Episode 1 Edinburgh Nights

Sadly, since recording this week's episode of Edinburgh Nights,

which includes the actor Richard Wilson on sparkling form,

he's had to withdraw from performing at the festival due to ill health.

We wish him a full recovery.

Welcome to Edinburgh,

where the world's biggest festival of culture

is well underway,

and performers from all over the planet

are inhabiting every single nook and cranny in Scotland's capital.

Over the next three weeks,

we'll be bringing you the creme de la creme

of the talent in town.

Coming up, famous faces reboot classic comedy scripts.

Tony Award winner Cherry Jones takes the lead

in Tennessee Williams' heartbreaker The Glass Menagerie.

Ian Rankin joins me at a provocative exhibition

exploring the dark side of Scottish art.

And we bring you a sappy song from Hollywood star Alan Cumming.

# Tell me

# Why... #

The Edinburgh Fringe has helped kick-start the careers

of many household names.

Angus Deayton cut his comedy teeth here in 1979

with the Oxford Revue,

and Richard Wilson has performed and directed at the Traverse

over a course of many years.

Now, believe it or not, both men are back in town.

Angus Deayton is revisiting his comedy breakthrough, Radio Active,

while Wilson is resurrecting a cantankerous character

from beyond the grave.

Wilson and Deayton co-starred in the classic sitcom

One Foot In The Grave,

and a single episode, The Trial,

forms the basis of Wilson's one-man Edinburgh show.

Well, I'll tell you exactly what the problem is, Mr Sturgeon!

I was out the back working in the garden when he arrived,

so I asked him if, for the time being,

he'd put it in the downstairs toilet for me.

And do you know what he's done? He's only planted it in the...

LAUGHTER

Why are you returning to Victor Meldrew?

I'm returning to Victor Meldrew, uh...

-because I need work.

-Yes.

I want to carry on...

Sorry! You need work?

-I do!

-Really?

He's the busiest person in show business.

I think I said somewhere,

"I hope I never see Victor Meldrew again."

But I've changed my mind.

And now do you love him again, or did you never not love him?

I never... I've always loved him.

The thing you really love most is being asked to say,

"I don't believe it", isn't it?

-By passers by and members of the public.

-Yeah.

-How many times do you say it in The Trial?

-Four times.

What in the name of bloody hell?

I do not believe it!

LAUGHTER

Why not choose an episode

that Angus is in?

Why choose The Trial?

Well, I chose The Trial because there was only one person.

-No thought for your friends!

-Just saying.

-Look...

-I'm here. I'm in Edinburgh.

I'd never done a one-person show before.

This just seemed so much easier.

-So next year?

-Next year.

-But you've already sold out. Is that true?

-This is true, I'm afraid.

So why are you publicising it?

I'm here to support you.

-Oh!

-Thank you.

-I'm not quite sure why, but thank you.

-And to meet Kirsty.

You're bringing back an old show, too.

Yes, it's a very similar idea, basically.

Both bringing back old shows!

Yes, an episode from a radio series

rather than an episode from a TV series, but otherwise...

Does that say something about our careers, do you think?

-Does it?

-Erm...

That we look at projects and think, "What might be fun? Let's do that."

-Exactly.

-Yeah.

# Meaningless songs

# In very high voices

# In a pair of tight

# Gold jeans... #

So, what was Radio Active?

Well, Radio Active was born here at the Edinburgh Festival

when we were still at college, when we were still at university,

and it was a show that was based in a local radio station,

so it was a parody, initially, of a radio show.

-Don Tipley, the programme so far, have you enjoyed it?

-Yes, it's fun.

And the meal in the canteen beforehand, Sally Mason,

-was that a good idea?

-Yes, it was lovely.

-Malcolm Grace, my wife, is she a nice woman?

-Charming.

-Don Tipley, did you like my wife?

-I thought she was very nice.

Yes, she was once described by my mother as a venomous slut.

So I thought, today, because you had your scripts in your hands,

it's because you didn't know it yet.

-Right! No.

-No?

When you record a radio programme...

-Ah!

-..Richard, you don't actually need to learn the lines...

-I see. I've got it now.

-..because no-one's filming you.

-I thought it was because it was your first show.

-No.

You must have been very confused for most of the show.

We've had a large number of letters concerning political bias

in our current-affairs output.

Now, to show how seriously we take these allegations,

here to answer them in the studio is our head of carpets.

Tell me, do you have any reason to think these allegations are true?

-No.

-No? Splendid.

Well, moving on, then.

And Geoffrey Perkins and you wrote Radio Active.

