2014: My Top 50 gigs

I didn’t see 50 gigs this year. I saw one. It was one of the all-time greats, though, so that counts for a lot. It has been some years since going to music gigs was a regular outing for me. Let’s be honest: a large percentage of the music gigs I have been to since 2007 have been Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine at Brixton Academy. But this one, on November 22, was the Final Comedown, that is, their actual farewell, on home turf, to a home crowd. I was proud to have been among the 5,000 who communed there, some of them (not me) in original Carter shirts, many more (not me) in reproductions, more still in brand new ones for the occasion. (For the record, I wore my only band t-shirt, the Space Cudette one that Cud gave me two years ago when I played the drums with them, when they supported Carter at Brixton.)

I have written before about the almost metaphysical experience of seeing two men fill a 5,000-capacity amphitheatre using only their still fairly skinny bodies, a couple of guitars and some backing tapes, but whatever works. Carter USM have the hits, and a fanbase to sing them back at them at the tops of their ageing lungs. They used to have Jon Beast, whose passing was one of the sadder bits of news in 2014, but whose memory lives on in the chant of “You fat bastard!” We’re all fat bastards now. In tribute. The Final Comedown was less of a gig, more of a loud vigil. It allowed me to queue up for what might have been my last time down the side of the Academy, collect my pass from the little window, and stumble up the stairs in the dark to the “VIP bar”, where bottles of Carslberg or Tuborg sell for £3.80, but where you might, as I did, bump happily into Michael Legge, Danielle Ward and Simon Evans, not to mention Adrian, Carter’s old manager in the days when I was a cub reporter for the NME. I saw the gig itself from the right hand side of the front (where the exit from the backstage bit comes out). I am definitely getting too old for this shit, though, as even amid the unfettered joy and untrammelled shouting and air-pointing, I found myself slightly irritated by people blocking my view and filming everything on phones. But the magic was not destroyed.

So, that was my gig of the year. I await the official DVD with anticipation. You can pre-order it here, and the company that lovingly make it, Nyquest, kindly supplied all the photos, via Carter’s manager Marc.

As for other live gigs, well, I went all the way to the Edinburgh Festival for three days but I was working, so I only saw one comedy gig. It is, by definition, the best comedy gig I saw in 2014: Josie Long’s groundbreaking Josie Long show Cara Josephine, which I highly recommend, especially if you think you’ve got her sussed. Depths of honesty and autobiography are revealed in this show which makes it one of her very best, I think. I am glad to say that I saw my only comedy gig of the year at The Stand in Edinburgh, one of the greatest venues in the world.

I saw two plays in 2014. Do they count at gigs? They are live entertainment. One was Daytona at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, in London’s busy West End, courtesy of my friend Harry Shearer, who’s in it. As a very infrequent theatregoer – mainly due to price – I must say I love every minute of any play. Daytona, written by Oliver Cotton, who also stars in it, is set in Brooklyn in 1986 and, through two estranged brothers (wayward visitor Cotton and Shearer, who’s happily married to ballroom-dancing Maureen Lipman), it examines Jewishness down the ages, from the Holocaust to that which exercises modern Jewry. Having met Harry through 6 Music and relaxed into his company ever since, it was a joy to see him act, which is what he does, in such exalted company, and in such an unfamiliar milieu.

As I always say, I see too little theatre to judge with precision, but I know I enjoyed watching these three superb actors lead me through a story whose outcome was unknown to me.

Later in the year, we paid good money to see Ballyturk at the National Theatre, inspired to do so, I must confess, by the pleasurable experience of meeting and interviewing Cillian Murphy for Radio Times in Dublin, by which time he had already premiered his longtime confidant Enda Walsh’s Ballyturk in Galway. By the time it arrived in London, we’d purchased tickets, in a moment of fiscal madness. Acting alongside the physically committed Mikel Murfi and – in an extended cameo – the great Stephen Rea, Murphy was a revelation to those of us who’d only seen him onscreen, in films or Peaky Blinders. This is a hard play to pin down, but it seemed to be part hallucination, part something else, set to the great tunes of 80s pop (Living On The Ceiling, The Look Of Love etc.), and set inside the mentally suspect head of one of the two characters, who may have been part of the same head. Murphy’s voice was ragged by the time we saw him (and for which Mike Leigh and Karl Johnson the actor were in separate attendance), but this screechy imperfection added to the dislocated verve of the piece.

That’s it for gigs. I like to see people performing, live, in front of me, but I see this less than I’d like, in a world where money is very much an object.

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Yes to Scottish independence

Another year, another Edinburgh. It’s great how you can refer to a trip to what really is my Second City to coincide with the Festival, or Festivals, as “an Edinburgh.” We all know what it means. And it means mostly wonderful things. Before I prepare my report on this year’s three-day piped-bagpipe bagatelle, here’s the traditional shot of me at my first Edinburgh, in 1989.

