. Not what she was hoping for. But at least it inspired this drawing, so there’s that.

Mum, as you’ll know if you’ve been following this blog, has recently been admitted to a care home. She’s in the Knoll in Kibworth, which used to be my mate Nick’s house, as her condition continues to be stable but, as she might describe it, boring. She really has precious little energy, wanting to sleep most of the time, and is having increasing difficulty with her manual dexterity - a pox on whoever designed phones that you have to tap and swipe in order to answer them, and to all those designers with their nimble fingers who think pinching and swiping with two fingers without accidentally pressing the wrong bit of the screen remains easy forever!

So it’s a delight to see her still drawing. Not anything near as much as she’s always done, and inevitably not up the quality of her usual work. But I’d happily rank her work alongside late Picassos and a good few others I’ve seen (this summer’s show or Orson Welles drawings at Summerhall springs to mind).

This is a sketch of Paul, who is, I believe, the handyman here at the Knoll. I may be belittling his job, he could well be the boss for all I know, I’ve not met him yet. He’s been putting pictures up on the wall for Mum, mostly photos of the family, and her watercolour of “General Jacks” (the Old House in Kibworth Harcourt, which we’ve always known by that name.)

Here’s Jude, Paul, and Mum's zimmer frame. She’s not in a hurry to go downstairs and eat with the others, preferring her quiet wee room. I say quiet, Jude (with the tiniest help from me) has sorted out Mum’s TV, and iPlayer on her Hudl (Earth’s most useless tablet) and iPhone, as well as sorting out a booster for her Wifi. Sadly it’s also Earth’s slowest wifi, so the only way we can load Mum up with TV is to take the devices home and bring them back loaded. But it seems to be doing the trick.

I’ve just been visiting her, over Friday night and through Saturday, my first visit since the first week of August when I came down to help Jude suss out care homes. Jude has been a far better daughter than me, staying with Mum for a few days every week. I’m going to try and get up as often as I can, but the nature of work means it won’t be as long as anyone would like. 

Granny's School of Unbelievable Slushies - comics by kids

It's a testament to how all-consuming Edinburgh is, when you're doing the Fringe, that it's taken me until the 2nd of September to get these four comics coloured. But coloured they are, and they're the result of the few Comic Art Masterclasses I did in August while based in Edinburgh. These two are from South Queensferry and Kirkliston libraries. I wisely limited myself to one class in a day, so I wouldn't jeapordise my voice for that night's show, and only lined up 4 days of classes. A far cry from past years, when for example in August 2015 I did at least 8 classes and zoomed off to do classes in Nairn the day after my last show, in August 2014 I produced these and these, and in August 2013 I produced all this lot. What was I thinking? (One thing I wasn't thinking was that I had to colour them all in full colour! When did that madness start?)

These two comics were from libraries in Denny and Meadowbank, both near Falkirk, so an excuse to drive past The Kelpies every time. Not, it has to be said, the most inspiring titles of the year.

This month's libraries got some nice flipcharts, by dint of me turning up in time to do a bit of doodling. Here are two of them.

The celebrities these four groups chose to appear in my demonstration strip were Robert Downey Junior, Johnny Depp, Donald Trump and Beyonce.



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 - email for details, and follow him on Facebook and Twitter. View the promo video here. 

Edinburgh audit 2018

Hev bought me a mug with a Dalek as a Tunnocks teacake. And here we see my Edinburgh haircut, and the new Socks t shirts which, along with the Superheroes comic, sold quite well at the Gilded Balloon shop for the first time.

Another enjoyable Edinburgh comes to an end, with a month having flown by. My show was good, the audiences liked it and so did I, though they didn’t come in the numbers I would have liked (see below). Obviously the month was coloured by illness. That of Mum, which saw me leaving town and cancelling shows for the first time; of myself, which saw me getting a cold on day two so having to do shows with next to no voice and drastically reducing my flyering in the first week; and that of Hev, which she doesn’t want me to tell you all about, but has caused her a lot of trouble with her diet and, whisper it, included a visit to the Infirmary. We’re on top of things now, Mum’s in a care home and Hev’s slowly figuring out what she can eat, but these things certainly made the month memorable in lots of the wrong ways.

We saw lots of art, which was disappointing (as detailed here) and only two shows (as has become the norm, a dreadful state of affairs for which I feel stupidly guilty). I didn’t pull a single late night in the Loft Bar and did very little socialising or networking. I flyered, I performed, I sewed sock eyeballs back on and, in fact, made a whole new pair of Socks halfway through the run, I made no videos, and I felt good about my show, while actively planning next year’s. The subject will, I think, be the circus and music hall.

