It’s the sixth instalment of our... blah blah blah... you’re probably getting tired of reading this same first paragraph every week, and I’m getting tired of writing it, so... the Fringe is over, and here’s how it ended...

24th August 2010 (Tuesday)

This was the last week of the Fringe, and because I need a bit of a holiday, it’s going to be our last tour diary entry for a while.  If I can muster the energy I’ll write something about our last two weeks in London when we get back to South Africa, but don’t be surprised if that entry simply says “We did things.  It was fun.  We’re home now.”

Later this week I’ll be posting some general blogs about our reviews at Fringe and also a list of all the shows we actually ended up seeing, but because this is the last Fringe diary entry, I think I should address some other things that I have perhaps left out up until this point.  For example, Dylan has bought himself a pet fox and is now fond of dressing it up like Marty McFly from Back To The Future, and I’ve gotten into the bad habit of biting nails, mainly other people’s nails.

No, none of that is true, but I haven’t been writing much about our diet, and I know my mother is probably wondering whether I’ll be coming back to Cape Town malnourished like the rest of Africa, so I’ll start there...

I had good intentions of going grocery shopping while we were here, and actually making proper food at the flat, but general lack of time, and the convenience of pub suppers and meal deals, meant that these intentions didn’t get much further than me buying peanut butter and pop tarts.  Breakfast was normally toast, but more often than not, breakfast wasn’t consumed because it’s hard to eat breakfast when you’re in bed sleeping until lunch.

Lunch was usually some form of meal deal, which, if you’re unfamiliar with British culture, means the combo of a sandwich, packet of crisps and a cool drink.  Britain is obsessed with deals – either packaging things together, or offering you incredibly reduced prices for buying two of the same things.  I’m not sure when the Brits decided you needed two of everything, but it perhaps explains the coalition government.

Supper was usually a burger or steak pie at the pub (Doctors, of course), or supper was eaten on the run thanks to the Angus Burger stand outside the Gilded Balloon.  As far as I understand, Angus is supposed to be some form of superior beef, and not simply a patty made out of someone called Angus.  That said, considering how much people rave about them, I get the feeling that if they were discovered to be made from human meat, the majority of people would be okay with it.

Drinking in the UK is incredibly expensive, which isn’t ideal, because it’s essentially compulsory.  To give South Africans an idea of prices, a cheaper beer from a pub costs about R38, whilst the aforementioned meal deal costs about R33.  It’s really weird to think that for the price of a beer, you could be eating a whole meal.  I’m not saying it would taste great, but you do begin to think about liquidizing your steak pie and chips so that you can kill two birds with one stone.  If you see me walking around The Loft with a pint of Angus burger next year, you know why.

Tuesday was the day Dyl’s mom and sister arrived, otherwise known as Joy and Roxy Hichens respectively.  Joy is about 23 years old, and Roxy is made out of Lego.  And if that level of characterisation isn’t good enough for you, then now you know why I haven’t written a book.

Joy and Roxy were fairly tired from their travelling, but they mustered enough energy to join us for a welcoming lunch at Doctors, and then came to watch our show that evening.  They had an early night, and Dyl and I went on to watch Josie Long, Mark Watson, and then Batman Forever back at the flat.  Tom joined us for Batman, and Aidan made a guest appearance before falling asleep in a chair – and I mean a chair, not a couch.  Aidan is a man of many talents.

25th August 2010 (Wednesday)

Depending on who you ask, apparently the average audience for a show during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, is either 6, or 1.8.  I’m not sure how you end up getting a 1.8, but I guess if both the performer and audience member is pregnant, it could happen.

Before we came to Edinburgh we were told that you only start making a profit in your fourth or fifth year, because it takes about that long to build up a following.  To give you some perspective, in John Bishop’s show he mentioned playing an audience of 5 people in a venue called The Hut.  This year, John Bishop was playing one of the biggest venues, and was sold out his whole run.  A similar story was told at David O’Doherty’s show, who unlike Bishop, hasn’t had the luxury of regular TV spots.  (The main difference in their stories though is that at O’Doherty’s show, apparently his five audience members walked out half way and he was left performing to his sound and lighting guy.)

