Oh What A Time... -  #71 Festivals (Part 1)

Episode Date: October 13, 2024

This week we’re off to some of the world’s most celebrated festivals. We’re travelling back to 1969 for Woodstock, then off to Edinburgh festival and finishing our odyssey at Glastonbury festival. And this week we’re talking about Elis’ really waterproof jacket and pondering how people in the past could possibly have put up with rain in their (we assume) cow hide outerwear? If you’ve got any idea: [e-mail] If you fancy a bunch of OWAT content you’ve never heard before, why not treat yourself and become an Oh What A Time: FULL TIMER? In exchange for your £4.99 per month to support the show, you'll get: - two bonus episodes every month! - ad-free listening - episodes a week ahead of everyone else - And first dibs on any live show tickets Subscriptions are available via AnotherSlice, Apple and Spotify. For all the links head to: ohwhatatime.com You can also follow us on:  X (formerly Twitter) at @ohwhatatimepod And Instagram at @ohwhatatimepod Aaannnd if you like it, why not drop us a review in your podcast app of choice? Thank you to Dan Evans for the artwork (idrawforfood.co.uk). Chris, Elis and Tom x Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From the kitchen to the laundry room, your home deserves the best. Give it the upgrade it deserves at Best Buy's Ultimate Appliance Event. Save up to $1,000 on two or more major appliances. Shop now, in-store or online at bestbuy.ca. Exclusions apply. Hello and welcome to Oh What A Time, the history podcast in which we consider the past and I've been considering today the fact that it has been raining all day today and I have a nice waterproof jacket. Yes. And how long have they been around is what I've been thinking.

Yep. I was talking to a friend of mine who likes cycling as much as I do. And she used to work, my friend Sarah, and she used to work in a bike shop. And she said, buy this jacket because I can ride in a monsoon. And I arrive at my destination and I am bone dry. And I've bought so many jackets that claim to be waterproof and aren't. This, you could push me into a swimming pool and I would get out and I would be somehow drier than I was when I went in. How would you react if I had done that though Ellis, very briefly? I would come out, I'd be like, grated parmesan, I'd be so dry. If I died in this waterproof jacket,

I would be like Toll and Mam. They would find me in a thousand years. They'd be able to work out what my last meal had been. They'd be like, nothing gets in or out of this jacket. It's incredible. Will Barron How would you feel if I did shove you into a swimming pool and then said, I was trying to test the jacket and how dry you'd be, Ellis? It was an experiment, mate. If I thought you were being genuine, I would be glad because you've given me an opportunity to show off how good my jacket is. If I thought there was any malice in it, yeah, I'd be quite sad actually. But if I just thought, I thought it was a genuine jacket experiment, I'd be like, you've really helped me out here.

Mason Hickman So here's a question. Would you be confident to dive into a swimming pool with your laptop underneath your jacket against your chest? Will Barron I do it all the time. I did it an hour ago. Mason Hickman Would you do that test with a laptop under your jacket? You have to swim to the bottom of the swimming pool and rescue a brick and bring it back up to the surface. Yeah, yeah. I took my kids swimming just now, I got in with the jacket, with my laptop, and I had

about a hundred grand in currency just strapped to my body. I had euros, dollars, pounds sterling. Well, to answer your question there Chris, you were saying when do they first have waterproof jackets? I mean, I suppose early bear hide and stuff like that. You're retaining the skin underneath the fur. That will be waterproof to some extent. If you're fashioning something which is big enough with a hood, I don't think they were way back. But at least that had some kind of waterproof quality, didn't it?

I was thinking of medieval England and the rain coming down. In my mind it's already a bit of a bog. You're just going to be so miserable. Imagine being that moist all the time. Will Barron The Macintosh Raincoat is a former waterproof raincoat, first sold in 1824, made of rubberised fabric. Mason Hick Okay, that's early enough. Will Barron That's much earlier than I thought. Absolutely. I think with the medieval thing though, Chris, in that period I think people would have been just so numb to wet, cold, dry. It's just all the same. I think

life is misery and toil. So you just, whatever it is, there's no reaction, oh it's cold out I should put a coat on. You're just leaving the house every time, making no difference. Oh, no, no, no. Because you're always trying to improve your conditions. So you would have... I think they were a tougher breed. They were definitely tougher. But also, when it was on a nice summer's day, you'd be like, God, this is good. Three months' time is going to be shit, isn't it?