This show is a kind homage to him.

In part, it is a tribute to Geoffrey, yeah,

because he did write at least 50% of the show.

And now before our next programme,

here's a traffic report.

Thank you, Anna.

There's a two-mile tailback on the flyover caused by an accident.

Pssh! Boom! Boof!

-All the other cars screeching to a halt.

-HE SCREECHES

And people out running around, shouting, "Oh, my God,

"there's been an accident."

He had that Midas touch.

It's astonishing, the number of shows that he's responsible for...

-Yeah.

-..creating over the years.

I mean, Spitting Image and Father Ted, Catherine Tate, Harry & Paul.

I mean, the list is endless. He's much missed.

Well, time fast running out. Don Tipley, how would you sum up

Radio Active's output this week in a word?

-Abysmal.

-Abysmal. Sally Mason, do you think that's fair?

I think it's positively generous in the circumstances.

Positively generous. Malcolm Grace?

-That wasn't a question.

-Wasn't it?

-No.

-Oh, dear. My mind is going...

Just going back to One Foot In The Grave,

looking back on the series, the writing was incredibly surreal.

-And very macabre as well.

-Yeah.

I think there was a very dark side to David Renwick.

-Abdominal disorders.

-LAUGHTER

Abdominal disorders, where are we?

My God.

Colon tumour!

Often, no symptoms in the early stages.

That's exactly what I've got.

LAUGHTER

That was what was so great about it.

I mean, it looked like a really kind of conventional sitcom,

with a sofa, an old couple - middle-aged couple.

Um... And, um...

Because it's not. Scratch the surface,

and it's quite sort of weird and mysterious a lot of the time,

and quite dark.

I think it was...

I can't remember, one of the BBC people said,

that David Renwick was the Beckett of sitcom.

-There you are.

-What did he mean by that?

The silences.

Like this one.

LAUGHTER

Afternoon!

Were you very professional, or did you corpse a lot,

I mean, working together?

We had fun doing it but, actually, filming comedy, I hate to say,

is a horribly serious business.

Once you've actually read it for the first one or two times,

-you sort of... you've got the jokes...

-Yeah.

..you've laughed at that, then recording it...

-The trick is to make it funny.

-Yeah.

When did you become so close in real life?

-We support the same football team.

-We...

SHE SNORES God...

-Men and football, my favourite!

-Yes.

Some women...like football.

-Yes, you support the same football team?

-That linked us.

-And we had a sort of similar sense of humour.

-Yes.

And I would arrange summer holidays and Richard would often turn up.

-Freeloading?

-Yeah...

No, no, no, no! No, no!

Angus used to organise these big holidays.

And Richard was one of the invitees.

Would you work together again?

-No. Sorry, I said that too quickly.

-Look at that...

I'd have to think about it.

I mean, the money would have to be huge.

Yes, we'd work together again.

If we got the right Hollywood blockbuster, then probably, yes.

You would work together.

I must say, this is the longest interview I've ever had.

And it's just finishing! Thank you very much, indeed.

Now, there are thousands of shows on all over the city

and, obviously, we can't bring you every single one,

so here's our pick of the productions

that have been making waves this week.

The International Festival kicked off in spectacular style,

with 27,000 people attending Deep Time,

an epic outdoor event at Edinburgh Castle.

Music from Mogwai provided a soundtrack

to awesome animations,

which were projected on the castle walls,

charting 350 million years

of Edinburgh's history.

CHEERING

Two of Canada's most arresting art groups

joined forces in Monumental,

a dark, dystopian

and almost deafening performance

from dance company The Holy Body Tattoo,

and post-rock collective Godspeed You! Black Emperor.

At the Usher Hall, Barry Humphries transported his audience

to the hedonism of Germany's Weimar Republic,

with a subversive evening of jazz, tango and saucy sonatas,

performed with cabaret sensation Meow Meow

and the Australian Chamber Orchestra.

# Out of the ruins of Berlin. #

In a rather more modest venue,

a relay of performers, politicians and punters

have begun what could become the longest performance

in the history of the Edinburgh Fringe.

Their continuous reading of all 2.6 million words

of the Chilcot Report

will run for as long as it takes - in a garden shed.

"The report of the Iraq Inquiry, Volume One."

Comedian Seymour Mace, who was shortlisted

for the Edinburgh Comedy Awards at last year's Fringe,

is on fine form again.

Amusing and repulsing his audience in equal measure

with his latest creation, Mannequin Hands.

# Mannequin hands... #

LAUGHTER AND GROANING

And, as ever, a cast of world-class dance, circus and cabaret acts

are taking to the air and making a splash,

as the festival quite literally gets into full swing.

