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10 comedians announced for Underbelly's Edinburgh Comedy All Stars at Festival Fringe 2025
"Comedian Olga Koch is going to tell you a scary story over the course of an hour" is the premise of this work in progress from one of the most consistent and hilarious Fringe performers of the last decade. Her show last year, 'Olga Koch: Comes From Money' was her best yet - so it'll be fascinating to see what she's going to come up with to top it. See her at the Monkey Barrel from July 28-August 10. | Contributed
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Scotsman
15 minutes ago
- Scotsman
Fringe is intensive course in performing that costs same as an MA
Frisky, aka Laura Corcoran, is to perform at this year's Fringe Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is a three-and-a-half week intensive course in performing that has the same value - and costs the same - as an MA, a veteran performer is to tell an audience at the official launch of this year's event. Laura Corcoran, aka Frisky, one half of musical comedy double act Frisky and Mannish, who have performed at the Fringe since 2009, is to address the Fringe Society's launch event to 'metaphorically cut the ribbon' of the 78th Fringe. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The event, on 1 August, will see Ms Corcoran, who is returning to Edinburgh for her solo show for the first time since 2019, also discuss the barriers faced when continuing to perform after having children - as well as addressing the issue of a skills gap in MCs who can hold the attention of an audience in an online, post-pandemic world. Frisky, aka Laura Corcoran, is to perform in a solo show at this year's Fringe. | Frisky She is to call for artists attending the Fringe for the first time to make the most out of the event at Fringe Central, with opportunities to observe different aspects of the arts sector, from graphic design and technical aspects of the sector. She said: 'I'm going to speak to the fact that if you're here at all, you've invested in yourself to do this. I want to talk about how to make the most of it and look at some ways to change your thinking about the industry while you're here. As a performer, you're in a position to observe very closely at the Fringe in a way that you maybe wouldn't have in other arts environments because of the sheer scale and quantity of work that's here and the diversity of it, once you start to really key into other areas of the industry, you can really see how they tick. 'If you start thinking critically and being more curious and observant you can get more out of it than your own lived experience of the Fringe and get a lot and learn a lot really quickly. So I'm trying to encourage people to do that and be smart with the investment they have already made.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad She added: 'Once you get your brain into a place of critical thinking, the wealth of knowledge and research that is here, I would say is equivalent to an MA and costs about the same. It's there for you as a very intense training.' Ms Corcoran, who began performing at the Fringe in 2004 as a student, before creating the Frisky and Mannish duo, said she had started holding courses on how to be an MC at events after industry figures had raised the issue of a lack of skills in people able to host cabaret and variety-style events. She warned a trend for comedians and entertainers to create content online - and monetise their creative products through the internet on platforms such as TikTok - meant fewer people are able to hold the attention of a live audience. 'The pandemic was really the time when TikTok comedy took off,' she said. 'It is a way of monetising it. In the industry, you're expected to do a lot of free work before you get a sniff of paid work. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'It's quite a specific thing to manage the energy of a room over the course of a night. You're throwing the ball back and forth between acts and making audiences feel warm and relaxed and entertained. 'There is a real lack of it because people with skills and talent are making TikToks. They're making online content and monetising it that way, not getting up in front of an audience. 'Even with circus performers, they're really struggling for people with great acts. They're super skilled performers, they can do tumbling and juggling but they don't have an act with a context and a great arc and an aesthetic that connects to an audience directly. This connection between performer and audience is something that is already an evident skills gap.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Ms Corcoran, who has a six year old daughter and is now based in rural France with her family, said the majority of her work comes from hosting dinner cabaret shows - and 'Christmas circus' in Germany, where variety performances are more popular than in the UK. 'I make the majority of my money in Europe,' Ms Corcoran said. 'There's a huge variety scene in Germany particularly.' A recent report from Parents and Carers in Performing Arts (PiPA) found eight out of ten women working in the arts had to cut down working hours to manage caring responsibilities. 'This isn't only a problem at the Fringe of course, this is an industry-wide issue,' she said. 'It's become so ubiquitous, it's become invisible and I think a big attitude shift could happen which would open a lot more doors. I should stop being the problem of just the parents and becomes a collective responsibility.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'They say it takes a village and I think the Fringe is a village in a lot of ways and we need to look at how we can expand it into a village for families as well.' Her solo debut show this year. Frisky's Reshuffle, will see the audience challenge Frisky and her four-piece band to play any song in any style, from samba to skiffle, Mötley Crüe to Mongolian throat singing. Chris Snow, head of artist services at the Festival Fringe Society, said: 'The Edinburgh Festival Fringe artist address is a key moment for artists to gather, meet each other, and celebrate the start of the 2025 festival. It also marks the opening of Fringe Central, our support hub for artists, industry and media.