I feel sure I don’t need to go into detail, but I was two years out of college, one year in the NME art room, far enough into a hair-growing project to produce a nub of a ponytail, and part of a Tooting-based, medical-school-formed am-dram group called Renaissance Comedy Associates; our play, which I co-wrote with co-star Matthew Hall*, was called President Kennedy’s Big Night Out and one or two people paid to see it in a church hall on Princes Street – it was a great adventure, but I didn’t go back until 2001, when the show was Lloyd Cole Knew My Father and we looked like this.

I have been up every year except one ever since. The big shift for me occurred in 2009, when, having been up to do an experimental week of live Collings & Herrin Podcasts at the Underbelly, I was also invited to host, or “chair”, my first session at the Guardian Edinburgh International Television Festival, which – after my heartfelt retirement from stand-up comedy in 2010 and a welcome year off in 2011 – has thereafter been my ticket up there. It being Guardian-sponsored, a short clip of me talking to Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin in 2009 is still available to view. My body language says: I am not yet confident enough as a “chair” to sit properly in one.

I like to think I am now a far more confident host. Once you’ve done your first live gig as “facilitator” – whose brief is to introduce the session, get the best out of your interviewees (ie. “facilitate” their illuminating answers), move the thing along, hit the clips at the right moment, coordinate a short audience Q&A at the end and exude approachable authority – you start to get into a rhythm of being miked up, having a producer bark into your ear via an earpiece, knowing when to skip a huge chunk of questions for time, and being unclipped from your mic at the end (always courteous and grateful to the venue staff, as without them you would not be miked up, or able to reach for a sip of water, or even know where the hell to go in the warren of suites, green rooms and auditoria). I am not staff. I am not paid to do this work, but the Festival does pay my train fare and puts me up in a serviceable hotel (the one you can guarantee none of the big stars will be staying in – I know my place). Most importantly, it gives me the chance to be here.

I have rhapsodised Edinburgh aplenty. In a way, I’m the wrong person to ask about the city as I’ve literally only ever stepped foot on the platform of Waverley Station during the Festival. This is clearly not what life is like in Edinburgh for the other 11 months of the year (except for the weather and the novelty drunks and the souvenir shops piping out bagpipe music). But I have made friends up here who do live in Edinburgh and adjoining Dunfermline, so it’s not as if I only hang out with London media wankers like myself. I made enough friends when I was a stand-up to be able to sneak in to see a couple of their shows while I’m up here, which is always a bonus, and I make an effort to conceal or remove my pink, YouTube-sponsored TV Festival pass when I’m walking down the street. I certainly stride maplessly about the place like I own it, which I hope stops me ever looking like a tourist.

Because I always come on my own, what I do feel like is a travelling salesman. Especially at breakfast.

I’ve been a regular at Apex hotels for the past couple of Festivals: no-nonsense places but a cut above a Best Western or Novotel (and I say that not as a hotel snob but as someone whose default, austerity overnight is a Travelodge if I’m paying the bill). This year, for no apparent reason, I was placed in a Hilton. I’m worldly-wise enough to know that the “Hilton” logo does not automatically speak of glamour and the high life. It’s just a hotel chain, a Premier Inn that fancies itself.

There are a couple of Hiltons in Edinburgh (which shows how exclusive they’re not) and I think I was in the least glamorous Hilton. I don’t expect to live like a king – all I require is a bed, wi-fi, a full Scottish breakfast and a free paper. The Hilton gives away the digest version of the Independent whose actual name looks like a mistake of you type it: the i. I’ve never had a minibar. Luckily, I don’t demand a room with light in it either, as this year I was in a non-air-conditioned basement whose windows were painted shut and which was illuminated only by tiny desk lamps (the only fitted ceiling light was in the tiny hallway). I did not complain. I was not paying for it. There was free shortbread with the tea- and coffee-making facilities. I thought: I am living the dream.

The title of this blog entry refers not to Scotland’s forthcoming independence – a matter much discussed and a passion-fuelled debate I felt fortunate to have landed in the middle of at the height of national indecision – but my own current independence. Travelling alone, essentially being on holiday alone (even for three days), is replenishing for the soul, I find. I did plenty of solo travelling when I was a much younger music journalist, and it hardened me up. I flew to Dublin for three hours last week to interview Cillian Murphy for Radio Times and I felt a bit like an international jetsetter, albeit one too intrinsically stingy to pay for a fucking coffee on the plane, especially as the otherwise courteous Aer Lingus declined to offer any of us a free drink while we sat on the tarmac at Dublin for two hours, the mercenary bastards.

I arrived in Edinburgh on Wednesday afternoon alone, declined to pay for a cab and thus walked, with my rucksack, to the Hilton, which was 30 minutes away, alone. Checked in alone, unpacked alone etc. etc., you get the manly picture. And within the hour I was back out, alone, marching towards my favourite venue, The Stand, to pick up my ticket to see my friend Josie Long, alone. I bought some fish chowder, which came in a bowl made of bread, from a stall at the new Fringe hub, St Andrew Square Gardens, whose convenience actually prevented me from making my annual day-one pilgrimage to the Pleasance. (This will be the first Edinburgh ever where I haven’t had a pint at the Pleasance. Time bends.) I bought my ceremonial first pint in a plastic glass and sat, alone, among booming revellers, to silently eat my soup and drink my lager. I was happy enough. Edinburgh is full of groups and couples and families at this time of year, but also solo artists, like me. You’re never alone with a plastic pint glass: it is your passport to sit anywhere and just be.