The Glass Menagerie was the play

that catapulted Tennessee Williams to fame.

Now the International Festival is hosting the European premiere

of the acclaimed Broadway production

directed by the man of the moment, John Tiffany.

It stars the Tony Award winning actress Cherry Jones,

who plays the fading Southern belle Amanda Wingfield.

And another thing, I am right at the end of my patience!

What do you think I'm at the end of, Mother?

Or aren't I supposed to have any patience to reach the end of?

Now, I know, I know it seems unimportant to you,

what I am doing and what I'm trying to do,

having the difference between them. You don't think...?

I think that you are doing things

that you are ashamed of.

The play focuses on mother Amanda's dreams

of her son, Tom, finding the perfect gentleman caller

for her shy and fragile daughter, Laura.

This is the play that Tennessee Williams

really comes to prominence with,

and it's his only autobiographical play.

Well, for him, it's an unsuccessful attempt

to exorcise a guilt that he feels about what happened.

He didn't see his sister Rose for four years

as he was embarking on, you know, his career as a playwright.

And during that time,

Rose spiralled down

and she had a lobotomy.

And when he came back, she was kind of reduced,

and it was all about his attempt

to try and deal with the fact

that he thought he had absolutely abandoned his sister, and his mum.

It's a play made up of his memories.

Trying to write, which he did.

Drinking a lot, which he did.

Pretending he was going to the movies,

and we know what he did.

And that often hasn't got any easier between gay men and their mothers.

I don't believe you go every night to the movies.

Nobody goes to the movies night after night!

Nobody in their right mind

goes to the movies as often as you pretend to.

People don't go to the movies at nearly midnight.

Movies don't let out at 2am.

Come in stumbling, muttering to yourself like a maniac.

You get three hours' sleep and then go to work.

How did you two get together over The Glass menagerie, then?

We were talking about Cherry's trip,

recent trip back to Paris, Tennessee.

This was five years ago,

and as I started talking about my mother's letters,

I guess my accent got deeper and deeper,

further down south.

And just out of nowhere, John said,

"We're going to work together

"and were going to do The Glass Menagerie."

Because it is my favourite play,

and I never thought I'd get to direct it,

because I went into new plays,

and it wasn't until I heard your voice, and I thought,

"Am I going to get the opportunity to direct The Glass Menagerie

"with real American actors,

"and an Amanda who's actually from Tennessee?"

And that's why I pursued you like a hound.

Like a Yorkshire terrier.

Because I thought, "This is my one chance."

Is it because you're southern...

that, actually, your portrayal of what often is a character

who is derided as being nasty and overblown is very sympathetic?

I am so glad people feel that way,

particularly because I so admire her.

Everything she has done

her entire adult life

has been for the care of those children.

When sweet Tom is going on and on about the shoe factory,

if he had one iota of a notion

of what she has had to do and sacrifice

just to feed them and keep them warm.

You know, but she never lords that over them.

No matter how much of a harridan some people think she is,

she never says, "Do you know what I've done for you?

-"Do you know how much I've sacrificed?"

-Sacrificed.

How dare you jeopardise your job?

Jeopardise our security?

How do you think we would manage without that job?

Look, Mother, do you think I'm crazy about the warehouse?

Do you think I am in love with the Continental Shoemakers?

You think I want to spend 55 years of my life

down there in that celotex interior, with fluorescent tubes?

Honest to God, I'd rather somebody picked up a crowbar

and battered out my brains than go back mornings!

But I go. Sure, every time you come in in the morning

yelling that bloody, "Rise and shine, rise and shine!"

I think to myself how lucky dead people are, but I go.

The play itself, when, you know, he wrote about the staging,

it's very minimal,

and that allowed you to explore what you like to do on a stage.

I've discovered that the less you put to give an audience,

the more they see.

So I took everything away from you, didn't I?

Every single prop I could.

I mean, actually, Tennessee Williams took it all away from us,

I just went further. He writes with this thing called plastic theatre,

is the introduction to The Glass Menagerie, where he says, you know,

"The ice cubes in the glass are the death of American theatre."

Because what he wanted to do

was conjure Amanda and Laura out of thin air,

and so he did it with gauzes and lighting,

so he was able to just make them appear.

And, obviously,

that's quite familiar now to theatre audiences as a technique.

So I said, "Well, how do we conjure Amanda and Laura out of the set?"

"Oh, well, I know how to do this."

John said the first day of rehearsal, he said,

"All I know is the women come out of the furniture."