Oh, God. How long until package holidays come along? 150 years. I read All Quiet on the Western Front over the summer. Did you? And it makes... It's a fantastic book. I read all Quiet on the Western Front over the summer. Did you? And it makes, it's a fantastic book. I read it. But it makes, it's very short actually, it's much shorter than I'd realised, but it's just, it's just such a great, there are so many great descriptions of how

wet and miserable and uncomfortable things were. And what's funny is you never think of it... I always assumed that German equipment and German gear was always way better than the British stuff, but they were always complaining that the English soldiers had better stuff, better food, better provisions, which is something I'd never considered. But yeah, they're just up to their necks in mud all the time. And you just can't get dry and you can't get clean. And you've got... And they all had lice. Mason- Really? Wow.

Fechsohn- I thought trench foot would be a bigger problem for me than it is. Reading about trench foot, I remember it going- Mason- As a child, you mean? Fechsohn- Yeah. We got taken to like the World War, like in the Imperial War Museum when I was in primary school, we got taken there and shown a trench. Like, sorry, like there was a, in the Imperial, they had like what over a trench. In the Imperial, they had what over the top, like the trenches, trench life in World War I. I remember learning about trench foot and thinking, wow, if you get your foot wet, you're going to get trench foot.

Will Barron Oh, quicksand. Jason Vale Quicksand, another one. Will Barron I was terrified of quicksand until about a year ago and I thought, hang on, I've never seen it. Why am I so worried about this stuff? Get a grip, man. You're 43. You'd have seen it by now. Yeah. If you did see it though, I think you'd be so fascinated by it, you'd chance a foot to see what would happen. If I saw it…

And then you would go on. I'd get my nice jacket on. I'd be like, can it handle quicksand? According to the labour, it can handle 20,000 droplets of water. What about 5 million granules of sand? How's it with that? What bizarre claim, 20,000 droplets of water. Have they worked that? What, in one row?

In a row? One after the other? Or spread across? In a straight line? One after another? Like they're queuing? I think what we should do, we should meet up. I'll wear my coat and you can both bring buckets.

10,000 of droplets each. Just wrench me. I'm so up for that, absolutely. There's a lovely segue here if we want to try for it. And why wouldn't we? Because we're talking today about festivals. And music festivals, infamously in Britain are wet affairs. Oh very nice Chris Skoll, that's right. This should be a really fun episode actually. It's

not just music, it's culture, it's art, it's got the whole lot. Later in the episode I'm going to be talking about the history of my favourite festival, Glastonbury Festival, how it came from nothing to become the behemoth that it is today. And I'll be talking about Woodstock, an event I wish I could have attended. And I'll be talking about Edinburgh Festival, which is an event you have attended. Oh yeah. Many, many times. But not just attended, absolutely bossed.

Completed it mate. Won it. Sort of. Next question, completed it. Won it. Sort of. Next question. Completed it. Next question. Do you want a three star review from the Scotsman three years running? I'm your man. Do you want to do a package show that gets reviewed in the Times and you don't even make the review? Not mentioned. I'm your man. I can't wait to drill into this genuinely. Before we get into the sorrow that is Edinburgh

for Ellis James, let's talk about correspondence. We'll do a dot of correspondence. Here's an interesting one. Shall we crack into this one email before we get on with it? This is from Tom Rau. Tom Rau or Rau, I don't know, has emailed the show. Either way you pronounce your name, your email is welcome. The email says inflation and the Big Mac index. Hello Tom, Chris and Ellis. I was listening to the most recent pod where you were all discussing inflation and benchmarking against the price of chomps fudges and asked why this wasn't a regular section on working lunch. Okay, so Ellis, do you want to explain this conversation we had about chomps and inflation just for people who might not have been listening?