More than anything, this month leaves me head-scratching and over-analysing more than I have for many years. Why? Because my sales tanked and I can’t work out why.

As recorded in July, my advance sales before the Edinburgh run started were at record-breaking levels and everything was looking good. Then we had the major problem of Mum being not well and me having to leave Edinburgh for two days, coupled with me getting a cold on day two, both of which seriously affected my ability to flyer, and obviously removed two nights from our run. But then, as recorded in the second week of August, once I returned and got up to speed with flyering, I was finding it wasn’t working. And, though the city went from unusually quiet to its normal levels of busy, my flyering continued to be ineffectual.

In 18 years of promoting Edinburgh shows, I have never found flyering to be so unsuccessful. The old “Rule Of Flyering”, that one hour’s flyering equated to ten bums on seats, is out of the window. I have done five hours of good flyering in one day, and only see half a dozen sales added by the end. As you can see from the graph, whereas every year from 2013 to 2016 ended up with almost exactly the same total sales, this year has ended much lower, just about equalling the Olympic year of 2012. It would have been higher with the two missing days back in there, but not much. What has gone wrong?

To investigate this problem, I’ve looked at my blogs for the last eight Socks Edinburgh shows, seeing how many days were spent doing Comic Art Masterclasses (and thus unable to flyer), how many reviews I got, and other significant media coverage:

2009 - some reviews inc 4 star Scotsman, lots of classes, on GMTV & BBC Edinburgh - 2nd biggest sales ever

2010 - 6 reviews, Scotsman interview, included in 2 Top Tens, on Culture Show, on One Show, no classes - biggest sales ever 

2012 - 11 reviews, 2 shows a day, Olympic year - after a year off sales plummet from last time 

2013 - 9 reviews, 12 days classes & caricatures, Sitcom Trials - sales reach good level 

2014 - 3 reviews, 12 days classes, Newsnight & Edinburgh Extra - sales equal last year 

2015 - 6 reviews, 8 days classes, noted successful flyering, 3rd week slump - sales equal last year 

2016 - 7 reviews, 0 days classes, sales hold up 

2018 - 1 review, 4 days classes, flyering ineffectual, after a year off sales holed below the waterline 

I have no answer to this question. I take small consolation in hearing the horror stories of other acts, one of whom I spoke to said that, if she got 7 people in on her final night, she’d have been seen by a total of 100 people all month. That puts my moaning in context (I’ve been seen by over 1300, and am only moaning cos last time I was here that figure was 1600).

Things that used to be a novelty at Edinburgh and have now reached saturation:

Silent Discos

10 foot high posters of comedians

Drag queens with beards

Musicals about Brexit or Trump

Rain

So, as we head home, and struggle to remember The Hot Summer Of 2018 which seems years ago now (it ended the second we arrived in Scotland) I look forward to a busy week of schools, beginning Tuesday. I’ll update the notes below when I have a chance to research other peoples’ Edinburgh stories. Here’s to next year.

Other stories:

Edinburgh Fringe crowds grow by nearly a million in a decade - The Scotsman
(Article includes Fringe up 9% on last year, up 52% on 2009; Space sees 11% increase on last year; Official Festival slumped by £500,000 on last year's takings)

Andy Quirk's financial breakdown of his two Free Fringe shows - with graphs!
Reflections of a First Timer by Julian Lee
Underbelly's record breaking 2018 figures
Pleasance's record breaking 2018 figures
Comedy Guide's overview of all the Edinburgh Fringe 2018 stories (a good round-up of things I missed all month)

Comedian Sian Docksey's financial breakdown on her Free Fringe show (from which this is just one slide):

Shappi Khorsandi on the politics of reviewers

Brendon Burns announces he's retiring from Edinburgh

Brett Goldstein's stats (via @brettgoldstein)

The Award Winning Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre were Superheroes at The Gilded Balloon at the Edinburgh Fringe from August 1st to 26th 2018 and will be on tour into 2019.

Art at Edinburgh 2018 - a very poor year

Whatever happened to the art at Edinburgh? It’s always been the backbone of our visits, the Fringe being complemented by the biggest array of art to be found outside of Venice. Until this year, when we’ve been met with an endless succession of closed galleries, ex-galleries, galleries that are no longer free, and artwork which is, on the whole, a bit underwhelming.

Top of the list of closed galleries must be the Collective Gallery on Calton Hill, which has frankly been the only reason to climb all the way up Calton Hill for a number of years. It’s listed in the Edinburgh Art Festival programme, with a whole page to itself, but thank god we found out in advance (from the website) that it’s not open. 

