Festival Tales: Edinburgh at 70

This programme contains strong language

To start this film, I'm taking you to where it started for me.

The venue that I performed my first ever Edinburgh show at, in 2006.

A venue that, nowadays, is this.

Since then, I've worked my way through the ranks,

like so many other comedians.

Good evening, Edinburgh!

Many of them feel they owe their careers to Edinburgh.

Whenever I'm near-tah the theatre, I...

LAUGHTER

Shut up!

But the phenomenal rise of comedy

is a small part of an extraordinary story.

This year, the Edinburgh International Festival

celebrates its 70th anniversary.

It was conceived as a way to bring people together

and lift their spirits in the aftermath of the Second World War.

Together with the Festival Fringe,

it has evolved into an eclectic mix of creativity and experimentation,

and it still feels as innovative and surprising as it did in 1947.

I was 21.

It was certainly, I'd say, one of the most important

turning points in my career.

So this fellow who's quite tall, and big blue eyes,

came along and went, "Hullo," and I said, "Hello."

It was Hugh Laurie. And we just instantly hit it off.

-Hello, Hugh.

-Hi.

-Hi.

It was everything that I had dreamed of as a child.

It showed me the bigger picture.

It showed me the world of entertainment.

I'd never, never, at 17 years of age,

had experienced an orchestra.

But it was the world's top orchestra.

And there was one night when, you know, nobody came,

we just had no audience.

Anyway, somebody came up and said,

"Would you like to do TV? Your own show?"

That's what happened in Edinburgh.

It was a dizzying dream, and it all happened because of Edinburgh.

There's no doubt, I don't think.

OPERATIC SINGING

After the war in 1947, the arts were seen as a way to heal the nation,

and this spirit of optimism was going to play out here,

in the city of Edinburgh.

These streets, theatres, walls, over the last 70 years,

have witnessed a miraculous coming together

of artists, writers, musicians,

and that strangest breed of all, comedians,

in what was a triumph of idealism.

But, like most young performers flocking up here,

I never really thought about what lay behind it all, why it exists,

why it was ever even thought of.

What was the spirit of 1947?

BELL CLANGS

In that year, some of the world's greatest musicians and actors

were making the difficult journey across war-torn Europe

to perform at what would be

the first ever Edinburgh International Festival.

If you analyse the history of it,

it was founded on the basis that the one language

which we human beings have,

which can express our capacity to love -

the language of the arts.

For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come

when we have shuffled off this mortal coil.

-How old is God?

-How old is God? God, how old is he?

Oh, God, how is he?

The Festival had been the idea of a remarkable man.

Rudolf Bing was an Austrian-born Jew who believed that art was the way

to return to the light in dark, unsettled times.

I started working on the first Festival in 1945,

when the war hadn't quite ended.

So the challenge was manifold,

and it comprised getting artists who had never heard of Edinburgh,

plus getting curtain material for hotel rooms,

and it was quite a formidable task.

But he was attempting to do this at a time of hardship,

and in a city that was known to be very conservative.

It was just simply beyond one's belief.

It wasn't in London, it wasn't in Paris, it wasn't in Berlin.

Er...

It was in...

..Edinburgh. We didn't have an opera house.

We didn't have a gallery of modern art.

It was a mad idea in 1947.

Britain was still struggling after the war.

People were grey with exhaustion,

shops were empty, the food was awful,

and to travel anywhere outside the UK was nearly impossible.

Must have been a hard sell for the people of Edinburgh,

to tell them that they were going to put on a party and invite the world.

WHISTLE BLASTS

TRAIN WHISTLE TOOTS

Food had to be brought into the city.

Flowers arrived by the truckload.

A bigger problem was that there was nowhere for anyone to stay,

and the rumour that the Americans expected en-suite bathrooms,

of which there were none.

They even thought of chartering a cruise ship to berth in Leith,

or a permanently parked sleeper train to house people.

In the end, they just made a plea to the people of Edinburgh

to find 10,000 beds, and they did.

Across the city, people opened their homes and enough beds were found.

Rudolf Bing's dream was becoming real -

that this would be a "bond of reunion in a disintegrated world".

OPERATIC SINGING

After the war, the fact that the arts became so important

is a real measure of what a civilised society we are.

You can't underestimate how much art aids a healing process,

because it's about communication, it's about...

..understanding, it's about putting yourself in other people's shoes,

and nothing does that like art.

What a wonderful idea to call up on the arts.

To summon the Muses as the immortals

who would be most likely to heal the world

after, you know, Ares and the war gods had ruined it.

-NEWSREEL:

-Edinburgh's aim is to be the Salzburg of the post-war world -

the new world centre for all art lovers.

In '47, it must have been pretty startling

for people to meet people like themselves,

with likeminded attitudes, who came from abroad.

People who had travelled in the early '40s

had been travelling to destroy Europe,

not to meet it on equal terms.

In 1947, there was a lot going on in people's hearts, and in Parliament.

You know, the establishment of the National Health Service and...

..artists at the service of the public.

Even today, the sight of a great orchestra playing at the Usher Hall

is pretty impressive.

In those years, it must have seemed incredible.

WHISPERING: They're playing Haydn's Surprise Symphony

for the opening concert, which they played in 1947.