Ellis The three of us realised that there were certain chocolates from our childhoods that were considerably cheaper than your marquee chocolates, you know, your Snickers, your Mars bars, your dairy milks, etc. And they tended to be the ones that if you were really scrabbling around in your pockets desperate for chocolate but you didn't have a huge amount of money, they were the ones that you could afford. A fudge, which from my memory is 15 pence, a chomp, which in my memory was 10 pence, a Freddo, which to my memory is 10 pence. But obviously, I haven't bought a chomp for probably 25 years. Will Barron So Chris started Googling the prices of chomps and fudges and freddos. It

had gone up to now what I think are unsustainable levels. If you think the housing boom in England. Yeah, like the supply mortgage crisis in the US. The chomp boom is even more incredible. Now, Tom Rowe has said, this reminded me of the fact that the economists actually have a very similar index that they use to track purchasing power around the world, but using Big Macs to make exchange rate theory a bit more digestible. So I'll quickly explain what this is. The Big Mac index is a price index published since 1986 by The Economist as an informal

way of measuring the purchasing power parity, the PPP, between two currencies and providing a test to the extent to which market exchange rates result in goods costing the same in different countries. The Big Mac Index was introduced in September 1986 by Pam Woodle as a semi-humorous illustration of PPP and has been published by that paper annually since then. The final point here is that although the Big Mac Index was not intended to be a legitimate tool for exchange rate evaluation, it is now globally recognised and featured in many academic textbooks and reports. The index also gave rise to the word,-nomics. Did you know about this? I have seen that discussed in the past because McDonald's is in pretty much every country

on earth and it has a slightly different, it might have a slightly different cultural significance depending on where it is. But the thing with McDonald's, there wasn't McDonald's in my hometown until I was about 18 and I was amazed at how cheap it was. Right, yes. Because I just used to see the adverts all the time and it was a treat because there was one in Swansea and there was one in Cardiff, but there wasn't one in Carmarne until I was sort of in sixth form, pretty much. And so when I started going to McDonald's then, I

think I expected the burgers to be about 15 quid, if it was so... But they were like six... like. The hamburger was 69 pence. Yeah. £2.88 for an extra value meal. Remember that? Glory days. Yeah. Yeah. Well, for me, the happy meal was always the win over as a child. I mean, this is quite the company for us to be banging on about, but I did as a kid. Absolutely loved that. It was really exciting getting the little things, the little figures. Well, their burger is a basis of this kind of economic appraisal in The Economist every month. I actually,

when I get McDonald's now, I order a big Tasty. So I don't really know about the price of a big Mac. I'm a big Tasty guy. I need the big Tasty chart. I didn't know you were a big Tasty guy. I'm a big tasty guy, that's my thing. It's sort of like the slightly higher quality. It's a classier McDonald's choice. Yeah, of course. Absolutely. The sort of thing royalty might order. Do you do your thing in McDonald's that you sometimes do with your local Chinese, where you order something extra, don't tell your wife and then act surprised when you find it in the bag? Yes. Or do you do it like as a Chinese as a Chinese? You know what, we'll just get one of everything and then we'll share. So we'll just pick. And you're spinning the table around like

as a Chinese restaurant. Oh, I'm going to have a little bit of that quarter pounder actually. Oh, can I have a little bit of that fillet of fish? Mason- It's always the former. So I will order a Chinese meal, which Chris knows about this. What I actually do is I always put together my dream order, which will be like £120 on the liveroo. And then I whittle back from there. So I always create what I would order if I was a king. Create a long list. And then there'll be exactly a long list. And then the order will come, there'll be

a side of chicken wings or something like that, and I'll say to Claire, oh, why have they sent us chicken wings by mistake? And then she'll say, I know what you're doing. She always says that, I know what you're doing. Will Barron But yeah, there must be cock-ups where you end up ordering way too much because you've forgotten to take stuff off. Will Barron Yes. I think her suspicion is aroused by the fact that every time we have food delivered, there's one of those extra things. And it's impossible for companies to constantly be adding sides when they don't mean to be adding

sides. Will Barron Well the hamburger, plain hamburger from McDonald's, I've just googled it, is now £1.19. Jamie Fierce That's still, that's good. Will Barron And fries are £1.19. Cheeseburger £1.39. That is cheap. Jamie Fierce You struggle to get a sandwich for that. Will Barron Oh yeah are £1.19. Cheeseburger £1.39. That is cheap. Will Barron You struggle to get a sandwich for that? Will Barron Yeah, oh yeah. Definitely. Yeah. I don't

think you can. Maybe from like a garage or something. But I don't know. £1.19. Will Barron I'm going to make a controversial statement. Will Barron Yeah. Will Barron Because people disagree with this. I think McDonald's is great. And I think there's a reason it's successful. People always go, people always go, oh McDonald's is terrible. But okay, it's obviously not good for you, but there is something pleasurable about McDonald's and we have to accept that. There's a reason it's massive. It's bigger than quinoa for a reason.