So, although these numbers might seem small, considering we are unknown in the UK, we were incredibly fortunate to get audiences of in-between 10 and 30 people for the majority of our run.  That said, this day, Wednesday 25th August 2010, was the day we only had two people in our show.

The last week of the festival was slow for everyone – the festival peaked in the first and third weekends, and most notably dipped for us on this day.  But it only dipped in terms of numbers - Eddie (ex-stand-up comedian and the production manager from EdCom) suggested we play the show regardless, so we did, and it ended up being one of our favourite shows of the run.  John and Victoria, if you’re reading this, thanks for being an appreciative audience and not making the situation as awkward as it could have been.  We hope you enjoyed the love song we improvised especially for you, and you might be pleased to know that we might make an improvised love song a standard feature in our next shows set.  And also thanks to Eddie for being so supportive and suggesting we go through with it – you’ve been incredibly inspirational throughout this whole month.

That night we joined Joy and Roxy for Celebrity Autobiography – a show where comedians read out extracts from... you guessed it... celebrities’ autobiographies.  I then went to watch the social networking quiz GIT, and then Dyl and I went to watch Sarah Millican, followed by Late ‘n’ Live, which featured Chris Ramsey as the MC, Rufus Hound, Aidan Bishop and Brendon Burns as the other comedians, and Dead Cat Bounce as the band.

26th August 2010 (Thursday)

The Fringe audience is an interesting breed.  You begin to realise that whilst the comedian obviously has some responsibility for whether a show is good, they share that responsibility with the audience – who are very fickle, because they differ every night.  Each night you’re not just dealing with people who share different comedic tastes, but because it’s a really big international arts festival, you’re dealing with people with different nationalities.  Blank stares from an audience might be because they don’t share your sense of humour, or because English isn’t their first language and they actually have no idea what is going on.

The best example of how fickle and sometimes relentless an audience can be is Late ‘n’ Live.  I’ve mentioned Late ‘n’ Live several times, but haven’t really said much about what it is.  Late ‘n’ Live is essentially a test in a comedian’s endurance.  The show starts at 1am – so not only is the audience diverse, but they’re also slightly drunk, and like most people after a few drinks, they are simultaneously confident, loud, irritable and tired, and not afraid to show all four of these attributes.  This means an accomplished comedian can go out and induce raucous laughter, or they can go out and wait their impending death as they are heckled by a crowd which is more interested in seeing their corpse crowd surfed off the stage, than they are in seeing clever one liners or observational comedy.  And once again I must stress, this can often have very little to do with a comedian’s talent – it’s just as if in the first minute of the performance the crowd decides that they’re either going to get on the act’s side, or they’re going to try stir up a angry mob and march the comedian out of Edinburgh.  To save face in such a dire situation, apparently one comedian won the crowd back over again by breaking a beer bottle over their head.  That is Late ‘n’ Live.

That night we managed to increase our audience by over 500%.  (This is not incredibly impressive if you’ve remembered we only had two the previous night.)

After our show we went to the EICC to watch Rhod Gilbert, and then caught Jack Whitehall’s extra show at Pleasance.  Both very good hours of stand-up.

Perhaps it was too many late nights, or too many performances of My Pirate Friends and Me, but during this evening I begun to feel as if I was getting slightly sick and losing my voice.  I still went through to a bit of the So You Think You’re Funny After Party, but left earlyish (possibly 2:30am) to try restore my health and voice.

27th August 2010 (Friday)

My attempts at restoring myself to full health weren’t incredibly successful, and despite large quantities of throat lozenges and vitamins, my voice had given up and we had to cancel our show for this night.  Considering I often lose my voice at gigs, I’m quite impressed we only ended up having to cancel one show in the whole run – a remarkable fact if you bear in mind that some performers end up cancelling whole tours when they lose their voice – for example, Michael Jackson last year, although in his defence he lost a bit more than his voice.

I spent most of the day in bed, so I don’t have any particularly interesting stories from this day, but I will use the lack of an interesting morning and afternoon to report back about tea.

If you know Dylan and myself well you will know that our drink of choice is tea.  Most important Streep decisions are made over a cup of tea, and if a band practice doesn’t start or end with a good cup of tea, Tim S Streep (our keyboardist) refuses to leave.