The Guardian
3 hours ago
- The Guardian
‘Robin Williams said: 'I'll buy the club!'': how The Comic Strip set the UK comedy scene ablaze
It was the moment comedy broke with sexism – yet it happened in a strip club. It was a fervour of free creative expression – yet it retained a commercial, careerist edge. It was one of the longest-running and most successful brands in UK comedy history – which few people could now recognise. At the Edinburgh fringe this summer, The Comic Strip Presents … will be memorialised in a series of film screenings and Q&As with its creator and prime mover Peter Richardson. Richardson was the impresario behind the legendary comedy club The Comic Strip, which opened in 1980. When he and his star performers – Rik Mayall, Alexei Sayle, French and Saunders among them – created Channel 4's The Comic Strip Presents … a couple of years later, he could legitimately claim to be the man who brought alternative comedy to television. This being a celebration of an iconic moment in UK comedy history, one might assume Edinburgh's Usher Hall or the 750-seat Pleasance Grand has been set aside to host. But one might assume wrong. 'When I started [showing these films] about a year ago,' Richardson tells me, 'we didn't have the money to advertise them. So we'd arrive at theatres that had about 30 people who had somehow read our minds that we were going to be there. And 30 people in a 300-seat cinema can be hard work.' The Comic Strip Presents … ran for three series on Channel 4 from 1982-1988, then it moved to the BBC in the early 90s before making a return to Channel 4 for one-off specials, the most recent in 2016. But it's not a big name in comedy – far less so than, for example, The Young Ones, the BBC sitcom starring some of the same talents and broadcast at the same time. 'It wasn't good television,' admits Richardson, 'because it wasn't repetitive, and television is about repeating a formula and people getting to know it well.' And was it even comedy? One of the show's stars, Mayall, argued that it shouldn't have been called The Comic Strip, and that 'Interesting Films' might have been a better fit. In fact, the series was – like Inside No 9 more recently – a tonally varying anthology show, a suite of standalone films united only by sensibility, and by the performers bringing them to the screen. 'I told Channel 4,' says Richardson, ''These performers are so good they don't need to be stuck playing one-dimensional characters. They can play all sorts. One week they can be a heavy metal band, the next week they can be The Famous Five.' You could call it bad television, because you're not seeing more of the same. But as it's gone on, it's become a collection of very memorable one-off moments and that's what people now remember.' The performers also included Adrian Edmondson, Nigel Planer and Richardson himself, with a rotating supporting cast that included Keith Allen, Robbie Coltrane and more. At the time, they were setting the UK comedy scene ablaze. That all started at the Comedy Store, a strip club and the anarchic HQ of what had recently been called 'alternative comedy'. Richardson's coup was to cherrypick the most exciting voices of that generation, and cart them off to another strip club, a little less anarchic, a few blocks up the road: the Raymond Revuebar. Here, with the financial support of the Rocky Horror Picture Show producer Michael White, he opened The Comic Strip club – a name that seems obvious, although 'the New Depression Club' was, according to Edmondson, a very near miss. For a year from 1980-1981, the Comic Strip was the hippest and hottest comedy night in town. 'The bouncers at Raymond Revuebar had a simple rule of thumb for who was directed where,' Sayle later wrote. 'If they reeked of aftershave they were sent to the strip show; if they smelled of beer they came to us.' Celebs piled in: Bianca Jagger, Dustin Hoffman. Robin Williams came and demanded to perform, to impress his guest, David Bowie. Sayle offered him 15 minutes. Williams said: 'I told [Bowie] I'd do an hour'. Sayle: 'You can't.' Williams: 'I'll buy the club!' Sayle: 'We don't own it. It belongs to a bouffant-haired pornographer.' The buzz even reached the pages of the London Review of Books, whose critic noted, 'within seconds, [Sayle] has the audience agape. Most of them, it seemed, had never been called cunts before.' Then Channel 4 came calling, looking for cutting-edge talent to help launch the new broadcaster on to the country's airwaves. Richardson was given carte blanche. 'They said, 'What do you want to do?' and I said, 'I want to make six films, all different.'' The first, Five Go Mad in Dorset, was transmitted on the station's opening night, and the controversy around its satire of Enid Blyton attitudes gave that event a front-page news fillip. But Five Go Mad will not be celebrated at the fringe this summer, says Richardson. 'Taking the piss out of racism and sexism [in that way] is long gone,' he says. 'It's not a funny issue like it was when we did it in the 80s.' One option might have been to re-edit the episode – a course of action in which Richardson, now 73, has freely indulged as the Edinburgh shows have come together. Not for him a bask in the glory of his youthful success. 