Ssh.

ORCHESTRA STARTS

In '47, the great conductor Bruno Walter,

who'd been exiled by the Nazis, was making his way from New York

to be reunited with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

for the first time.

The festival put together what was first

of its many bold collaborations.

They had asked Walter to work with Kathleen Ferrier,

a young English singer who had sung in munitions factories

and military camps during the war,

becoming as popular with the wider public

as she was with the posh opera-goers.

She was very well known. She was a down-to-earth Lancashire girl.

She'd started off as a telephonist.

Everyone who'd met her said she was absolutely enchanting

and terribly funny and down-to-earth.

And she could make these very, very simple songs

like Blow The Wind Southerly...

You'd be in floods of tears.

KATHLEEN FERRIER SINGS

Walter was not sure that she could manage Mahler's music...

until he heard her.

Bruno Walter just fell in love with her instantly,

as absolutely everybody did.

And I think one of the things that's most moving and most significant

was the fact that an English singer was suddenly singing in German,

the language of the enemy, the language of the Nazis,

the language of hatred.

And this was a very, very healing moment, I think, for people.

And that's a very noble thing, I think,

for an international festival to do.

Even the Royal Family were there, and the reviews were rave.

"Last night's elegant audience, some in evening dress,

"a few in kilts and several in arty corduroys,

"forgot their elegance and applauded for about five minutes

"with stamping of feet and cries for more."

It was a brilliant success.

Bruno Walter said that there had been

two great influences on his life - Gustav Mahler and Kathleen Ferrier.

That's the real story of the Edinburgh Festival,

the meetings of people who couldn't possibly have met anywhere else.

The Festival was to become a place of drawing together

different nationalities, classes and artistic disciplines.

It would also bring the establishment

and the anti-establishment face-to-face.

Even that first year at the Festival,

those that weren't officially invited

took things into their own hands and set up on the outskirts of the city.

When a critic remarked that it was a pity they were on the FRINGE,

a whole new phenomenon was born.

Thank you.

Over the following years,

these two events would at times battle and compete.

They would influence each other and bring new audiences,

and fill up every corner of the city.

# Baby, please come home... #

AUDIENCE CLAPS ALONG

Edinburgh was becoming a magnet for youth,

a generation emerging from the war, determined to live life to the full

and do their own thing.

And as they flocked here for the arts,

the setting added to the allure.

The atmosphere of the city seeps into everything.

Edinburgh is not like the stage set,

it's more like the lead character in the drama

that plays out here every summer.

Edinburgh was a very, kind of...

It seemed like a faraway...

..almost fairyland that had a castle, you know.

SHE LAUGHS

But architecturally it is, of course, a dazzling place to spend...

I mean just dazzling,

because the division between old and new is so exciting,

the levels going up and down the Grassmarket

and then up through the gardens.

It was a bit, like, oppressive

because there is so much history in these old walls.

I felt that there was...

..a lot of old ghosts in the city.

Old spirits that went through difficult, dark times.

Medieval...

The castle, the walls, the horror stories of the past.

This really strange kind of, you know,

magical kind of city in a way, with all these spires.

I think anybody who's done at least two Edinburgh festivals

will always have a very particular memory of Edinburgh the place.

It's not incidental to the entire experience, I don't think.

It's a kind of a metaphor for the city itself.

There's all these surprising things down little lanes,

and underneath bridges and stuff like that,

and I think that really...

..helps with the festival, because it's always full...

There's always more to discover.

One of the highlights of the festival was Fonteyn.

The press and the public loved her.

-NEWSREEL:

-Margot Fonteyn is the Firebird,

fluttering and caught in the arms of her partner, Michael Somes.

Where ballet had been cool and remote,

she was intense and full of emotion. Her power to tell a story

made ballet more accessible than ever before.

Fonteyn had sort of penetrated the popular consciousness.

She had a film-star status,

and she was our Margot, she was our ballerina.

And alongside the International Festival and the Fringe,

the Film Festival was also growing.

-NEWSREEL:

-..Walter Wainger.

Sir Alexander King welcomes them to the Film Festival.

The atmosphere of cross-pollination continued as the Film Festival drew

more stars, directors and writers,

adding to the artistic mix that Edinburgh was becoming.

This is the hour when the autograph-hunters strike.

So Edinburgh stretches out her hands to you.

Edinburgh invites...

Cinema newsreels were bringing culture to the masses,

and the once-distant stars of ballet, opera and theatre

were becoming household names.

This was the beginning of popularising the arts,

and led to the current mad diverse mix

that is the Festival today.

That's the one that grandfather couldn't stand.

Now, anything goes.

Performance once considered high art might be found anywhere,

even in the girls' toilet.

WOMEN SING: Flower Duet

# Dome epais... #

Hearing operatic voices in the acoustics of a small space

is actually rather amazing.

Plus it's very handy if you need a wee halfway through.

# Dome epais

# Le jasmin

# A la rose s'assemble... #

SHE LAUGHS

But, in 1957, opera stars were arts royalty,

and the greatest of them all, Maria Callas,

was coming to perform at Edinburgh for the first and only time.

The festival organisers were terrified.

She was the biggest star on earth,

and by that time she did have an enormous reputation

for violent outbursts.