It makes me feel depressed. Yeah. Does it really? You have that initial high, don't you? Okay. But then it does. Yeah. I love a curry. I love a Chinese. I love Italian food. I love Thai. Japanese food. I'm trying to think of all any other takeaways. Pizza. But there's something about

McDonald's in a service station late at night. And I'm just like, this is... I'd prefer to eat at Costa, if I'm honest. Will Barron Yes. Okay. However, I would say, I mean on the subject of this episode, post-festival, on the way back, exhausted. Chris Skull and I have pulled over into a McDonald's many times post Glastonbury and that is a perfect moment in life. The meal of the year. Too much food, too many dips. That's fine. But I will just walk another hundred yards to the Costa and I'll have those

ginger stem biscuits in a packet. If you think that's enough post-festival, you're not. Oh yeah, no. I'm having a ham and cheese toasty as well. Okay, fine. And I'm having a tiffin. Well, thank you for getting in contact with that, Tom Rao. That's very funny and very interesting thing to point out. So if any of you have any thoughts on takeaways, or ideally something historical, because that's what the podcast is about, here's how you get in contact. All right, you horrible lot. Here's how you can stay in touch with the show. You can email us at hello at earlwatertime.com and you can follow us on Instagram and Twitter at Earl Watertime pod. Now clear off.

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Did I mention that we care? So as we say, at the end of this show, I'm going to be talking about the Glastonbury Festival, one of my favourite places on earth. I will be talking about Woodstock. And now I'm going to take you boys back to 1947 and the birth of the Edinburgh Fringe. How do you feel about going back to Edinburgh Fringe? It comes up a lot on this podcast, your fringe experiences. Yes. I don't think I'll do the fringe again. I can say whenever I approach Edinburgh and I smell the strong smell of hops, I immediately feel nauseous and full of despair and worry,

which suggests that maybe that's not a place for me to return. Although I've had a lot of lovely experiences there. I've really enjoyed shows, but I think it's probably not a place for me to return. Although I've had a lot of lovely experiences there. I've really enjoyed shows, but I think it's probably not a thing I will return to now. Will Barron It has changed because when Tom and I started going and we did our first Edinburgh's in the same year, back then everyone, or certainly the vast, vast majority of performers were there for the month. Will Barron Yeah. Alistair But it's now become so expensive that people do much shorter runs because they simply can't afford to be up there. And because I've got young children, the three of us are all in the

same boat, I can't imagine doing a month like I used to in my late 20s and early 30s, but potentially doing a week or something, maybe. I did a show in Welsh, believe it or not, in 2019 at the Pleasance, which was where I used to do shows when I was doing stand-up in English, because there are enough Welsh people there doing the festival I could, you know, sell enough for it to be a gig. But no, certainly a month-long run like I used to do, no. But I went last year and I saw Anya Magliano was great, I saw Rosemata Feyo and I saw who was great, and I saw David O'Doherty who was brilliant. Watching those three shows reminds me of things. And John Robbins, because I went to see John's work in progress. His

show was great. I remember thinking, I would actually like to get involved again. It's just my life is so busy and has changed so much since I was doing editing that I can't really imagine how I'd get back into that zone. Will That is really interesting actually, Al, about the idea of doing a week because it has changed a lot. Part of the old experience for me, and I've done sketch shows and stand-up shows there, was the slog of a whole month. It's quite an emotional toil. You're getting reviewed all the time, you're getting, well, your audience is going to be etc. etc. It's quite intense, but a week maybe might change it. The thing that's difficult about it is that you will end up doing over 25 shows.

Yeah. And so obviously they're different, so it's quite unpredictable. And having to put the roof back on your venue 25 times gets you big. But you're put into competition with your peers, which isn't very nice. Yeah, that's true. Getting reviewed all the time, often by people you don't particularly respect, but those reviews carry weight somehow. And also, what the punters don't realise, the acts are losing a fortune.

So when you see comedians crying into their beer at the end of the night, it's because they know that the gig's gone badly and they're going to promote to £12,000. So that is why people are like, it's an emotional rollercoaster. I remember a friend of mine said, oh, it's not hard like being a bin man, it's hard. Yeah, but you don't pay 12 grand to be a bin man and then get told by an 18-year-old who's writing for a student newspaper that you're a bad bin man. Will Barron And the people you're collecting the bins off booing you as you do so. Will Barron Like I tip my bin then. Does that answer your question Chris?

