Edinburgh Festival - Day One

Edinburgh Festival- Friday 10th August

  After visiting the Edinburgh festival for the first time last year I was back for three days this time to experience a variety of interesting, funny and downright bizarre acts.
  For those unaware, the trip last year was one of the most disorganised outings ever undertaken by anyone, ever. It would take pages to explain everything but basically we decided 9 hours beforehand (around 11.30pm on a Friday night) that we were going. With nowhere booked to stay. For a Saturday night. In Scotland's capital city. In the middle of August. In the middle of the World's biggest comedy and performing arts festival.
  Thankfully it all worked out as at around 10pm on Saturday we found the only hotel in Edinburgh with a spare room and avoiding the seemingly inevitable sleeping in the car.

The accomodation

  This year was planned far better, the accomodation was booked a whole 18 hours in advance, which meant we could actually relax and not spend half the time asking every hostel/hotel/B&B/homeless shelter whether they had a spare bed or four. There were unpromising signs before we set off however, as some miscommunication between our party led to one member dropping out before we'd even made it out of Leeds. This meant upon arrival at our lodgings some hard negotiations were made with the Polish owners so that we could cancel one of the huts. Basically we told a little white lie (he was ill and had to drop out) and they let us off. Only later would we come to discover why they were so lenient.
 When we eventually arrived in Edinburgh and found a parking space, after embarrassingly having to reverse out of a multi-storey season-pass only car park, we realised neither of us had a clue who or what was really on this year. Luckily after collecting nearly 100 flyers, pamphlets and guides in the first ten minutes we were soon aware that there was unsurprisingly around 2,600 acts performing. By now it was starting to get dark so we quickly scanned through the listings for the evening, decided upon Reginald D Hunter, discovered he was sold out so plumped for Andrew Lawrence instead.

 Andrew Lawrence is one of those comedians whose name you'd vaguely recall but upon seeing him instantly recognise, especially when hearing his distinctive voice. This is partly due to his appearances on the likes of Michael McIntyre's Comedy Roadshow and Live At The Apollo but also because he's been doing comedy for 9 years now. Despite this he was recently described as 'up and coming' by in one review!
 Entitled 'Andrew Lawrence Is Coming To Get You', and accompanied by a creepy photo, it didn't bode well for my comrade looking to avoid any audience interaction whatsoever. Luckily for him it was only those in the front row, including some over enthusiastic students forced to plug their drama production, who were singled out and got off fairly lightly.
 His one hour slot was exactly what was to be expected for anyone who has seen even a glimpse of him before, top class comedy covering a range of topics, from the standard jokes about relationships to how shit life can be. There were also a few jokes thrown in that tested the inappropriate boundaries of course, although how a joke about Madeline McCann got a more distasteful reaction than one about the far more recent Batman shootings I'll never know. Maybe it shows more about the values of society than what is deemed tasteful or not.