Edinburgh Festival (1999)

If I’m being honest – and nobody is ever honest in Edinburgh, everyone’s ‘storming it’ – if I’m being brutally honest, I have never done as well as I should have in Edinburgh. At whatever level I’m operating, I’ve never been able to consistently reach the standards I’ve reached elsewhere.

I first went in 1998 to do So You Think You’re Funny? for which I didn’t make the final, but should have. Nevertheless at Peter Buckley Hill’s free gig around the corner I so stormed it in one twenty minute gig as Ludwig The Bavarian I almost got a TV series. I’m not joking. But that’s typical of me. It would have done me far more good to make the final of SYTYF.

In 1999 I did The Big Value Comedy Show with Michale Legge, Nick Doody and Noel Britten. (In the early show was Howard Read, Robin Ince, Bennett Arron and Gina Ryan). I did The Upper-Class Rapper, which was an all-or-nothing act like no other. It would either rock like no other has ever rocked or meet with baffled silence. Or worse. I had some awful gigs up there and yet I was the only one of us in both shows to get an encore. I later discovered that while I was up there having bad gigs, someone of part-Caribbean origin was sticking needles into a Voodoo doll of me, not that that had any effect, of course.