I do regret only seeing one Fringe show this year (I usually squeeze in at least three), but I do not regret choosing Josie Long‘s. It’s been a few years since we were buddied up by 6 Music (and then let go with an empty promise to have us back on – not bitter about that), and even longer since I first met her in a pub basement and offered to hold her indie coat while she sang Nothing Compares 2 U at Karaoke Circus, so I feel I can praise her new direction without being too partisan.

After years of building up her unique and deeply-felt political persona, this year’s show, Cara Josephine (a title movingly explained in the final section), is a left turn. Or a right turn, since she’s already so far to the left. It’s a personal show about heartbreak and failed relationships and being “on the shelf” at 32 that’s quite a jolt if you know her stuff. But it’s delivered in such a way that, while contextually shocking in places (and actually really challenging at one particularly raw and graphic juncture, which I won’t spoil), it’s still Josie being who she is, with her American accents and her self-effacement and righteous ire always bubbling under the surface. It may even be her best show, although that needs to be taken in context. Nobody can accuse her of coasting, that’s for sure.

Back to the picture at the top, which I repeat for reference and which, for all the world, looks like a triumphant stand-up gig, or perhaps a rally, but is actually me introducing an exclusive, public screening of the new Doctor Who episode, Deep Breath, at the mighty Filmhouse cinema on Lothian Road, which has been my de facto base for three years. We screened Asylum Of The Daleks two years ago, with a fabulous Q&A with Steven Moffat afterwards. This, blurrily, was it:

No Q&A this time, but the preview itself was enough to pack the 280-seater auditorium of Cinema 1 with enthusiasts of all ages. I did a warm-up and by a show of hands (my fallback warm-up technique) established that we had kids in who were too young to remember when David Tennant regenerated into Matt Smith, and at least a couple of gentlemen who remembered seeing the first ever episode! It was pretty easy to get them excited before the screening, as they arrived pre-excited.

It was fun to be part of, and the episode itself is pretty damn good, with Peter Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor a real shot in the franchise’s arm – his very Scottishness seems to have reinvigorated Moffat’s writing: the 80-miute episode is overlong but full of great jokes, including a couple “about” the Referendum. On Friday morning, in the noisy lobby of the Edinburgh International Conference Centre, hub of the TV Festival, I filmed a special Telly Addict review of the episode for the Guardian with my usual producer Tom, busked rather than read from autocue, as we didn’t have one, and it will go live right after the episode airs on BBC1 this evening.

Thursday also had me manhandling the roving mic for an industry session back in the EICC and another exclusive screening: the pilot of a new, grown-up romantic comedy called Catastrophe, written by and starring Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney, produced by Avalon (who also manage me) for C4, and due next year. I “met” them both via Twitter on the train up to Edinburgh and we got on famously. This can happen. It was a buzz to see the creators of a show experience their work with a large audience of their peers, and to soak up the constant laughter. It was an easy Q&A, as it was always going to be, but you wouldn’t believe how panicky PRs and managers get beforehand, as if perhaps I was going to bypass how Sharon and Rob wrote the show in the 15 minutes available and ask them a series of improper, probing personal questions to make them squirm and stutter.

Having been out so late on Wednesday night with my two go-to Edinburgh pals Tony and Helen that two bars shut in our faces, forcing us to go to a much nastier one for a final round, I took it easy on Thursday and retired to my dark room early with a chalice of Stella from the hotel bar to sip with two free sticks of shortbread and watch the world burning on the news with the sound down. (Full disclosure: my manager bought me a posh burger and a beer in a posher hotel than my own, and I did a short spin of the National Museum of Scotland where ITV held their annual TV Fest drinks to discover that I only knew one person in the cavernous space, Badults producer Izzy, whom I was most grateful to talk to.)

We’ll come to the impish, slumped fellow to my right in a moment. Friday was the biggest mountain to climb, with the biggest names to facilitate. It was halfway through the afternoon when I remembered how easy it is to miss entire mealtimes when you’re working the Festival. I’d had my hearty breakfast of course, while weeping lonely tears into the Islamic State headlines in my i (simply doesn’t work, does it? What the hell were they thinking?), but the Guardian filming ran into a session I was keen to attend asking how the US “showrunner” model can be introduced into UK drama production (conclusion: it can’t), and that ran into my first session as host. I did the least imaginative thing possible in the world and ate a warmed-up panini in Caffe Nero for the loyalty stamp in about five minutes flat. Here is a photo of that session, taken by @Missread, my favourite photo of Edinburgh 2014:

A year ago – inspired by seeing the popularity of a session with Vince Gilligan at the TV Festival – I wrote a piece for the Guardian about showrunners. In researching it, I discovered Des Doyle, an Irish filmmaker who was Kickstarting a feature-length documentary about the US TV industry called Showrunners. I plugged it and quoted it in the piece, as you could tell by the trailer than it was going to be an authoritative treat for TV geeks and Yankophiles like me. Well, the extra funding came in, and he finished it, and it’s being released here and in the States in October. It was a pleasure to be able to screen it for the public as well as delegates, as it’s a cracking piece of work, and we’d secured the great Ron D. Moore for a Q&A (he’s the genius behind Battlestar Galactica if you don’t know the name – a wise, softly-spoken sage who happens to be in Scotland to shoot his latest opus Outlander).