Add to this the closed basement floor or The City Art Centre, the closed lower level of the National Gallery of Scotland, the broken lift at the National Portrait Gallery (which formerly gave a marvellous all-round view of the exhibition floors), the closed-despite-being-advertised-as-open Burns Monument, no work this year at the High School on Calton Hill, and the closed permanent and the temporary galleries at the National Library of Scotland, and you have quite a diminution of what’s been on offer before. You now have to pay to see the exhibitions at Dovecot Gallery, which is a shame, and we didn’t bother.

Summerhall has continued to lose exhibition space to performances over the years. When we first discovered it, it had more art on show than any other venue in years, in all its buildings, and on all its floors. This year there was nothing in the courtyard that now houses a tent theatre, nor in the buildings behind which now house performance spaces and a BBC studio. Even the lower cafe area, which 4 years ago housed one of the most impressive installations, is now just some little used tables. And the exhibition from the DeMarco collection hardly compensates including, as it does, a display of drawings by Orson Welles which have to be the most amateurish display on show this year. A supposed exhibition in the basement was also closed. 

Not that there isn’t competition on the “slightly rubbish” front. It would be cruel to single out the Institut Francais’s exhibition by Adam Lewis Jacob as the biggest display of “Will This Do” work, but I challenge anyone not to be non-plussed with ennui (how apt the French should have all the bon mots). Similarly disappointing were Tacita Dean at the Fruitmarket (once you’ve decided she’s a bit over-hyped, as I did when she was being a bit dull as a Turner Prize finalist, it’s hard to find anything exciting in her work), and the students work at the College Of Art. 

So what was good? We enjoyed The Common Sense video piece by Melanie Gilligan and the sound installation by Shilpa Gupta, both at the Art College. Barbara Rae’s painting, and the accompanying work at the Royal Scottish Academy was very impressive, outstripping the staid and conservative work one sometimes expects from academicians; Raqib Shaw at the Nat Gall of Modern Art was very interesting, if a bit Roger Dean album cover-y; and Victoria Crowe at the Nat Portrait Gallery was good if you like portraits of famous Scots, and heavy use of the colour brown; Lucy Skaer’s curated exhibition at the Talbot Rice was good, but the whole was less than the sum of its parts, and it was made of small and diverse parts.

There were nifty, but slight, installations in a church off the Royal Mile and a bar just behind St Giles, and some lovely films of Edinburgh in the 1950s at Stills Gallery, but nothing you’d be in a hurry to tell all your friends about.

Most impressive was the Jacobs Ladder exhibition at Ingelby Gallery, in their impressive new location in the New Town. This was complemented by an exhibition at the University Library on George Square, which I’ve managed to never visit before in my 30 years of coming here. It was good, but not enough on its own to make Edinburgh feel like a town you’d come to to see the art.

And most fun was Rip It Up, the exhibition of artefacts from the history of Scottish pop music. With an excellent TV series to go with it, this was the most memorable exhibition, full of nostalgic treasures and well produced displays and videos. Not strictly art, but knocking spots off the art for entertainment value.

There is undoubtedly art we haven’t seen - we didn’t venture out of town, and we weren’t going to pay to see the likes of Rembrandt and Canaletto (we may be jaded after the two visits we made to the Venice Biennale last year) - but it wasn’t as if we didn’t try. Genuinely it would appear that Edinburgh has less art on, in comparison to previous years, and what they have is not as impressive as previous years have had to offer. Other opinions may differ.

"Take a hanky for the tears of laughter you’ll cry" - Audience reviews

There's a first for everything. And on Thursday night's show it was The Socks performing minus an eyeball! Just seconds before the show began, I jerked the Sock on the right up and caught it on something, yanking his left eyeball clean off. Luckily it didn't seem to weird too many people out and the show went fine.

Audience reviews are, as the Gilded Balloon have been tweeting, the best. And, in our case, they've also proved to be the only reviews we've got (Geek Chocolate notwithstanding), so we'd best enjoy them.

And, delightfully, of the 8 reviews posted by punters on edfringe.com, 7 of them are glowing (the eighth being the one posted by Keith D after "That Night", which we've already discussed). Here they all are.

RTB16 days ago

Very very good!
Put a huge smile on my face which was still there several days later...kind of like the rictus grin of the Joker...
Seriously, well woth going to if you want severely cheered up!
The programme was funny but the improvs were tripply funny!
What...a...hoot!