Chris McIlwain Yeah, thank you. Thank you for establishing that. I've never been to the Edinburgh Festival. I'd like to go. It is insane. My wife goes every year. My wife's a theatre producer for English Touring Theatre. So she gets to go and watch something like seven plays a day for a few days, which is super intense. And that's what makes it hard. Because if you're doing stand up at eight o'clock, the person who's watching your show might have seen seven shows already so they're laughed out. So they're the hardest crowds in the world to perform to because they've seen some of the best stuff on earth and now they're watching you and they're tired. They're a bit pissed and tired.

Whenever you were struggling Ellis, did you think they've seen six or seven theatre shows today? That's why. That's what's happening here. The material is not at fault. No, I used to think I can tell from the shirts they're wearing that they're Rangers fans and they hate me. Well, let's wind the clock back now to 1947. A group of theatre companies have turned up uninvited and unannounced, hoping to perform at the inaugural Edinburgh International Festival. They were refused with the city's major venues booked up, so they decided to hold an alternative festival of their own in venues on the fringes of the

Edinburgh International Festival. So they booked up the YMCA on South St Andrew Street, the Pleasance Little Theatre, New Victoria Cinema, Clark Street, the Gateway Theatre, Leith Walk. Six of the eight companies were Scottish and included the Glasgow Unity Theatre and Edinburgh People's Theatre, the former founded in 1941 and grew out of the workers drama groups of the 1930s and had close links to the Communist Party. There's one thing you'll learn about is that there was actually quite a political lilt to the early years of the Fringe Festival. In 1947, a production of Maxim Gorky's 1902 social realist play, The Lower Depths, had

its first showing in Britain since 1912 and it was obviously overtly left distant. Got three stars in the angry microwave by so anonymous a viewer you'll never meet. The play itself, The Lower Depths, portrays the harsh and degrading lives of impoverished individuals living in a dilapidated shelter. So, The Lower Depths portrays the harsh and degrading lives of impoverished individuals living in a dilapidated shelter. Here's your first fringe review of the show. The Edinburgh Evening News wondered whether Glasgow Unity Theatre could have made a happier choice. Right. All right. Does that compete with my 2010 review from The Daily Mirror?

His relatively high profile in Wales beggars belief on this performance. That's just mean. Thank you. That's just mean. Also, the choice of relatively high profile is like another little kick in there as well, isn't it? Not even willing to give you high profile.

High profile for Wales, sure. Yeah. But even that beggars belief on the show. Beggars belief. The fringe in those kind of in the 40s was called the Festival Adjunct and was designed to be a radical but open and accessible alternative to the high art on display at the International Festival. And it was repeated again a year later in 1948. And so the story goes that in 1948, the term fringe was officially born when the playwright, BBC producer and critic Robert Kemp writing in the Edinburgh Evening News pointed to the fringe

of official festival drama and the attractiveness of the productions. And he went on to write, I am afraid some of us are not going to be at home during the evenings. That was so good. Yeah. Oh, nice. That's nice, isn't it? There we go. That is nice, yeah.

So then the Fringe became kind of well known in 1949. It began to get a new purpose. Theatre Workshop turned up from Manchester to give a performance of Ewan McCall's The Other Animals at the Epworth Halls on Nicholson Street. The play which echoed John Paul Sartre's Hugh Close of 1944 focused on the last hours of a condemned political prisoner living with the phantoms conjured up in his mind after prolonged torture in prison. This is the thing that I find about drama and theatre, a lot of it is really bleak. Even when I cast my mind back to GCSE plays I was involved with,

someone always died at the end. Yes. And yet, in 2011, when I was trying to keep it light and I was trying to entertain the masses, the Daily Telegraph saw fit to write about me. His incredibly irritating habit of bookending routines with there we are then, will grate like nothing else once you note to sit two stars daily till again. I'm trying to keep it light! There we are then. You bastard!