And I think even by prima donna standards, you know,

she was very, very defensive, she was a tigress.

Callas now seemed reluctant to sing

all five of her scheduled performances.

She'd famously become obsessed with film star Audrey Hepburn,

and had transformed herself into a mirror image of the film star

by losing several stone.

It was said this had weakened her voice.

She was a figure of enormous glamour in the 1950s,

of sort of the Victoria Beckham level.

Everybody was interested in her every move.

Callas was a huge hit with the festival audience,

but she walked out on the last night,

leaving hundreds of disappointed fans.

And where did she go?

A party in Venice, where she met a shipping tycoon

called Aristotle Onassis.

The status of opera and its stars, and the expense of staging it,

would be a challenge to the festival over the years.

But the Fringe would bring new approaches to the genre

that made it more accessible.

One of the most genre-busting was a show that combined operatic voices

and TV's filthiest chat show.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

# Jerry, Jerry... #

# Put your fucking clothes on, you stupid bitch

# Don't you touch me

# Put your fucking clothes on, you stupid bitch

# Or I'll kill you in your sleep

# Put your fucking clothes on, you stupid bitch

# Cocksucker! Talk to the ass... #

The Fringe was, as ever, a place to take big chances.

And the first preview, we had 80 people. I mean, and that's...

That is a small amount of people in a room that size.

And I could just hear these two in front of me going,

"Eh, it's a good idea, didn't quite do it, what a waste of an idea."

And you know... "Oh!" But then the day after - packed out, 750.

And that day was amazing.

# I've been seeing... #

Jerry Springer: The Opera transferred to

London's National Theatre, as high-status as it gets.

# ..someone else

# What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fucking, fucking fuck?! #

Now opera could be about anything, and performed anywhere.

I think you can chart the course of Edinburgh from...

from this Arts Festival, which was Arts with a capital A -

of ballet and classical music and Shakespeare

and other such theatre, which still exists and is still there -

and it's little under-things, Fringe.

This little Fringe of demotic, you know,

the people's arts of slightly more vulgar...

..so-called "low" as opposed to high art,

and you could watch how that just takes over.

And low art becomes the main artistic discourse of the nation

in the way that pop music has overtaken classical music,

or jazz even.

CLOCK CHIMES

The Government was aware that the arts had a new importance,

reminding people what they'd fought the war for -

the idea of civilisation.

The Old Vic had toured Welsh mining villages with this in mind,

but no-one yet had quite worked out how to appeal to working people

or the youth. But now young actors began pouring into Edinburgh

as a place to explore new ideas.

Edinburgh was a magnet.

It was saying, "Come to us, come to us,"

because the English theatre was tremendously hidebound,

and so Edinburgh was opening things up.

When the opportunity came to start a play in Edinburgh,

all of us thought, "How wonderful!

"How courageous of Edinburgh to do this so soon after the war."

I was 20, and I was about to play Juliet at the Assembly Rooms.

And then I met a whole wonderful circle of poets,

and a circle of young men.

I just thought, "This is the kind of milieu that I want to be in."

Pardon me, but, er... have you a flyswatter?

I beg your pardon?

The following year, Claire arrived back as a hot ticket

from starring in Charlie Chaplin's Limelight,

and now she was on the arm of the most sizzling male star of 1953.

The Classics were extremely unpopular.

So getting a young rising superstar

to front an entire season,

and with Claire Bloom,

who'd just been in Limelight for Charlie Chaplin as, you know...

was a genuine coup.

And it did bring all kinds of people into that theatre

that would never have come.

-NEWSREEL:

-This is the hour when the autograph-hunters strike,

and I don't think Richard Burton and Claire Bloom will escape.

Ah, not the first time it's happened to them, evidently.

They're on their way to play in Hamlet at the Assembly Hall.

He was probably the last actor to be a genuine theatre star,

where people queued up all the way around the Old Vic.

He'd never been on television or in the movies at all, Burton.

He was he was a star because of his theatre acting.

To be or not to be, that is the question.

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows

of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

and by opposing...end them?

To die...

My image of Richard Burton

is standing in front of me with Claire Bloom.

He was 24, she was 21.

They obviously were attracted to each other.

He was very wonderful.

I'd known Richard Burton for a long time.

Boy from Wales.

And, erm...

we were friends. Great friends.

Richard used to read to me wonderful poetry.

They were very heady days for all of us.

They were young, gorgeous,

and had a more natural and relaxed acting style.

There was the last vestiges of the grand manner.

So the man was playing Claudius was still...

"O let no noble eye profane a tear for me."

There's the rub,

for in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,

when we have shuffled off this mortal coil.

Burton was a different matter because he was Welsh.

His first language had not been English anyway -

till he was seven or eight he didn't even speak it.

And he had a completely different delivery to everybody else.

So he had this wonderful voice.

He had this wonderful appearance.

His "mmmmm".

And he was... I learned very quickly...

..the sex did it because the gods were absolutely jammed with girls.

This was made even more exciting by the so-called thrust stage

which brought Burton right into the midst of the audience.

This hall was the HQ for the Church of Scotland

and designed for their meetings.

Because the city had so few theatres,

it had been requisitioned by the festival

and its very particular shape was now creating a new form of staging.