In the picture above you can see both Des and me looking adoringly at Ron. This is what a TV festival should be like. It’s all very well to be “industry” and all dry and po-faced about telly, but at heart we should all be fans of the medium and of those who make it, even if, technically, they are our peers. (Our Q&A was foreshortened by The Next Thing, as these events tend to be on this media merry-go-round, but it was great to be in his aura and chat offstage to him about “that” Portlandia sketch.)

Thanks to @envypost for the borrow of the above moody photo, by the way.

Dynamo, boyish 31-year-old underground-overground star of Magician Impossible (whose forthcoming fourth series has been announced as his last for the channel Watch), is a different kettle of fish to anyone I’ve ever facilitated. Although the industry panel we did was conventional (see: above), with his producer/confidsnt Dan, Lucy from Phil McIntyre who manage him, and Richard from the channel, fanned around the coffee table onstage with me in the middle, and with clips playing on the big screen above, the subject – a television show – was not. How do you get under the bonnet of a show whose very beating heart is illusion (what Dynamo prefers to call “events” rather than “tricks”) and to which the question, “How did you do that?” is not only inapplicable, it’s downright rude.

For my intro, I borrowed the quote from Walter Bagehot, 19th century essayist, who warned, “We must not let daylight in upon magic.” And I hope we didn’t, and yet I hope we did a bit. If you’ve not seen Dynamo’s work – indebted to both the street style and spectacle of David Blaine, but without the wankiness – look him up on YouTube or Catch Up. It’s quite unique, as is the way he just walks off after doing something amazing, while Dan’s camera stays on the amazed. Dynamo might have turned out to be a tricky customer in real life, but he was sweet, funny and self-aware, and more than able to deal with a large auditorium. (He’s taking a break from TV to do a live tour, by the way.) When he did a bit of magic, and melted the hearts of even the stoniest TV miseryguts in the audience I think, I was right there next to him. I saw him turn some Lottery tickets into £20 notes by just shaking them. If they were “special” ones, I don’t know how they worked. He also turned his hand all the way round on his wrist, and swapped a playing card he held in his mouth with the playing card held in the mouth of a female volunteer. I know it’s magic, but Iogic disappears when you see someone as cool and casual as Dynamo do it.

The industry session was followed by a public screening, back at the Filmhouse. Sold out, of course, with a crowd that needed even less warming up from me than Doctor Who‘s. We watched Ep1 of his new, typically globe-trotting, celeb-packed series (showing on Watch in September), and Dynamo slipped into the seat next to me in the dark, mid-screening, to soak up the audience reaction. A small child in the row in front turned round and saw him and it was like he’d seen Jesus. After the Q&A, during which he did more magic, he was literally mobbed, enveloped, subsumed by disciples. He’s a star of the Instagram Age and he understands the power of that, but it was still incredible to see how patiently and diligently he gave them all the time they individually craved. Here’s a selfie he had taken with a volunteer, @DimpleMagician:

His popularity, that kid-from-Bradford approachability and a superstar’s diligence combined to become a health and safety issue. I slipped out into the bar to have a chat to my Dunfermline pal Paul (whose daughter – who was such a fan she’d done a school project on Dynamo – queued patiently with her mum to get the now standard autograph/selfie) and realised that, without any warning, my working holiday was over. And it had stared raining.

It was with a little sadness that I ate my last breakfast this morning, and packed my bags. I got absolutely soaked through on the walk home last night in the statutory proper Edinburgh downpour, but along the way (I was too mean, and too wet already, to hail a cab), I saw women without jackets or coats, let alone umbrellas or kagoules, determined to have a Friday night out regardless. You have to love the north. The Scots are already independent, spiritually and behaviourally, and Alex Salmond’s million signatures were reached yesterday, but I still fear the don’t-knows will win the day and Scotland will remain adjoined more than just geographically to the bit of the country that votes in Tory governments. (Capaldi’s Doctor blames the English for his woes in Deep Breath.) I will still love them as anyone might love a different tribe who almost speak the same language.

My last memory of Edinburgh 2014 will be sitting in wet jeans in the Hilton bar with a burger and a chalice of Stella, reading Charlotte Higgins’ brilliant, eloquent but depressing final analysis of the BBC in the Guardian, the newspaper that sponsors the Festival that pays my train fare and gives me the golden opportunity to see auld acquaintances annually, and asks me to busk a review of Doctor Who in a lobby. See you in 2015, yes?

Or should that be: see you in 2015, YES.