David Robinson13 days ago

By far the funniest, sockiest and Scottishest show at the Fringe. It actually hurt to laugh so much. Not only were the scripted bits hilarious, the audience interaction shows that this is a real talent. Why are the socks not on TV? They are far more professional and entertaining than Ant and Dec and much more practical.

Frankie B.8 days ago

Successfully funny. Audience was falling about.
So much better than the big name improv/stand ups we've seen.
Quite clever too behind the apparent simplicity.
This is one show I would actually see again - and I don't think that about many Fringe shows.

Fiona6 days ago

Loved the socks. This show never fails to make me laugh. An hour never seems enough. Very talented man and very talented socks. A hilarious hour.

SueP5 days ago

Saturday night’s brilliant show was a great way to start the week. Might have to see it again! Reccommended.

Frances Mitchell1 day ago

I admit it, I never really grew up. I like puppet shows and cuddly things, and after finding The Socks on Facebook over a year ago, I’ve been waiting eagerly for them to come to Edinburgh. I took 3 friends with me, and The Socks didn’t disappoint. I can’t actually remember the last time I laughed so hard or so long at daft jokes, fun puns and a very clever background of superheroes as diverse as Irn Bru Man and Super Gran. Absolutely hysterical, very clever, and if you’re in the mood for some daft, modern, happy fun, then this show should be your shout of choice. (And take a hanky for the tears of laughter you’ll cry

Gibletmanabout 17 hours ago

‘Holey socks, Batman! Is it a bird? Is it a plane?’
‘No, old chum, it’s the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre...’

Yes, the socks are back and this year they’re taking on the subject of superheroes. It was inevitable this topic would eventually get the SFSPT treatment given that puppet master Kev F Sutherland’s other job is as a comic-book writer and artist. Oh, and he was once bitten by a radioactive sock which gave him the uncanny ability to speak in a high pitched Scottish accent and hold his hands above his head for extended periods without getting tired...

Unfortunately, Sutherland’s familiarity with his subject matter is too big to be contained and the show doesn’t entirely translate for a general audience. For instance, why does Spider-Man not appear yet we get the Fantastic Four - an odd decision for a one-man sock puppet theatre where more than two characters on ‘stage’ at the same time is extremely challenging (although admittedly one of the FF is invisible). There’s also an unfathomable ‘sub plot’ about a long lost racist brother and a song about the Bechdel test that appear to have been rocketed to earth from the exploding remains of an entirely different show.

Nevertheless, the socks’ great irresponsibility does lead to some great laughter, and they are still a mainstay of our trips to the Fringe.

To the sockmobile!

The Award Winning* Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre are Superheroes at The Gilded Balloon at the Edinburgh Fringe every night at 10.30pm  until August 26th 

*Winners of the Bath Comedy Festival Lovehoney Best Joke Award 2018

Cosmopolitan - new clip from Superheroes

Another new clip from Superheroes, Cosmopolitan. Enjoy. If there was ever an indication that I'm aiming to upload the whole show, it's the fact that I'm uploading a bit of nonsense like this. I'll get onto the meatier scenes next.

Unlike Shakespeare, which had lots of stand-alone sketches which you could watch in isolation, that's really only the case for Superheroes' songs. The comedy routines are all episodes in the plot in this show, which really means they will mostly only make sense when you watch the full hour.

As I did with Shakespeare, I hope to edit the scenes and upload them piecemeal, then assemble the whole lot together into a concert DVD. The whole hour should go online in the fullness of time. But, like I say, you really have to be there to enjoy the experience.

At time of writing, just 4 shows to go.

The Award Winning* Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre are Superheroes at The Gilded Balloon at the Edinburgh Fringe every night at 10.30pm  until August 26th 

*Winners of the Bath Comedy Festival Lovehoney Best Joke Award 2018

Dead Ringer - new clip from Superheroes

Another clip from the Scottish Falsetto Socks smashing Edinburgh run of Superheroes - Dead Ringer For Superman. It's on Youtube in subtitled form, or vanilla. Enjoy. There's even a square version on Facebook, if you fancy.

This has been probably the most popular song in the show, with the glasses prop proving a fun if unpredictable bit of slapstick that's different every night. This take is from what I call That Night, the one night when we had an unresponsive audience (as discussed here) and even they laughed at it. Other nights (we videod three) had better laugh tracks, but not as good prop shots or music mix.

(If you really want to know how it's done, the front-on shot and soundtrack are from Monday Aug 20, and the side shot is from an earlier night).

The Award Winning* Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre are Superheroes at The Gilded Balloon at the Edinburgh Fringe every night at 10.30pm  until August 26th 

*Winners of the Bath Comedy Festival Lovehoney Best Joke Award 2018