Theatre in the round.

But I love the idea of being close to the audience and, yes,

I think it added to the excitement of that production

that we were all so...

close to the audience.

You could see modern theatre groping its way to become something

with these new people

and that's the sort of thing I think that was the seed

that led to the classics becoming as popular as they...

You know, you can do any classic now.

But this was the beginning of groping towards modernity, I think.

AS RICHARD BURTON: To be or not to be.

You want to go quite deep and only quite subtly Welsh.

To sleep perchance to dream.

Points for effort.

# La, la-la-la-la

# La-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la... #

Now Shakespeare's done everywhere and in so many inventive ways.

At this festival alone, you can have breakfast with Shakespeare,

death by Shakespeare, or even go and see Shit-Faced Shakespeare,

where one of the cast performs entirely shit-faced each night.

I like the sound of that one.

But if modernity was creeping into Edinburgh in the early '60s,

it was still the old favourites that were getting top billing.

# You could do such a lot with a wompom

# You can use every part of it too... #

CEILIDH MUSIC PLAYS

-Let me hear you yeehaw!

-ALL:

-Yeehaw!

They say that the '60s only really arrived halfway through the decade,

with traditional country dancing a popular favourite,

along with Flanders and Swann singing The Wompom song.

But all of that was about to change, as the hippy era drifted in.

It was a great divide.

As polite Edinburgh society chuckled over comic songs,

the young were plotting to blow things apart

with the new avant-garde.

The happening is somewhere between...

theatre, performing arts, and, if you like, visual arts.

It's, er... At its best, it's quite thrilling.

During a long and fairly solemn speech by, I think,

a Czechoslovakian novelist,

a young woman, a naked young woman, was wheeled across the gallery

and it created a massive uproar and this was the event of the festival,

the great happening.

I stood on the trolley with my bottom to the audience.

And they... The audience were just looking in stunned silence,

You know? What's Edinburgh come to now?

Dear God, look at her bum.

And that was called the happening.

A happening being something that has no sense, no refuge, no, erm...

history. It's just something that happens and that's...

that's what was explained to me.

At the time, I was...

How old was I? I was 20 and I just thought it was a miraculous event

that a, erm, rather lovely nude woman could be seen in public.

And when I came off, it...

..it was like the place had blown up. People were just...

Couldn't believe it. They were sort of, erm...

I had a red plastic coat and I do remember several people saying,

"She's over there. She's over there."

And it was almost like being...

..an animal trapped and I don't remember very clearly...

Well, I don't remember at all the business of being arrested.

Anna Kesselaar was an 18-year-old single mother

whose parents had both died.

She had no idea of the anger and outrage

that her appearance would provoke.

Edinburgh itself was contained and difficult and unforgiving.

It was a savage place to live in, to be honest,

if you were on the wrong side of it.

I do remember this awful man coming to...

"Give me the baby, give me the baby."

You know, really, really...

I was not going to part with my baby.

Anna Kesselaar was acquitted at trial

and retained custody of her child.

But what was known as the Lady MacChatterley trial

divided Edinburgh society.

This was the moment when the Edinburgh Festival

could have been non-acceptable.

But it did test the idea of the Edinburgh Festival

to the breaking point.

I must have been to about 30 festivals for my sins.

I first went in 1967 and you can see in front of me

a pile of all the programmes...

Extracts from all the programmes from everything.

The festival in those days was very, very different,

in the '60s and early '70s,

because there was very, very little Fringe.

It hardly impinged at all.

And when you walked down Princes Street,

all the shop windows had photographs in them

of the great classical stars.

It was all quite dignified and quite genteel.

But in the back rooms and dusty church halls,

the Fringe was quietly growing and growing.

The festival has been defined by the geography of the city.

The grand old buildings of the official festival at its heart,

and then these winding alleyways.

A maze leading to hundreds of small rooms, halls, churches, and, yes,

even toilets, that each year people will move their productions into.

From here, young people were taking up the mission

to shock and challenge.

It made Edinburgh the place to discover the new.

And everyone is still out in search of it today.

A container wedged into a small bit of available ground

is one of hundreds of small events that might deliver the unexpected.

-Beloved.

-BELL RINGS

Join with us and move among us.

-ALL:

-Join with us. Join with us. Join with us. Join with us.

CREAKING

-Join with us.

-CREAKING

And it all began back in the '60s,

where Edinburgh had become a focus for the avant-garde

and experimental, which was spilling out all over the city.

This was at the time when the Fringe was threatening to steal the thunder

of the main festival.

Pop culture was on the rise all over Britain

and the International Festival decided to fight back.

They did this by putting together a group of comedians

that were funnier, bolder, riskier

than anything the Fringe was producing.

They called them Beyond The Fringe.

The festival director pulled together some Oxbridge talent.

Jonathan Miller was working as a doctor

and took two weeks off to perform at the festival.

He suggested Peter Cook, another recent graduate.

And they were joined by Alan Bennett

and a jazz musician called Dudley Moore.

And now, Dudley Moore continues his recital

with a setting by Kurt Weill of the ballad of Gangster Joe

by Bertolt Brecht.

LAUGHTER

HE SINGS IN MIMICKED GERMAN

# Oh... #

The group aimed their humour at the last bastions of the establishment -

the army, the church, and even the royal family.

