Monday 20 August 2018

Tortoise and Tweets - a half time report


Here we see the goodies from the goodie bag we all came away with after a pleasant afternoon soiree organised by Hare & Tortoise Productions, the new company set up by Jon Rolph & Claire Nosworthy. Jon, you won't remember, produced my BBC radio pilots Come Together and Meanwhile, way back in the days of yon and yore, and it was great to hear from him again. Having been producing the likes of Armstrong and Miller, and currently developing the Scarfolk Council into a TV series, he has bigger fish to fry than the little old Socks, though hope springs eternal that he & Claire might catch our show while they're up here.

The do started at 11am and, by dint of the fact that I was en route to the last of the month's Comic Art Masterclasses that afternoon, I was the first person to arrive. And it would seem the only performer in Edinburgh who was awake before midday. The goodie bag is the most Edinburgh-friendly you could conjure up, and the Lockets were immediately got through, along with the various energy food & drinks and, of course, the Tunnocks tea cake.


I've been Tweeting very heavily this Edinburgh season. Whether or not it's been to any avail, it is hard to say. Our numbers, as reported elsewhere, are down on previous years, but that is for myriad reasons, which will be investigated thoroughly at the end of the month. Whether they've been bumped up or left totally unaffected by our Twitter activity I really cannot tell. They probably haven't been helped by these rather desperate tweets where, in bursts of passive-aggressive ennui, I've let it be known how hard I've found flyering, some days this month. There have been, it's felt, an inordinate number of resistant punters, in comparison to previous years. This could be faulty selective memory and bias confirmation, but there have been days when you wonder where I ever got that idea that the streets of Edinburgh were full of punters looking for shows to see, and all you had to do was convince them yours was the one they wanted.


There have been a few days when the flyering experience has reminded me of Adelaide. It was there that we found everyone had "already got one". That meant either they'd already booked the one show they were going to see that night, or they already had a flyer and were limiting themselves. This year I've also found that an awful lot of people seem to be day trippers or folks on the final day of their holiday who, by the middle of the afternoon, are on their way home. This phenomenon occurs on any given day of the week, bizarrely.


And, with the exception of Geek Chocolate's lovely report, we haven't had a single review this year. Nothing with stars on, nothing from a familiar name. I have, with only 7 shows left, given up hope on getting any reviews which will be seen by punters and have, instead, just started Tweeting our old reviews from 2009 to 2016. Five stars from Edinburgh Evening News, 4 stars The Scotsman. Ah, memories.

NB: My blog about whether Edinburgh is quieter this year, has been read 880 times. Since which time we've just had the busiest weekend when nobody would be under the illusion that the city was in any way quiet. They were a lot of drunks and stag parties, the like of which nobody would want within a mile of their show, but there were certainly a lot of them, so yeah tourism.


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 

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