Britain is the home of tea, and London is the home of The Queen, so you’d expect that London would share the same passion as The Brothers Streep for tea, and produce the best tea in the world.  This would be a false assumption, because only about half of the places we’ve stayed in London provide a good cup of tea, which seems almost as ridiculous as going to any curio shop in London and not being able to buy a decent snow globe.

The tea is bad in London because apparently London hasn’t caught on to effective water purification methods yet, which means you can probably drink better water in a township in Cape Town, than you would in a village in London.  The main problem with the water is something called limescale, which if my knowledge is correct, is an oily substance in the water which tends to sit on top of your tea so that you can’t drink a good cup of Ceylon without thinking about the recent BP oil spill.

London, sort this out.  You can do it.  If not for me, do it for The Queen, Sherlock Holmes and Paddington Bear.

But back to Edinburgh...

That night we watched Dan Antopolski’s fun and diverse hour of comedy at Pleasance, and then we retreated back to our flat to watch Dylan Moran with Joy and Roxy.  I should probably point out that Dylan Moran was not playing an exclusive gig at our flat, but rather we watched his latest DVD.  It was quite strange watching stand-up on DVD after getting so used to watching it live, mainly because you didn’t fear getting picked on when getting up to go to the bathroom.

28th August 2010 (Saturday)

It was another slow start to the day as I tried to get as much sleep as possible in order to coax my body into thinking I have been having normal sleeping habits and my voice had no excuse not to work.  It turns out I must have slept long enough because although it wasn’t back to its normal state, it was good enough to survive the rest of the day and the show.

That afternoon we went to watch John Bishop’s Sunshine, then Maeve Higgins' Personal Best, and then did some flyering for our show before it started.  I don’t think I’ve explained flyering properly yet, so...

Flyering is the process of handing out flyers to people who you think might
a) be interested in coming to see your show, or
b) be interested in taking a flyer and at least waiting until they’re around the corner to throw it away.

The problem with flyering is that most people don’t really want your flyer, because
a) they’re locals and secretly hate the Edinburgh Fringe for disrupting their town
b) they’ve booked for another show that night and so would only be taking your flyer if they had visions of creating a Edinburgh Fringe flyer scrap book, which is never going to happen because it’s only a matter of time before
c) they’ve been given one thousand flyers and unfortunately one thousand and one is their cut-off point.

So yes, despite the fact that we have a team of dedicated people flyering for us, flyering is far more miss than hit, much like Nickelback.

In short, although it does definitely help a bit, flyering must have been invented by someone who secretly hated the environment enough to try destroying the rain forests under the guise of advertising an arts festival.  Flyering is a pain, but we do thank everyone on our team who helped us do it, and we thank those who took our flyers, and who also took time to ask us about the show, because at the end of the day, it’s those conversations which probably helped the most.

At this point, I should probably mention Roger.  Without meaning to discredit anyone on the EdCom team, Roger is probably the best flyerer I’ve ever met.  Unfortunately, he was flyering for a different show, which regretfully was round the same time of our show.  Near the end of the festival, Roger and I used to have a competition between each other to try sabotaging the other’s flyering attempts.  He would be charming some tourists with his flyers, and then I’d come up to the group and say, “Don’t take a flyer from this man, he kills puppies and likes to trip the disabled.”  Half of that sentence is actually true.

In a desperate attempt to get rid of flyers, I lay on the ground and covered myself in my remaining Brothers Streep flyers, which then gave Roger the open window to walk up to me and get a small child to kick me repeatedly by telling him, “It’s okay, I give you full permission to do this.”

That evening after our show, I went to watch Alun Cochrane whilst Dylan went to go watch Patrick Monahan.  We then met up to watch H Anthony Hildebrand’s show for the third time, because we were told he had changed it a bit here and there and that this was essentially the remix.  The remix was great, which once again shows how the Fringe really makes you up your game in terms of performing your own show and tweaking it to make it the best show possible.