It was one of those iconic moments in comedy history.

There is no royal personage actually gracing the Royal box.

Unless, of course, they're crouching.

LAUGHTER

It's hard to imagine now just how much this changed the rules.

It wasn't just changing what we could laugh at,

but it was the end of doffing your cap to authority

and the beginning of our modern age.

As the great critic of the time, Ken Tynan, said,

"English comedy had taken its first decisive step

"into the second half of the 20th century."

-Perkins?

-Sir.

-I want you to lay down your life.

-Yes, sir.

We need a futile gesture at this stage.

It will raise the whole turn of the war.

-Get up in a crate, Perkins.

-Yes, sir.

-Pop over to Bremen.

-Yes, sir.

-Take a shufti.

-Sir.

-Don't come back.

-Right you are.

Goodbye, Perkins.

-God, I wish I was going, too.

-Goodbye, sir.

Or is it au revoir?

No, Perkins.

Beyond The Fringe had killed a lot of sacred cows

and that had happened, well, I think, three years before,

so that was perhaps the great seminal sort of comedy production.

The shock had worn off by the time we did our Edinburgh revue,

which is why I think we concentrated on doing slightly more silly,

surreal stuff to make people laugh.

MUSIC: The Liberty Bell

We stayed in the Masonic Lodge in Johnston Terrace.

We were boys all on one floor, girls on the top floor

and some strange winking eye in the ceiling, looking down

and odd suits of Masonic gear in glass cases in the hallway,

and us writing comedy material. It seemed perfect.

So, Michael Palin stayed in this room in a sleeping bag on the floor.

The Edinburgh Festival was a meeting point for various of the Pythons.

John Cleese and Graham Chapman had toured

and had success at the festival.

And now Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin were in town,

learning to be comedians.

APPLAUSE AND CHEERING

I wish to register a complaint.

APPLAUSE

At the time...

satire was the big thing, That Was The Week That Was.

And yet, certainly Terry and myself

were looking more for the sort of surreal,

I suppose what would become Python, really.

Not depending entirely on the week's news or the day's news,

but on strange characters and strange contrast

and people coming together to do odd things.

So there was a great deal of freedom at that Edinburgh Festival and

we did develop, I think, as writers, probably more than performers.

This was the point when TV star-maker

David Frost was on the prowl

and the start of the festival as a real hunting ground

for future TV talent.

I realised suddenly that everything leading up to this

had been sort of schoolboy mucking around,

undergraduate mucking around, but here, suddenly,

there was a chance that someone might sort of see me and give me

a job later on. I could do what I always wanted to do,

my father would never let me, which was become an actor,

and to do comedy.

# You're

# The cream

-# In my coffee

-APPLAUSE

# You're the salt in my stew... #

Edinburgh closed at 10pm.

Most people were in bed with their Ovaltine,

but the festival decided to try out a late-night slot.

Their mission was to challenge the status quo

and remain truly international.

And to bring in somebody like Dietrich

was like suddenly, you know, parachuting in,

I don't know, the Foo Fighters or something into the programme.

And I think people, especially in Edinburgh,

were very, very shocked by it,

because she had quite a reputation, Dietrich.

A crowd waits at the Turnhouse Airport to welcome Marlene Dietrich.

I loved Edinburgh.

I want to say this again and again and again.

I loved Edinburgh.

Dietrich had obviously a very special reputation...

to come back to Europe after the war, she had, you know,

left Germany behind and sung for the American soldiers in the war.

# Where have all the flowers gone?

# Long time passing... #

And to the Germans, she was a traitor

and to the Europeans and the Allies, obviously, she was a hero.

It must have been wonderful for her to be at this festival

and to be, you know, telling her story to the British.

# Where have all the soldiers gone? #

She sent out a big message, anti-war.

# Every one! When...

# Will they ever learn? #

Dietrich's version is so raw and edgy

and full of pain and melancholy and remorse.

I mean, it's remarkable from that point of view

and quite indelible.

She certainly had an aura about her.

I think her biggest achievement was her androgynous way

of messing with the image of a woman.

And so she put the suit on, she had a masculinity

and a courage about herself that was ground-breaking at the time.

You know, she wasn't entirely respectable

and also the fact that it was a late-night show,

in a city that basically closed down entirely at ten o'clock.

The festival was also challenging the sexual politics of the time.

Gallop a-pace, bright Phoebus, through the sky

and dusky night in rusty iron car,

between you both shorten the time, I pray,

that I may see that much desired day,

when we shall meet these rebels in the field.

SHOUTING

We were not altogether welcome.

Because Edward II is, I think, the first play ever written

in the English language about... with a gay character at its centre.

Of course, Ed was rather despised in Scotland because he was the man

who Robert the Bruce beat at the Battle of Bannockburn.

But that was not the theme that was offensive to the Church of Scotland.

But the fact that two men in the process of telling the story kissed,

showed their affection for each other,

this was against the law.

There was a councillor, John Kidd I think was his name,

who reported the production to the local watch committee...

..on the grounds that it was offensive,

not just in the church premises but anywhere.

And it was decided by the watch committee and a few policemen,

I remember, arrived in their uniforms, sat in the front row.