 

 

 

*Oh, Matthew Hall changed his name to Harry Hill. Whatever happened to him?

Drug of the nation

Look, it’s a massive telly. And people are sitting down watching it, together, at the same time. It must be the Guardian Edinburgh International Television Festival 2013, which brings together TV professionals from all around the world and confines them to a conference centre for three days. The man on the telly is smallscreen newcomer Kevin Spacey, in his civvies on the Friday morning after the MacTaggart Lecture before, taking questions from the floor in the flagship Pentland suite of the Edinburgh International Conference Centre, where all the big gigs take place. I missed his MacTaggart, as I was seeing Sarah Millican‘s 2013 Fringe show in a cellar at the time, before attending the MacTaggart after-show at the National Museum of Scotland, at which the writer of Broadchurch texted me when I couldn’t find him, saying, “I’m in the middle, by a boat.” This is what happens at Edinburgh, when festivals deliberately collide.

As I write, it’s over. A distant memory. The festive spirit of Edinburgh all but wiped out by the grey, humdrum reality of London life. But I’d like to get it down, diary style, if I may?

I have been up at the Edinburgh Fringe (what I call “Edinburgh”) for extended periods in the past – for 16 days in 2010 when I was performing Secret Dancing, hard to imagine that now – but I seem to have now settled into a manageable three days, thanks to a blossoming relationship with the nice people who run the TV Festival (hello, Liz, Anna, Fraser, Naz et al). I’m grateful for the chance to make a concentrated raid on the Fringe, and on Edinburgh itself, which is far and away my “second city” after London, as I have really come to know my way about the place over the two decades since I first walked Princes Street and North Bridge and the Royal Mile and Cowgate and all those other inimitably uphill thoroughfares as a wide-eyed postgraduate. (I had a too-true Marcus Brigstocke observation reported back to me in which he pondered why it was that the walk from his flat to the venue was uphill, and so was the walk back from the venue to his flat.)

This, below, is not a great photo (I took it on my phone while pretending to check my emails), but it depicts assorted TV professionals skulking in the lobby of the EICC in a lull between sessions, during which the fancy people queue up to pay for roasted coffee in takeaway cups, and the less flamboyant drink the free stuff, out of urns, which is perfectly nice, but comes in mugs. Conundrum!

You can probably guess which way I swing vis-a-vis expensive versus free coffee. Actually, it’s imperative for me to have a low-cost Edinburgh. I’m not paid to come up and host sessions (eek! working for free! thin end of the wedge! etc.!), as the Festival is a registered charity whose budget is eaten up by flying Kevin Spacey, Vince Gilligan and Mary Berry up to Scotland, but – crucially – whose profits are ploughed back into training schemes that help people break into TV. However, in return for my professional services, I am put up in a decent hotel, with a Full Scottish Breakfast included, and get to travel first class on the train. This delicate economic contract only works if I don’t pee tons of spending money up against the wall of the Fringe or eating out while I’m in town. Scots may not be mean with money, but I am when I’m in Scotland.

I arrived at the gorgeous, welcoming Waverley station on Wednesday afternoon after the now-familiar four-and-a-half-hour train ride, with its tantalising glimpse of the Angel Of The North built in to ruin my concentration around Darlington, and during which I found myself blocked in on all sides of my solo seat by carousing TV executives who seemed never to have been on a train before, or had never had an alcoholic beverage and were very excited. (I managed not to be get sucked into their end-of-term revelry by keeping my head in my laptop.) I used my pedestrian’s version of The Edinburgh Knowledge to make short work of the short walk from the station to my hotel on Grassmarket (see: below – this pleasant cobbled ecosytem always makes me think of that lovely pizza I had with Mat Ricardo in 2010). I know where I’m going. And I don’t get expenses.

With my first evening ahead, I couldn’t wait to hurry back out and get my laughing gear round a plastic glassful of draft lager at the Pleasance: it’s a tradition. I was happy to be able to corral my two actual Edinburgh friends (imagine actually living in this spectacular city!), Tony and Helen, to meet me. We discussed many things – including the significance of their recent trip to the top of the actual “30 Rock” in NYC – but most of them were TV shows we loved too much. Excellent company. Excellent plastic lager.

As previously stated, I am a conservative Fringe-goer and with only three spare evenings, two of them after quite punishing days of working and networking, I plumped for two shows by two of my comedy friends: Sarah’s at The Stand, a characterful, diffident, subterranean venue she is way too popular to play but does so in the actual “spirit of the Fringe” (and because, as I’ve witnessed before, she loves to be close to her audience, who love to be close to her) and Richard Herring‘s latest conceptual treatise on masturbation, this year We’re All Going To Die, because I have seen every one of his shows since 2001 and am proud to be able to say that. So that was Weds and Thurs night. All I had to do was fill Friday night with laughter …