After Hildebrand’s show we retreated to The Loft and ended up meeting one of our musical comedy heroes, Tim Minchin.  We had an interesting discussion with him and Hildebrand about what a game of ‘Apartheid And Go Seek’ would entail, but I won’t go into any more details in case The Metro is reading this.
 
29th August 2010 (Sunday)

Sometimes in life you need to give away a trampoline...

When we started talking to our sponsors about them financially backing our tour, we said it would be great to have a Springfree Trampoline on stage with us, but unbeknownst to us, their trampolines are pretty big, and are certainly a lot bigger than what we ended up having space for on our stage.  We could have potentially had one on stage, but besides from having no place to store it in-between shows, it would have taken up the majority of the stage, so we would have had to perform our whole set on the trampoline, which wouldn’t have been ideal in terms of moving around, but I guess at the very least it would have been safe.

Unfortunately we only discovered this fact once a trampoline had already been delivered to our flat, so now we had a trampoline and nowhere to put it.  Which was okay, but this was the last week of Fringe and soon we had to venture off to London and then back to Cape Town, and there was no way we could have done that journey with a trampoline.  We were already struggling with the luggage we brought with us, and a massive trampoline wasn’t going to make things any easier unless we were trying to bounce our luggage into space so that it wouldn’t weigh as much.

Our solution was to build the trampoline again in The Meadows, invite people to come jump with us, and then give away the trampoline to one lucky child at the end of the day.  We got some other South Africans we knew who were also in Edinburgh to come jump with us, and we asked them if they knew anyone who might want a free trampoline.  One of the expats, Jocelyn, knew a small child called Ruariadh, because she was involved in caring for his parents who were both in wheel chairs.  I am very aware that this might read like something out of an episode of Oprah, but we didn’t actively seek out a family situation that might pull at the heart strings, it just so happened that this was the first family to come up, and they seemed interested.

The next bit of the afternoon was both fun and funny, although I fear I might lack the descriptive writing abilities I would require in order to relay the information with enough humorous effect.  If you don’t find what follows amusing, blame it on my vocabulary, because on all accounts, it was a hilarious scene.

As previously mentioned, these Springfree Trampolines are surprisingly big, and we now had the daunting task of getting our trampoline from The Meadows to Ruariadh’s home, which was a good ten minutes away – a calculation measured under normal conditions, and not baring in mind any excess baggage, such as, for example, a large Springfree Trampoline.  Not only was the house a fair distance, but it also required crossing busy roads, roads which have been built to be inhabited by cars, as opposed to pedestrians carrying trampolines.  To make life easier, the trampoline has wheels which can be attached for transportation purposes, but before you get any ideas, the wheels are there for convenience and not to try encouraging you to use the trampoline as a method of transportation.  It’s probably not printed on the label at this stage, but after this blog don’t be surprised if they introduce a new label which says, “The Springfree Trampoline is first and foremost a trampoline, not a vehicle.”

That said, the wheels made it easy to push the trampoline down the hills of the Meadows until we met our first busy road.  We carried the trampoline over the road, feeling relatively safe, because we knew if a car did try drive towards us, we could just turn the trampoline on its side and bounce the car out of our way.  We wheeled the trampoline over the next section of meadow, in-between a performing arts group and a game of cricket – both groups seeming fairly interested in what was going down, although the performing arts group was the only group who asked to have a go.  (Cricket can hardly decide on a good method of altering scores on account of rain, I hardly doubt they’d be looking into incorporating a trampoline into the game anytime soon.)

The next section of the journey was slightly more complicated because the roads we had to travel on were not wide enough for both a car and a trampoline.  This meant we all of a sudden found ourselves in a real life version of the TV game classic Frogger, in which we had to avoid cars by moving up the road as fast as possible with the trampoline above our heads, occasionally ducking into open parking spaces for safety.

Eventually, after a journey of truly epic proportions (later to be made into a movie by Steven Spielberg) we made it to Ruariadh’s house and gave him his trampoline.  And thankfully, his parents didn’t change their mind when they realised that they no longer have a back garden, but rather a back trampoline.

By the way, Ruariadh is actually pronounced 'Rory'.  So now you've learn't something.