They showed no objection to it all and we continued and just guaranteed

there wasn't a single ticket to be had and...

..that could be another feather in Edinburgh Festival's cap.

In 1968, as festival-goers sat listening to

Benjamin Britten's War Requiem,

the Soviet-led troops rolled into Czechoslovakia.

Nearby, the Citizens Theatre Company was performing

The Resistible Rise Of Arturo Ui by Bertolt Brecht.

I was in the production of Arturo Ui and we performed in Edinburgh

at the time of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia.

The theme of Ui is "I'm here to protect you from force and violence

"with force and violence if necessary",

and there was a line spoken by a Russian soldier from his tank,

saying, "We're here to protect you."

And it was decided to put that on at the end of our production.

It was going on like on a ticker tape.

There's always been a sense that Edinburgh represents

a chance to really open up with comparatively few holds barred

on the big issues of the time.

The invasion of Czechoslovakia also happened as

the Soviet State Orchestra played to the Festival,

provoking angry criticism.

But the Festival's original mission of 1947 was to use the arts

to set aside differences, and they continued to invite performers,

even if defying public opinion.

These visits to the West allowed crucial new relationships -

Shostakovich and Benjamin Britten became close friends

and influenced each other's work.

And there were also dissident artists

not able to make these official visits.

Ricky Demarco made over 15 trips behind the Iron Curtain

to bring artists to Edinburgh

whose work we would otherwise not have seen.

The Cold War was a reality and

Europe was suffering from the obscenity of it,

the nonsense of it.

I just felt compelled to care.

It was a prison.

The Edinburgh Festival was very important because it allowed them

to be welcome here.

They brought with them highly experimental avant-garde work,

much of which was performed at the Traverse,

which has been called Britain's first-ever fringe theatre.

I think it's undeniable that the Festival did show us things

we otherwise would not have seen.

The thing that touches me about that era in the '70s

was our belief in theatre.

This is Dead Class, performed by a Polish theatre company

led by Tadeusz Kantor.

One of the most exciting shows ever seen on the Fringe.

The Polish theatre that occurred... that was brought over in '76,

it was so stylised, they were like automata.

And being automata was part of the point they were making,

and you really had to just not decide you knew what was going on.

You had to agree to be mystified.

THEY CHANT IN POLISH

And they put us through it.

You know, we'd sit there in the audience

while they ran around and spat at us.

And I would say, "Why don't we spit back?"

And this was as avant-garde as it got.

And you went in and you had to take most of your clothes off

and put them in a box.

And about halfway through this performance,

which was conducted in Polish and was complete gibberish,

they wheeled in this sort of chicken coop

in which a naked lady was sitting,

and she was sort of making chicken noises.

And then they opened the door of the chicken coop

and I was pushed into the chicken coop with this lady,

who asked me in very heavily-accented English

whether I wanted to make love to her.

And I said, in my best schoolboy, prim way,

"No, I don't think so."

As the Fringe spread out its tendrils across the city,

more and more space opened up.

Last year, this was just basement storage.

Now it's been transformed into Guantanamo Bay, the holiday camp.

Hello, welcome, come on in.

Find yourselves a lovely deck chair to sit in.

Make yourselves comfortable.

And as you're doing so, put your bags down,

take a moment to take off your shoes and socks.

You have your own private beach to enjoy,

so get your toes into the sand, wiggle them around.

Do you believe it?

Immersive experiences are now just part of the theatre landscape.

Being sat with your feet in the sand, cocktail in hand,

being exposed to enhanced interrogation techniques.

VOICEOVER: Edinburgh is now established as the place where

difficult political issues can be tackled in experimental ways.

It doesn't seem odd at all to be sat in a basement

at 1.30 in the afternoon, playing an interactive game show

in which one of the cast members gets water boarded.

One more drink!

So if you could please pour an entire bottle down

into the funnel into the jerry can.

This year is apparently one of the most political Fringes ever,

with a huge number of powerful and provocative productions

going on all over town.

MAN SPLUTTERS AND GASPS

Got to feel for this guy.

And for the production that are in this venue next.

-NEWSREADER:

-6,000 Upper Clyde shipbuilding employees

are threatened with redundancy and...

Back in the '70s,

the issue of the day was the Clyde shipyard closures.

It was all about political theatre,

but how did you get the working man to turn up?

A group of young actors and musicians decided to form a co-op,

as you did in the 1970s.

They staged a parody of the Upper Clyde shipyard work-in.

It was set in an old welly-boot factory

and staged here by the old covered market.

It did two things that the Festival was hoping to achieve -

enticing a new audience to the theatre

and introducing a comic genius.

# If it wasnae for your wellies where would you be?

# You'd be in the hospital or infirmary... #

They're legendary now.

Because the Waverley Market, it had a glass roof, and for some reason

we had to put the time earlier, and then nobody realised or noticed

in September, seven o'clock, it's still very light,

so simple lighting effects were just hopeless.

So, Billy looked up and he said,

"Well, I'll just go on until it gets dark."

We watched that with our mouths open.

We watched possibly, I think, maybe the funniest stand-up I had seen.

And comedy at the Fringe was getting a more political message.

And I wear finger picks, do you see that?

Do you know why that is?