In the meantime, my own first gig on Thursday morning: to interview the affable John Bishop in a “keynote” session for The Network, which is the Festival’s estimable scheme for TV hopefuls, 65 of whom secure a place each year, at a cost of nothing, which gives them access to a glittering array of TV folk to quiz. Last year, I interviewed Charlie Brooker in the same setting at Napier University, which was a walk in the park. As was this year’s. I’d never met John before, but you kind of feel you have. If he’s not the most genuine man in comedy then he’s light entertainment’s most manipulatively evil confidence trickster. Having just finished writing his memoir, his life story was instantly recalled in bite-sized chunks, and he was very revealing and candid about the process of making TV – the producers of John Bishop’s Britain pretty much forced a team of writers on him, even though he prefers to generate his own material, which is personal. (I am out of focus in the lovely pic above, and that’s probably how it should be. The host’s job is to frame the subject, and to facilitate the release of information for the audience. I love it, as I get to meet cool people, and I think I am asked to do it because I love it, so that works for me.)

I won’t give you the full itinerary for my entire Edinburgh. Needless to say, the Bishop interview flowed directly, via a cab ride across town, into a meeting about a future comedy project that I can’t mention, which flowed back directly, on foot, my preferred mode of transport, into my first Q&A at formidable indie cinema the Filmhouse on Lothian Road: The Wrong Mans, a comedy thriller with an awkward title from the combined pens of James Corden and Horrible Histories‘ Mathew Baynton for BBC2, due in September. After seeing two eps on the massive screen (a reason for turning up in itself), I interviewed Matt, director Jim Field Smith and BBC in-house comedy mandarin Mark Freeland. There was some interesting stuff about getting investment from Hulu in the US, who, Netflix, style, will release all six episodes at once, while it shows all traditionally over six weeks on BBC2.

Without a sniff of lunch beyond two Tunnocks caramel wafers I picked up from a complimentary jar in the lobby of my hotel, I legged it back to the Conference Centre with barely enough time to quickly email an 800-word column I’d written for the Guardian about “poverty porn” from my laptop in the lobby (I had started writing it on the train, broken its back, feeling a bit drunk and sick, just before bedtime on Wednesday, and polished it up before my inaugural hotel Full Scottish that morning). My one TV Festival ambition was to catch Vince Gilligan being interviewed by Charlie Brooker about Breaking Bad, which, save the opening 10 minutes, I did.

It was quite surreal to be in the same room, albeit the arena-sized Pentland Suite auditorium, full of adoring TV drones, as Vince Gilligan. You can read five of the best bits here. It was a proper treat. Brooker was a fan with a clipboard, an approach I am not too proud to use myself. Gilligan was humble and candid and downhome. Sated with TV drama-writing inspiration after 50 minutes of this, I then fast-tracked myself off to The Stand – surely everybody’s favourite Fringe venue? – to see Sarah Millican. After that – and a foreshortened “hello” to Sarah afterwards – I went up a hill and queued up for ages (but it was worth it) for a Laughing Stock “Red Devil” chilli-burger at their van within the Udderbelly compound. Festival style, I ate it under the dusky sky, standing up, mopping my face with napkins as I went, and sort of leaning against a tiny shelf.

ITV’s drinks reception at the Museum was vast and difficult to negotiate from one end of the great hall to the other in search of a small bottle of Kronenberg (wine-drinkers are much better served at such events, their glasses recharged automatically by waiting staff), but it was free, and, once the a capella band from Britain’s Got Talent shut up, I was able to tell Chris Chibnall – whom I only ever get to meet at corporate events – that I over-optimistically wrote a letter to the New Yorker complaining that his name wasn’t mentioned in a lovely piece about Broadchurch in the august journal of letters. (It will never be published.) And then, to bed. Lights off by 11, in Edinburgh. Not bad. Not bad. I had a free copy of the Guardian in my bag, all but unread.

(Oh, by the way, the corporate photo above is of the view from the breakfast lounge of the hotel I was in last year. Living in the past, that’s me, although it should also be noted that the Castle was shrouded in mist for the first 24 hours, so you had to imagine it.) Friday began with haggis and continued with a meeting in the Press Room at the EICC with Alex and Liana, producers of Saturday’s Meet The Controllers session (the most formal of my work itinerary), essentially to reassure each other that we knew what we were doing; to be honest, they are doing more work than me – the legs of a swan paddling beneath the water – so that all I have to do is look calm, informed and authoritative from the stage on the day. This was followed by a rare hour or so of downtime, during which I caught up with Episode 2 of Man Down, subject of my next Q&A, another comedy but this time one with which I have sinister links.

Man Down is the first sitcom written by and starring Greg Davies. It is quite insane and based upon his own life, albeit with the “loser” part somewhat exaggerated for comic effect. Tragicomic, actually. Rik Mayall plays his dad, in a piece of casting so perfect you may have to pinch yourself. We – blue lanyard-swinging Delegates and paying members of the public – watched the first two eps on the massive Filmhouse screen (Greg said afterwards that it made him squirm), and as the credits for the first one flew past at the speed of light, there was my name, as script editor. (Full disclosure: I was asked to read and give notes on an early draft of Greg’s first script last February before it was even a pilot, and that’s the full extend of my involvement. However, I did come up with the title Man Down. I am very proud of this. I think I got it commissioned.)

