Comedy

‘It’s lots of London performers leaving London in the hope of impressing media types from London! Why don’t they do it... in London?’ This has been a common yelp from comics for years. Realising they’ll be selling their fillings to pay off their debts to the fine upstanding Scottish slum landlords of Edinburgh.

I have realised that the Edinburgh Fringe Festival is a habit, like heroin or crosswords. I have decided that habit must be broken. For the first time in ten years, for the whole of August, I will be able to pick up any newspaper without asking someone to rip out the arts section, on the very slight chance there is a review. I will also be able to leave a bar at 2am without a load of comedians saying, ‘Hey, that’s a bit early. It’s not even dawn yet. Why not come with us and weep near the bins as the sun rises?’

I have not been able to go totally cold turkey, I have constructed a withdrawal patch made of playing every single other UK festival instead – from the Dartington Literary Festival to Bestival via The Big Chill, Leeds and a few other farmers’ fields given a lick of tents and hot cider to keep the youth happy. Feature continues

Rather than walking past jugglers and living statues on the Royal Mile, I shall spend my summer walking past them in a variety of other rural settings. It also means I’ll have to listen to them through the canvas of my tent as they keep me awake, arguing about their favourite hacky-sack trick and how one of them has invented an amazing new kind of joint. As we know, the joint has been aching to be reinvented, having failed so often to make people paranoid and lazy-brained in its current incarnation.

Sadly, the shiftless agrarian entrepreneurs and avaricious music promoters have not ensured there is a festival on somewhere every day of the the summer, so I have had to broaden my search for distractions. If I don’t now bombard my mind with alternative solipsistic stimuli,
my thoughts will turn to Edinburgh.

My head will pound with ‘Oh no! If only I’d gone, I am sure it would have been the year that I won the Blah-Blah Prize and met Mike Bigtime from Bigtime TV, who would have given me gold, ivory and a panel show about car accidents and genocide’.

My final Edinburgh diversion is playing the London alternative, the reasonably new Camden Fringe. This means I can still force my opinions on a room of people for an hour a night and get home in time for ‘The Sign Zone’. Also, as with the Edinburgh Fringe, I shall attempt to over-commit myself to other shows. In Edinburgh I normally start the day doing paper reviews (while most comics are still drunkenly looking for a lost shoe) and end it doing some sort of 3am storytelling show (just as a comedian is unaware of losing his shoe). As well as my stand-up, I’ll be putting on a show about science, with guest scientists demonstrating red shift by electrocuting gherkins and people singing songs about bonobos.

In Edinburgh, this is quite normal at 10.30pm. However, will London be sober enough at that time to face a lecture on the invention of mental illness for the pharmaceutical companies’ gain?

By doing the fringe in London, it also means I won’t suffer the pernicious ailment of ‘crazed ego wildness’.

While the Edinburgh Fringe is on, it becomes the world. Comedians are obsessed with reviews, searching for positive words in free newspapers, parish magazines or on a toilet door: ‘Hey, guess what? I got four stars on the door with the broken lock that leads to the blocked toilet. They say that’s the toughest door to get four stars on.’

Then they return to London after this adulation and bound down the platform at King’s Cross, declaiming, ‘Look, London – a star is born.’ And London says: ‘I’m sorry, who are you?’

Robin Ince will performing at Liberties Bar, Camden, August 4-24. See all Camden Fringe listings.

See Edinburgh preview shows on in London.

For summer festival information go to Time Out's festivals microsite.