It's because I used to work in the shipyards.

Really. And the reason I wear finger picks is because of the shipyards

was these wee timekeepers,

and they used to come clattering along

with the sandwiches flying into the air,

trying to get in in time.

Imagine running into a shipyard, you know?

Trying to get in. My God!

And he'd wait till you were three yards from it and go...

"Chhh!"

Argh!

It's time we had shows for ordinary punters in Edinburgh

to come and see. And then they charged us 1,800 quid for the...

It's an annual cry here, "Let's get the working class in."

They talk about them as if they were gnus or giraffes or something.

And they did get people in.

By using comedy in entertainment,

the Fringe was creating political theatre for everyone.

The London headlines.

The fact that the Edinburgh Festival gave spaces for young people

to be involved in this big explosion of artistic endeavour

was huge. Really important.

And cut through a lot of the snobbery and pomposity

surrounding theatre.

Because theatre in its earliest forms wasn't for the rich.

It was for everybody, especially for the poor, you know.

Storytelling in societies where most people were illiterate,

storytelling became the way that they learned about themselves

and their past, and that was performance.

But class was becoming an issue.

Not just an issue, but a theme for the next generation of comedians.

I do think that if you look at the composition of a theatre company,

you will find the answer.

We have with us the creme de la creme, I think,

of the various university acting groups in Cambridge -

the Marlowe Society, the Footlights, well-known in their own right.

# I once loved a rhinoceros

# Preposterous as that may sound

# Sweet little, neat little noceros

# All the joy of the love we've found... #

But this was about to change

and Edinburgh was about to see a new tide sweeping in.

Some time before we went to Edinburgh,

the BBC showed a programme called Boom Boom.... Out Go The Lights.

And it was an astonishing...

..revelation, an expose of this new form of comedy.

Don't wind me up, John, all right?

Yeah. Legs do break, my son, they do break.

Basically, people were saying what punk did three or four years ago

to glam rock and disco,

this comedy is doing to variety and typical comedy.

It's the new, young explosion. It's irreverent, it's...

What are you, theatre?

Whenever I'm near-tah the theatre, I...

LAUGHTER

Shut up!

And Hugh and I in my rooms at Queen's, my college in Cambridge,

I had a television and we were looking at it and we were thinking,

"Well, it's just all over. We are from another era."

We're sketch comedy. You know, we are...

HE KNOCKS

"Ah, Perkins, come in. Sit down."

You know, I mean, it's just, really, so dated.

It goes back to Peter Cook and Dudley Moore and before that

to Jonathan Miller. And it's, you know...

bits of Pythons, obviously.

But it's all basically, "Ah, Perkins, come in."

Or, "Hello, I'd like to buy something completely ridiculous,

"please, that you won't obviously have in this shop."

Last week, if you remember, we were concentrating largely on the body.

Well, tonight, it's the turn of the voice

and we'll be doing some vocal work.

Well, here's our space. Where's our actor?

Well, we're very lucky to have with us in the studio this evening Hugh.

-Hello, Hugh.

-Hi.

-Hi.

We were students, we didn't know what we were going to do.

None of us had a job lined up. Only Emma Thompson had an agent.

Hugh always claimed he wanted to go into the Hong Kong police force

because he had read they were corrupt and he fancied himself

as some sort of a Serpico figure.

I think he just fancied the idea of himself in ironed white shorts.

But I thought I'd go into teaching.

The show won the Perrier Award

and offers for television and film soon followed.

It was a dizzying dream and it all happened because of Edinburgh.

There's no doubt, I don't think.

Oh, I hated all them Oxbridge people.

Despised, loathed.

Couldn't stand them. Wanted them to be, you know,

eradicated from the face of the earth.

Going into the Fringe Club bar, which was the place everybody went

during the day and after shows in the evening...

-HE MUMBLES:

-And you were just like this,

talked like this all the time, just in case anybody heard me

and would go, "Oh! Oh! I bet you're at Cambridge, aren't you?"

I'd go, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I don't mean to be at Cambridge!

"It's not my fault.

I was angry with the audience for making me perform in front of them.

I was angry with, you know...

..the left for being so shit.

I was angry with the right for being so evil.

I was angry with people for buying Habitat furniture.

I was in the Cambridge Footlights and there was a real backlash

against Oxbridge comedy. And in all honesty,

this is probably the first time I've ever mentioned that I did that

professionally because it was a massive negative.

I remember that there was...

I think The Oxford Revue one year, all the alternative comics

just turned up just to heckle them offstage.

The fact, I bombed on the first night

is so painful, especially when you're, you know,

you're young and you're ambitious.

And...

So just kind of impelled by that, I took the whole act and I was just

so angry that I kind of blew it apart, really.

A one, two, a one, two, three, four...

Hello, John. Got a new motor?

And I just started swearing kind of at random,

and that's really the night that my performance style

finally kind of achieved its apotheosis.

I was a hit then.

A new act had hit town - stand-up alternative comedy.

What started out as a couple of comedians became an explosion

that would transform Edinburgh over the coming decades.

APPLAUSE

I'd just done Girls On Top and they had, you know, a time-out tent.

And they wanted me to talk about Girls On Top but it was two o'clock

in the morning and Michael Grade and I were still not on.