Interviewing Greg onstage was easy, and fun. More people came to this screening than to The Wrong Mans. Had James Corden been to attend, I suspect box office might have been different, but he couldn’t get the day off the film he’s making. After this, I went for a panini and coffee with the exec producer of another comedy project I’m involved in developing. An unscheduled stop-off at a double-header free Fringe show – promoted under the new banner Pay What You Want – brought my own experiences of the official Free Fringe flooding back as we filed into a cave and squashed into fold-out chairs. I’m glad I’ve seen Adam Hess and David Elms as they are charming, low-key men, one with a guitar, one not – combined, they might be a love child of Eddie Izzard. I was financially embarrassed during the bucket-waving ceremony on the way out, and only had coins. I apologised, but felt like a heel. (Mind you, I never shook my own bucket at my free gigs, so the guilt factor was – hopefully – reduced.)

An early-evening Royal Mile curry with Matthew, Tom and Ben – collectively Pappy’s – and our execs from nearby Glasgow’s The Comedy Unit seemed in order, as Badults, our vote-splitting BBC3 sitcom (I script edited their wacky inventiveness), was announced at the TV Festival to have been recommissioned. We are very pleased about this. It proves that a broadcaster is able to make its own mind up and ignore the negativity of Twitter. Series Two is, officially, underway. We had the first-series green light during the Festival last year. Telly can move fast when it has the will to do so.

Most of us repaired to the Pleasance to see 2012 Foster’s nominee Claudia O’Doherty‘s new show, Pioneer, a mindbending, self-reflexive, gauze-indebted multimedia assault (I’d not seen her before – presumably this is her now-you-see-me metier), through which a cheeky, poetic, self-effacing, semi-autobiographical Australian personality continually broke through. Was it her? Was it a character? I don’t know. But I enjoy that ambiguity; it’s something for an audience to conjure with. Claudia had a terrible sore throat, but belted her way through this intricate hour like a true battler. Against all odds, I went home after this. (It’s good to see – and like – someone new.)

My final gig on Saturday morning was the most formal and took place back at the EICC, in the Fintry room, which is not as big as the Pentland, but big enough. It being a 10am session, hopes were realistic about attendance, but loads of blue lanyards showed blearily up, and got value for money, I like to think. It was planned and produced with military precision by Alex and Liana; all I had to do was sit in the middle chair of five on a stage with an earpiece in and a lapel mic on and, clutching a clipboard as much for talismanic reasons as practical ones, keep everyone talking in equal chunks.

Meet The Controllers sessions punctuate the swollen programme and give production companies the chance to gauge what the channels are looking to commission in the new term, and if it’s a big channel, like BBC1 or ITV, they get an hour each and a “name” interviewer like Boyd Hilton or Cathy Newman. For Multi-Channel Entertainment, we packed four controllers into 60 minutes: Lourdes Diaz , LA-based VP, Development and Production, Comedy Central International; Sara Thornton, VP, Production and Development, Lifestyle and Entertainment, Discovery Networks International and boss of lady-aimed TLC; Steve Regan, Senior Editorial Director, Commissioning & Production, MTV (and also, bamboozingly, commissioner of non-scripted for Comedy Central); and Koulla Anastasi, Head of Acquisitions & Commissioning, Crime & Investigation Network and BIO at A+E Networks UK, who is heading up the launch of also lady-themed Lifetime UK. (I joked that I wouldn’t give them their full job titles as it would eat into the session.)

The hour flew by. (Rob Dougall took the official photo, by the way.) Lots of entertaining VT of the entertaining likes of Geordie Shore, Shopaholic Showdown and Breaking Amish, and a real insight into the ongoing battle for a slice of the soul of satellite viewers, using internationally marketable formats and cheap labour (ie. the “real people” who are the bedrock of these types of show). Steve Regan was a born showman, with his coy mention of a next-series moment in “Welsh Shore”, The Valleys, that he couldn’t possibly describe, but which he went on to describe. (It involved a presumably waxed, toned young Welshman who stuck his penis into a Pot Noodle for kicks. A dry one. Sky+ it, kids.) As I unhooked my mic and earpiece, having I think brilliantly fooled everyone into thinking I had ever worn an earpiece in my life, and joined in the back-slapping that happens through relief as much as self-love, I could think only of the train ride home. I hoped I would be spared the ordeal of being surrounded in First Class by TV execs on a comedown, and I was. Just ordinary members of the public who’d been upgraded to First because of an overheated Economy carriage. It was a revolution. (No hot food or alcohol served to First Class passengers on a Saturday on East Coast, we discovered. I would have asked for my money back if I had paid. Shocking inconsistency of service.)

Now, I have to sit back and see if any of my glad-handing and sweating and networking and namebadge-peering did any good. I’ll let you know.

I remain an Edinburgh man myself.

Edinburgh, man

It’s real. It’s happening. It’s in my hands. The Edinburgh Fringe brochure has arrived. And it has not one but two shows with my name on. Until it’s in your hands and all that admin has solidified into some words on a glossy page, it’s hard to believe that you’ll be standing on a stage trying to entertain people in a Scottish city at an international arts festival.