That's such a rubbish catchphrase. It's not a catchphrase, it's a Welsh verbal tick that I do when I'm nervous. So give an example of when you'd use that tick. So I've ended the routine and then I realised that there was actually a toaster in my garage already. Oh, they're not laughing. Oh, there we are then. It's something the very elderly do in Wales. If you're ever on a bus, like in the Rhondda,

and there's someone over the age of 80, they will just sit there and mutter, oh, there we are then. And because the gig was going badly, I started doing it, a habit I learned in childhood. And this reviewer from the Daily Telegraph, who doesn't understand Welsh people, yeah, it probably did great. But anyway. Listen to this one I got, Ellis. This is from Shortle. Crane keeps the laughs coming regularly and hard, but also throws in feeling and sentiment

with it. We perceive him to be honest and genuine and love him all the more for it. So we've all... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very nice. You pulled that up a little too quickly. You should have just done that. We've all, we've all think... I could go on. Wise, funny and lyrical. That's the absurd that's got you here. Deeply funny, genuinely touching Broadway baby. And there is a four star from, there's a four star from Scotsman as well. That's going to kick, that's a real kicker. Wise.

Crane, you should have. Oh Tom. Crane. There we are then. I'm not wise. There we are then. There we are then. Did you see Tom Crane show? I did. Do you know what? I came out and I just felt so wise at the end of it.

I didn't laugh once, but wow, the wisdom. It just exploded. Oh dear. So yeah, in the 1950s, the Fringe was really starting to grow. By 1954, the famous Fringe Program was born. In 1959, the Festival Fringe Society established a constitution, a programme and a proper ticket office situated in the YMCA. And it's continued to grow.

And anyone who hopes to make it in the arts takes the High Road or the Low Road to Midlothian in high summer. In 2023, some 3,500 shows were brought to the Fr fringe and 2.5 million tickets sold. Wow. So Edinburgh, the Edinburgh Festival is unique. There is nothing that even compares to it worldwide. When you think of just how many shows, how many performers. So the Melbourne International Comedy Festival in Australia, which is the second biggest comedy festival in the world, has 689 shows. And that's huge. And by global standards, massive. It doesn't even scratch the surface of Edinburgh. There is just nothing like it. It completely takes over the city. And I love Edinburgh the place. I love the

festival. And when I go to Edinburgh I love the festival. When I go to Edinburgh outside of the festival, like John and I did gigs up there, and I did gigs with Socio-Distant Sports Bar in November, the city feels dead. But it's just a normal, bustling, cool capital city. I don't know how many, but there must be like 100,000 performers at Edinburgh or something. It's just insane. Will Barron Absolutely. Well, what's amazing about it, for those who haven't been, is in literally every possible venue there is a show. Will Barron And they're not venues.

Will Barron So it'll be upstairs in a record shop behind a shelf that they've erected to create some kind of space. It's just literally every nook, every cranny, and constantly every hour from 9am through till 3am in the morning there's stuff. It's just incredible really. It's an amazing thing, the Edinburgh Festival. It really is. Will Barron But yeah, it would be in a university cleaner's stock cupboard. There will be 30 seats put in there and it's a gig. It is just extraordinary. There's nothing else that really compares to it. And also, that's what's quite hard for some performers is a lot of people don't really

know where they're... If they're especially on the free fringe, they don't know where their venue is going to be. They turn up in Edinburgh and they find out, oh, I'm literally out on the edge of the city. It's impossible to get people here. And that's the lottery to this for some people. It can be a really hard experience for that reason, because it's so saturated with shows. Will Barron Yeah, and my venue is incredibly hot and all this kind of stuff. Because if you look at in 2024, there were 51,446 scheduled performances of 3,317 shows. Some of the shows are enormous with big, big casts in. So, you know, the amount of performers

and the problem is the people of Edinburgh know this, so they hike up the prices on Airbnb. And so it's very expensive to stay there. Like Stuart Lee and Richard Herring will talk about doing Edinburgh in the 1980s as students on gyros. And it was just, it was always difficult. I remember reading it to the Stuart, they were all sleeping on the floor of a church vestry or in a dormitory somewhere, everyone sharing one room, 40 of them in sleeping bags. But it was definitely more affordable then than it is now. And that is an enormous shame, I think. It's worth talking about the growth. So yeah, two and a half million tickets sold in

2023. If you go back to 1974, there were 55,000 tickets sold. So the growth over that period of time has been enormous. Yeah, huge. Wow. And in 1981, famously, the Comedy Awards, initially called the Perrier Awards, were launched. The inaugural prize was captured by the Cambridge Footlights. Such names as Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson were in those. Of course, many comedic careers have been launched at the Fringe. Rowan Atkinson first performed at the Fringe in 1976 before going on to make Mr. Bean and Blackadder, et cetera.