So now at about one o'clock they had a Zulu band.

I mean, a full, full...

And everybody's on their chairs doing Zulu and then these two people

are supposed to go out after that to follow that act.

So Michael and I got drunk underneath the tent.

We were just drinking from the bottle

and by the time I was called out I said,

"I would like to introduce my next guest, Michael Grade."

He comes out... Michael Grade ran Channel 4.

I do not remember what I did with Michael Grade

but that night I got a 12-show series.

To this day I do not... People go, "You and Michael Grade!"

and I go, "Yeah..." I don't know what we did.

I think it was something about wearing a horse's head

but I can go no further.

One major impact the Festival was having on British culture

was forcing comedians to create a new show every year.

Anyone go running? Exactly.

Why would you go running if you're not being chased?

I think the Edinburgh Fringe is the thing that has most led to a culture

where comedians in this country turn over new shows year on year.

I think it drives them.

How that goes in August in Edinburgh

sets the tone for the next two years of my life.

I'm going to start by moving the microphone stand because you won't

be able to see me otherwise, will you?

All the comics that have "made it" that I know of

have all done shows in Edinburgh.

I always pictured that Marc Almond,

he didn't have much money so he got his dad to play keyboards.

The pressure to create new material,

and with a show that is an hour long with a beginning, middle and end,

has played a huge part in making Britain

this incredibly fertile place for new writing.

Starsky And Hutch is my favourite show.

Then they re-run in last year. Turns out, pile of old cack.

KEYBOARD PLAYS

Edinburgh is a great place to reinvent yourself because

the whole industry's there and you're laying your stall out,

saying, "This is what I've got this year."

I don't want to show off but I'm actually quite charitable.

Yes. A couple of years ago I actually bought one of those

anti-bullying charity wristbands.

I say bought - I stole it off a fat ginger kid.

Risky joke to do in Scotland, that one.

VOICEOVER: This guy's never going to make it.

It produced Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie,

Clive Anderson, Griff Rhys Jones,

Sacha Baron Cohen, David Mitchell.

There's just been an extraordinary wealth of people from there.

And then when you look at the stand-up circuit,

literally the great names have nearly all been there at some point.

It's definitely a teething ground for the world's entertainment

and without it, your TV screens would be a lot poorer.

Some people see comedy as a monster,

swallowing up the rest of the Fringe,

but it does seem to have brought more and more people here each year

desperate to experience something new.

The festival continues to support hundreds of new acts

and even new genres.

I feel like I'm being followed.

Of course, now it seems so professional -

television and the internet, and the stakes are so high for fame,

but that's one corner of it.

If you actually visit it and you talk to families of young people

who are going up to Edinburgh this year,

they're not going there in order to try and get spotted for Channel 4

or something, they have this show they want to do and it is...

It's done in a bright hope of entertaining,

alarming, beguiling, seducing,

delighting, shocking, all the things that art can do.

The most exciting time was going up there as a complete unknown

with four other unknowns and a little team putting on this show

which really, really caught people's imagination.

# Edinburgh Festival

# It's the one that's best of all

# If you're an actor rest and call your agent... #

And Scotland was also producing its own big hits,

and the locals were now pouring in.

The festival's early aims at getting a broader audience into theatres

had been achieved.

The festival has a certain...

..function for Scottish people as well.

It's this thing where our country is...

The spotlight is on it,

of the world. And it's this month where we...

The city may be a bit different to how we know it

for the rest of the time,

but it's definitely this place where all eyes are on us and

the welcome we give, the landscape that we present to people is very,

very important to how Scotland in general is seen.

The National Theatre Of Scotland's Black Watch, about their own

Scottish regiment in the Iraq War, seemed to pull together

everything the Festival had been aiming towards since the War.

It didn't really seem like a big fucking deal at the time, eh?

BANGING

The energy, the humour,

the political fierceness and theatre that was genuinely for the people.

..Uniform 3362.

P4.

Mother Alpha 5502...

What began as paternal at a time when the government

felt like they knew what was good for the nation

has developed into something incredibly diverse

that offers us almost anything we can think of.

I think what's better now is there's this sense that

it's a huge bran tub, Edinburgh.

For a whole month you can just put your hand in

and pull out anything you like.

And people take chances on things in a very good way.

I think they're less selective about what they go and hear.

Even in 1947, there were people who came uninvited to create

the first Festival because that's what moves art on.

It's people who go against the status quo

and want to explore human thought, human ideas,

human emotion, and that's what creates this iceberg

that's constantly moving, and I feel that the festival is that.

When you remember the festival was started to kind of...

..give people some cultural

sense of community and celebration after the Second World War...

..it serves that purpose every year and it brings people...

I think the most important thing, it certainly did for me,

it exposed me to so many people and things from different cultures.

You know, a kind of smorgasbord,

an intense smorgasbord of difference.

I think... Do you know?

One of the things that Brits are shocking at

is whenever we have a huge success, we downplay it.

You go anywhere in the world, the Edinburgh Festival has...

Just everybody's in awe of it.

And it has...

Incalculable artistic riches have come out of it.

I mean, one of the reasons why Britain punches above its weight

on the global screen and TV stage is because of Edinburgh.

I don't think people realise what a treasure they have here.