'What we've done,' he says, 'is revisited the films and said, '30 years later they need some adjustment.' Because things go faster now.' Western spoof Fistful of Travellers Cheques has been 'cut back a bit'. So too has late-period favourite Four Men in a Car. And a scene has been trimmed from The Strike, the show's faux Hollywood movie making mincemeat of the miners' strike. That one bagged a Golden Rose of Montreux comedy award, and starred Richardson (the only performer to appear in every episode) as Al Pacino playing, er, Arthur Scargill. 'I could do Pacino much better now,' he laughs, 'because I worked with John Sessions on Stella Street.' So now, he says, slipping into a convincing Italian-American accent, 'I can do Al.' Stella Street was another of Richardson's TV hits, undertaken when The Comic Strip Presents, by any measure his life's work, was in abeyance. Even when he was a jobbing comedian, in double act The Outer Limits with Nigel Planer, Richardson was a child of amateur film-makers and a wannabe film-maker himself. With The Comic Strip, he made movies for cinematic release: The Supergrass in 1985, and Eat the Rich two years later. Further TV specials included Red Nose of Courage, telling the tale of John Major's flight from the circus to parliament, and 2011's The Hunt for Tony Blair, imagining the ex-PM on the run having been accused of a series of murders. Both will be screened at the fringe, MC'd by comedian Robin Ince and with special guests including Sayle and Allen. Richardson is modest about the achievement of having brought these 30 years' worth of films to the screen. 'I always thought we were the new Ealing comedies. And [Ealing Studios at its peak] made about 150 films over 20 years, of which about 15 are remembered. So our strike rate isn't too bad. We made some flops, but at least one or two out of each series are really good.' Some, indeed, are carved on this writer's heart – notably Bad News Tour and More Bad News, the show's two-part heavy metal spoof, which predated This Is Spinal Tap and ended up with Edmondson, Mayall and co performing live on stage, under a hail of beer glasses, at the 1986 Monsters of Rock festival at Castle Donington. Richardson is at peace with the under-appreciation of The Comic Strip Presents, acknowledging that, as a bloody-minded sitcom refusenik way back when, he is the auteur of his own misfortune. He is delighted to be bringing the remastered films to Edinburgh, a city in which, back in the day, he and Planer once toured as a support act to Dexy's Midnight Runners. 'FrontmanKevin Rowland complained,' he says, 'that we didn't do new material at every performance.' Expect no new material at these screenings – but a new experience, perhaps. 'It's a great thing,' says Richardson, 'to show them in the cinema. You don't often get to share comedy television with an audience, and it changes the whole experience: people laughing around you. We've discovered that there is an audience around the country who want to see these films on the big screen and talk about them. It's fantastic that something we created 30 or 40 years ago is still creating laughter. I love it.' The Comic Strip Presents … is at the Fringe is on 2, 3, 8, 9 and 10 August at Just the Tonic, Edinburgh
Scotsman
17 hours ago
- Scotsman
Comedy legend Bobby Davro returns to The Fringe following last year's sell-out success
Bobby is back! After last year's triumphant sell-out full debut run at the Fringe and following a rip-roaring national tour, comedy legend Bobby Davro returns with a brand-new show. With queues running round the block and raucous laughter echoing up George IV Bridge, Davro took Edinburgh by storm last August. Now he hits the city again with Funny Magnet… The title says it all! Sign up to our daily newsletter Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to Edinburgh News, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Bobby says: "I was blown away by the audience's reaction to my debut Edinburgh Fringe show last year, so am very excited to be returning with more jokes, more impressions and more songs- if it's funny it's in the show!" Audience reviews 'Couldn't stop laughing from start to finish.' Bobby Davro 'Bobby's ability to ad lib and involve and react to audience is class' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'Great to see Bobby live on stage – the gags kept on coming with perfect timing, and the audience loved them!' Bobby Davro has been one of the UK's top comics and best-known celebrity entertainers for over 40 years. Over the years, he has appeared on numerous TV shows from Live at Her Majesty's to many of his own, through to regular appearances on Eastenders and shows including Dancing on Ice. His popularity was at its highest during the mid-1980s with his own Saturday night ITV shows, Bobby Davro on the Box, Bobby Davro's TV Annual andBobby Davro's TV Weekly. He also made appearances on the popular comedy impressions sketch show a. He then went on to play Vinnie Monks in BBC's Eastenders in 2007 and has appeared on a host of reality type shows including Celebrity Big Brother, Dancing On Ice and Celebrity Come Dine With Me. He has headlined for over fifteen years in pantomime across the country and his live stand up shows are legendary. Bobby Davro Here he is, a comedian at the top of his game, back live on stage with a masterclass in stand-up comedy. BOBBY DAVRO - FUNNY MAGNET RUNS AT FRANKENSTEIN PUB, BIER KELLER, GEORGE IV BRIDGE AT 9pm FROM 1 TO 24 AUGUST. To book tickets +44 (0)131 226 0000