Eddie Izzard in 1981, Frank Skinner in the late eighties, Steve Coogan in the nineties. But of course, it's not just, although the Fringe is well known for comedians and launching comedians careers, there's also a lot of famous theatrical work that's happened in the Fringe and debuted there. And some of the most famous works of the 21st century were debuted there. Fleabag by Phoebe Waller-Bridge debuted in 2013. The Play That Goes Wrong also in 2013, vintage year. Oh really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Jerry Springer, the opera in 2002. Black Watch by Gregory Burke and the

National Theatre of Scotland launched in 2006, which is a play that examines the experiences of Scottish soldiers in Iraq. The League of Gentlemen was 97, but of course went on to become a really successful TV show. Garth Marenghi's Fright Night and The Mighty Boosh in 1998 and Showstopper the Improvised Musical launched in 2008 and has gone on to become really popular. Heard of all those? I have, yes. What I did like about it, I did shows in 08, 09, 10, 11 and 12, and I've been back and done gigs since, but I've not done full runs since 2012. I did like feeling part of something vast. As long as there were enough people coming to my show, and I was quite lucky in terms of numbers,

as long as there were people coming and I didn't feel like I was wasting my time. I did like being feeling a part of this behemoth. It was quite exciting in that sense. Yeah, I get that. That's really interesting. I bet going as a punter last year and having none of the stress of worrying that my show wasn't ready or that my show wasn't good enough and just watching really good stuff was absolutely brilliant. Cause I took my kids and Izzy, you see Izzy's father was from Edinburgh. So she's been going to the Edinburgh Festival since about 1982. So she has very fond memories of watching like puppet shows when she was three or four.

I took my kids to a show, what was it called? It was called something like Mr. Sleepybum. My scent turned into a hooligan. He was on the stage, he was fighting with Mr. Sleepybum. He loved every second. He was like some English football hooligan in Charloir throwing stuff. But he still talks about that. There's so much stuff you can do. Going last year as a punter, I did think, oh yeah, this is a really magical thing. It's just such a shame that it's so expensive. Will Barron If you could go back, get in the one day time machine and go back to see one of your performances. What year? What night?

Will Barron One of my own performances. Will Barron Yeah, so up to you. I would have loved to have seen Johnny Vegas's show in 1997 that was called The Potter's Wheel, because Izzy saw it and 26, 27 years on. She's like, that's just one of the most extraordinary things I've ever seen in my life. And he was meant to be amazing. I would go back and see probably, I think, award-winning Mint Spy by Rod Gilbert is probably one of the funniest shows I've ever seen in my entire life. Both of us actually got to support him on tour when he was doing that, but I'd love to have seen that at Edinburgh. For my own shows, I would go back to my first ever solo show,

and the first night, and I'd say, you're doing this about two years too early. You don't have the mature. So there we are then. And then, so that would have been 2009, you could have said, listen, they do exist. Guardian Football Weekly's been going on since 2006. You don't listen to them. There's these things called podcasts.

It's way easier than standard. In about 15 times, you'll have one with Ellis, your friend and your friend Chris you haven't met yet and it will just be fine. So just, just, just chill out. Just wait for that. Just sit back and wait. So that's the end of part one of the festival's episode. Tomorrow we will be doing the further two parts. I'll be talking about the Glastonbury Festival. Ellis, what are you talking about tomorrow?

Talking about Woodstock. If you want to become an O What A Time full-timer, which is £4.99 a month to subscribe to the show, you can get that immediately. You can get it ad-free. You'll get both parts together as one to subscribe to the show. You can get that immediately. You can get it ad-free. You'll get both parts together as one every week on the Monday. You'll also get two additional bonus exclusive subscriber shows every month. We'll also be doing live shows, we think, towards the end of this year, hopefully. We'll be releasing tickets. You'll have first dibs for those. If you want to sign up, it's £4.99 a month.

Whatever way you support the show, we really appreciate it. But we'll be doing those live shows in Edinburgh festival conditions, so if you are staying, you're unable to stay in your own house, you've gotta pay £1,100 per night to an Airbnb couple you'll never meet. And everything will be triple the price to what it usually is.

And Ellis will be saying his famous catchphrase after every bit which is… There we are then! So subscribe for that. We'll see you tomorrow if you're not. Bye! I'm gonna go to the bathroom. Music