If Sunday wasn’t exciting enough already, Sunday was also the day of our last performance at The Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2010.  We invited all our new South African friends to join us, and decided to go out in style – sticking to script just enough to give the impression of professionalism, but venturing from the script just enough to make each other laugh.  It ended up being an awesome atmosphere and the best way we could have possibly ended off our string of shows.  Thanks to all those who attended, and special thanks to Mark for all his help setting up before each show, and to our techie Tom for making it through the whole run of shows without being tempted to throw his Blackberry at us out of boredom.
[Click here to see photos from our last show – they’ll be near the end of the album.  We gave the audience my camera to capture the night, and they did a great job!]

After our show Joy treated us to celebratory supper at The Doctors with herself and Roxy (and Tom, although he had to leave early), and then we all went to go watch The Gilded Balloon 25th Anniversary Show, which featured Stephen Frost as the MC, and Phil Jupitus, Sean Hughes and Tim Minchin as the guest comedians.  After the show Dyl and I joined up with Amy and Miriam to watch Rich Fulcher’s An Evening With Eleanor, the Tour Whore.

[Amy & Miriam ended up hosting us at their house on the Tuesday night, but due to this being the last big blog, I feel I should time travel ahead and say thanks to them for allowing us to stay that night.  I thought we were fairly well behaved, but apparently if you ask to be tucked into bed with a story you end up being referred to as ‘children’... pfft...]

We ended the night off with Axis of Awesome and Friends, with guests Steven K Amos, Abandonman and Tim Minchin, and then hit The Loft for some late night discussions with our usual Loft crew.

30th August 2010 (Monday)

This has been a long blog entry, so I’ll treat you by condensing the bulk of this day into one paragraph.  We watched Stewart Lee, Sean Lock, Ali Cook and the last Late ‘n’ Live which featured Patrick Monahan as the host, and Axis of Awesome, Abandoman and Brendan Burns.  Brendan Burns then in turn brought back up Abandoman and got other comedians to perform little stand-up routines which were then translated into rap by Abandoman.  The other comedians that got brought up were John Bishop, Jim Jeffries, Sean Walsh (improvising observational comedy whilst doing an incredibly convincing Michael Mcintyre impression) and Rich Fulcher.  It was pretty crazy.  There was even a crowd surfing competition between Patrick Monahan and John Bishop.  Once the comedy section was finished, Dead Cat Bounce led the evening to a close with their bootleg mix.

It was always going to be tough to end such an amazing Edinburgh Festival Fringe experience with something that would do the whole month justice.  Fortunately for us as we were leaving Late ‘n’ Live, Demian from Dead Cat Bounce introduced us to the end of festival tradition – a hike up Arthur’s Seat – a mountain which overlooks the city of Edinburgh.  So, at about 5:30am, with Demian as our leader, we gathered our troops and began the expedition.

We threw ourselves in the deep end by playing the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.  We had never done anything like this before, and for some reason we decided to start in one of the largest but toughest arts festivals in the world.  It wasn’t easy to begin with – we started with guitar problems and a show which we couldn’t quite figure out how to present.  We finished with a new guitar and a show which apparently ‘charmed the socks off people’, and made one reviewer give us four stars and say we were ‘fast becoming a 2010 Fringe favourite’.  We met amazing new people, made some great new contacts, and learnt a lot.  An awful lot.  If you thought this blog was long, be thankful it doesn’t include a section on all our lessons.

Our Fringe experience was challenging and inspiring, and at the end of the day, overwhelmingly positive.  It’s not every day you get to perform at a festival alongside the men and women you admire.  And it’s certainly not every day you get to share drinks with them afterwards.  We entered Edinburgh unsure of what to do next, and we left Edinburgh with mind to play other festivals, knowing that’d we’d be back as soon as possible.

Thank you to Kristen and everyone at Springfree Trampoline for making it a financial possibility, and thank you to Jon and everyone at EdCom for figuring out the logistics and putting in all the work that allowed it happen.  Thanks to our friends and family back at home that have gotten alongside us in our ventures, and thank you to everyone we met here who offered us friendship and support.

And in case you’re wondering, back to the last day...

Our festival ended with us on top of a mountain, singing songs at the top of our voices, until the early hours of the morning.  It couldn’t have ended in a better way.