He said, "That's all I know, that's all I know."

And I thought, "Well, that's a good place to start!"

Here you are, on stage in Edinburgh,

you know, getting great reviews,

but a lot of people know you from...

'the first woman President of the United States.'

-'Oh, the power of television!'

-'Allison Taylor. Exactly.'

Putting American lives at risk

is the hardest decision

I've ever had to make.

But it is one that has to be made.

It was 2007, the primaries were going on,

and they were so sure that Hillary was going to win the primary

that they felt like they would be behind the times

if they did not have a woman president,

so I actually have Hillary to thank for getting that job.

What do you think, though, is happening in America just now?

The terrible dark shadow that's been over our country...

for ever...

has been given a wretched voice

that suddenly gives permission

for all that ignorance to bubble forth.

And I have great faith

in the country that,

despite these dire poll numbers right now

that show them ridiculously close,

that he will get his bottom whooped.

And he'll go back into his little Trump hole,

never to be seen or heard from again.

Of course, John, you're also the co-creator of the smash-hit show

Harry Potter And The Cursed Child,

which is currently running in the West End.

So, what a trajectory you've had, from studying Drama and Classics

at Glasgow University, to the Traverse, to Paines Plough,

to the National Theatre of Scotland, Broadway, musicals,

how many awards!

Years of Black Watch.

And what's brought you back to Scotland now?

Well, I mean, Scotland is my kind of home.

I suppose my heart's in Glasgow, but it all began in Edinburgh.

And when Fergus Linehan,

the director of the EIF,

phoned me up last year and said,

"Would you bring your production of Glass Menagerie

"to the Festival?"

my heart did so many somersaults.

Me and Tennessee had a bourbon that night.

And I said, "Are we doing it?" He went, "Mm-hmm."

Each summer, the Edinburgh Art Festival puts on

an eclectic mix of exhibitions.

This year, there's everything from Impressionist masterpieces

at the National Gallery of Scotland,

to site-specific installations

in some very unexpected spaces.

The crime writer Ian Rankin

joined me to inspect a show

which puts a dark spin on the Scottish Enlightenment.

But first, two new commissions

which commemorate the centenary of World War I.

Until recently, the MV Fingal,

a former Northern Lighthouse board ship,

was just a leaden lump of metal.

But now it's been transformed into a modern-day interpretation

of a World War I dazzle ship,

by the Turner Prize nominated artist Ciara Phillips.

Dazzle ships were developed by the British Navy

as a way of bewildering the Germans

with contrasting patterns designed to make ships hard to target.

The designs were devised by a team of women

under the watchful eye of maritime artist Norman Wilkinson.

Ciara Phillips' ship is called Every Woman,

and its painting was also largely carried out by female artists.

I worked as a scenic artist,

and a lot of scenic artists are women,

so it was just natural

that the team developed as all women.

The cat is basically a floating scaffold tower.

We used the cat all the way through.

We had poles, four-inch rollers on a pole -

that was how the ship was painted.

There was something really intimate about it,

this enormous sort of cliff of a ship

towering up against you like this.

And then you're there with a roller,

and there's something very intimate.

It was amazing to have this experience.

I feel very moved coming back, seeing it.

World War I was the first truly global conflict

involving hundreds of thousands of soldiers

from across the British Empire.

But the contribution of colonial troops

has often been overlooked.

Pakistani artist Bani Abidi's sound installation

in the Old Royal High School

gives a voice to the Indian soldiers who fought in the war.

The title is A Memorial To Lost Words,

because I'm looking in particular

at letters that were written

by the Indian soldiers to their families,

and were censored and never made it back home.

And songs that were sung by women in villages in India,

that were unsung after the war.

So, um...

Yeah, so it's a dialogue of two songs,

three women's voices and a single male voice.

I was really interested in the emotions that were being censored,

which could not be shared,

because they were telling people to not come to this war.

So you have the male voice,

and then you have women's voices

who are actually singing a folk song from that period,

which is telling the menfolk to come back home,

and what it is to have lost them.

So they are the very sort of lost voices

of what happens to the families and women who were left behind,

so it's... In multiple ways, it's absolutely unheard-of songs,

and the songs of dissent.

The aftermath of the Second World War

is the starting point for the Dovecot Gallery's exhibition

The Scottish Endarkenment.

It suggests Scottish art

took a darkward turn post-1945.

The works on display deal with themes

such as psychological conflict,

sexual prejudice and social tension.

So, who better to explore this survey of the Scottish psyche with

than crime writer and art collector Ian Rankin.