I am naturally excited to be doing ten Collings & Herrin podcast shows this year, August 11-15, 18-22, at the GRV (where we saw Michael Legge and Johnny Candon last year; a really nice, tiered venue). We are part of the Five Pound Fringe, which means it costs five pounds to get in. You can buy tickets here. But I am more excited, and more frightened, about doing my first ever solo show, at Bannermans, August 7-21. This is part of the Free Fringe, which means it is free to get in. You can read about it but not buy tickets as there are no tickets here.

The Edinburgh brochure comes at a vital time. It reminds me of all the good that has come from my partnership with Richard Herring, without whom I would never have dared to venture out solo. I am having many new experiences because of this partnership. Unfortunately, I am also currently having a couple of bad new experiences, but the less said about those in a public forum the better.

There are many amazing things to see and do at the Fringe. I can’t think of a better way of saving money in a recession than to not fly abroad and instead go on holiday to Scotland and invest money in the thriving live entertainment sector on your own doorstep. Go here for all your information and ticketing needs. Initiatives like the Free Fringe and the Five Pound Fringe are what it’s all about. I am pleased to be a small part of it, once again, sandwiched between Andrew Bird and Andrew Clover in a brochure. Wish me luck.

It’s showtime!

Or standing perfectly still time. Well, that’s it, I really am going to do my first solo stand-up show at the Edinburgh Fringe. It’s official. I suppose it was official when I agreed the dates and venue with Peter Buckley Hill, organiser of the Free Fringe, under whose benevolent, free-conomic umbrella I shall be performing, and it will be even more official when the Fringe brochure comes out and I can actually flick through to my name, but it’s official enough for me when Chortle list it, as they have. You can see the listing here. You can’t book tickets as the Free Fringe is free – that’s the very essence of it. You just have to turn up. And if you like it, you are encouraged to leave a voluntary contribution on leaving. This strikes me not just as a terrific venture to support, within the Fringe, but also a realistic way for me to test the water on my own.

The show is officially called Secret Dancing … And Other Urban Survival Techniques. Many who have been to the live podcast gigs, or indeed the work-in-progress nights I recently did with Michael Legge, or indeed a couple of Robin Ince’s compendiums at either the Bloomsbury or the Roundhouse, will have witnessed Secret Dancing. Although it wasn’t planned as such, and only came about through the podcasts, Secret Dancing has proved to be the anvil upon which an hour-long show could be struck. I am still writing around it, and hoping to do a couple of previews, probably in London, before Edinburgh, but I must admit, I’m hoping for some crossover with the podcast audience. I have been writing jokes, and even writing routines, but on my experiences thus far, I think reading out things that have been written is probably not my natural metier. So a hopefully genial form of rambling and reading off the side of a bottle of Colgate Plax may be result.

Secret Dancing runs from Saturday August 7 to Sunday August 22, at 12.30 lunchtime, at Bannerman’s, 212 Cowgate, Edinburgh EH1 1NQ

Concurrently, Richard and me are doing ten live podcast shows this year, having dipped a toe in the water with one in 2008, and five in 2009. Collings & Herring Podcast Live is part of the Five Pound Fringe and runs from Wednesday August 11 to Sunday August 15, and Wednesday August 18 to Sunday August 22 at The GRV, 37 Guthrie St, Edinburgh EH1 1JG (tickets cost £5). The listing on Chortle is incomplete, plus it only has a picture of Richard on it, so wait for the Ed Fringe listings, coming within the week!

Those who know me will remember that my first Edinburgh Fringe was back in 1989, when, as a wide-eyed postgraduate comedy fan, I went up with Renaissance Comedy Associates, a comedy threatre group formed at St George’s Medical School in Tooting by Matthew Hall, who would later become the household name Harry Hill. He and I co-wrote a daft musical play called President Kennedy’s Big Night Out, in which I played a Wichita man who had surgery to turn him into a teddy bear, while Matthew played Val De Mere, a nightclub singer linked with Jackie Kennedy. It was an amazing experience, even though we only got one review, which was very bad, in the Scotsman. Matthew caught the bug, big time.

Then, in 2001, me, Stuart Maconie and David Quantick broke ranks and wrote a show about our shared experiences at the coalface of rock journalism, Lloyd Cole Knew My Father, which played in the afternoon at the Pleasance, and drew sufficient crowds and good notices to make it an expensive holiday but one that we thoroughly enjoyed. We even transferred to the ICA in London, and did the show in Belfast, and at Yo! Sushi in London. We were also invited to support Lloyd Cole himself with part of the show, at the Bloomsbury in London. This was a dream fulfilled, so we stopped after that, once we’d made it into a 6-part Radio 2 series, which at least meant we got to do the Drill Hall, standing in a row, holding scripts, on our own, without being on other people’s shows.

Here are a few pics from ’89 to get me back in the mood. I can’t wait. Hope you’re in the right place at the right time.