So what do you think of the idea

of actually framing an art exhibition

around the opposite of enlightenment?

Well, usually, you think of the writers.

You think of people dealing with the darker side of human nature,

you tend to think of the writers rather than the painters.

So it's really interesting to see if this exhibition manages

to bring across that notion that artists as well as writers

have always had an interest in the darker side of human existence.

So, when we start to look around here,

then, looking straight at

this incredibly arresting canvas,

this was an artist's response

to being in a concentration camp

and thinking that she would never be able to paint anything.

Yeah, and I think she's done a terrific job.

I mean, I've visited Auschwitz only once.

I know this isn't Auschwitz, but when you go there,

the scale is almost unbelievable.

You really can't take it in.

Until you go into the museum and you see the glass cases

full of suitcases, full of shoes, full of spectacles, full of hair.

And then it humanises it,

because you can focus on one shoe or one pair of shoes,

and you go, "That was a human, that was a person."

What really strikes me about this is that they're all women's shoes.

Look at that beautiful orange shoe down there,

the pink shoe, the lilac shoe.

It reminds me a little bit of Schindler's List,

where there's suddenly a little burst of red

in this black-and-white movie,

because when you think of the death camps,

you often think of them in kind of sepia tones,

and suddenly to get a little sharp reminder of the colourfulness

of human activity and human life

makes it the more powerful, I think.

I think your eye is taken completely by the Bellany,

don't you think?

Yeah. I mean, I love Bellany, anyway.

I love his use of colour and his composition.

John Bellany's Ettrick Shepherd painting

was directly inspired

by Scots author James Hogg's

Confessions Of A Justified Sinner.

To actually take on a literary author,

-but it's actually John Bellany's face, isn't it?

-It is.

-It's John Bellany's face!

-It certainly is John Bellany's face.

But the sheep are amazing. They look actually quite bloodied.

And then you've got this quiet corner of the exhibition,

and then you've got an Alison Watt, and you think,

well, I can properly stand here and we can actually relax...

look at this, and not worry about

what it actually is.

Yeah, but the reason it's in here is, I mean,

for two reasons, I guess.

One is light and shade.

There's a lot of light and darkness in that painting.

There's a lot of blackness in Alison's paintings.

It could be a shroud. It could be a shroud.

And so there's also that possibility.

But with Alison Watt, you can, you know, I mean,

-some people think her paintings are very erotic.

-Yeah.

-I don't know if you find that.

-I do sometimes.

I think, is that an arm with a breast underneath?

It could be a snowy crevice going into a cave.

So, do you think the idea of

kind of putting an exhibition together on endarkenment works?

It's not like putting an exhibition together

on Surrealism or on Impressionism.

It's a kind of really deep philosophical idea, endarkenment.

Well, it is, it's also a very loose idea,

and you could look around here and say,

"I don't see how that fits,

"quite fits in, or how that artist fits in."

But it is a chance to see some fantastic artists

at the top of their game, from the 20th and the 21st century.

So take that on board first,

see some amazing art

and think about some of the themes,

because every artist approaches it in a very different way.

That's just about all for this show.

I'll be back next Saturday,

when I'll be talking to Man Booker prize-winner James Kelman

about his new novel.

Sigur Ros sits alongside Schubert

as the International Festival takes a new musical direction,

and we'll be feeling the love which is all around town this year.

But tonight, we play you out with Hollywood star Alan Cumming,

who's back on home turf

to sing a selection of seductive and sappy songs at The Hub,

every night until 27th August.

Goodnight.

# Tell me

# Why

# Tell me

# Why

# I may be mad I may be blind

# I may be viciously unkind

# But I can still read what you're thinking

# Oooh

# And I've heard it said too many times

# That you would be better off Besides

# Why can't you see this boat is sinking

# This boat is sinking

# Let's go down to the water's edge

# And we can cast away those doubts

# Some things are better left unsaid

# But they still turn me inside out

# Turn me inside out

# Turn me inside out

# Tell me

# Why

# Tell me

# Why

# This is the book I've never read

# These are the words I've never said

# This is the path I'll never tread

# These are the dreams I'll dream instead

# This is the joy that's seldom spread

# These are the tears The tears we shed

# This is the fear This is the dread

# These are the contents of my head

# And these are the years that we have spent

# And this is what they represent

# Do you know how I feel?

# Cos I don't think you know how I feel

# This is the book I've never read

# These are the words I've never said

# This is the path I'll never tread

# These are the dreams I'll dream instead

# This is the joy that's seldom spread

# These are the tears The tears we shed

# This is the fear This is the dread

# These are the contents of my head. #