Flo and Joan share their Fringe cringe, binge and whinge...

For the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2022: This Time It’s Personal, Chortle have asked us for our cringes, whinges and binges of the Fringe. We’ve all got places to go and people to see and bins to sniff around, so we’ll get straight to it….

Fringe cringe

It was an uncharacteristically boiling hot day in Edinburgh and the air con had packed up in the basement pub (The Tron) where we were playing. We have no idea why, but there were upwards of eight pregnant people in the audience that day, and they looked absolutely fuming throughout the whole show.

In their defence, if either of us was sat in the pit of hellfire with a belly full of baby, the thing that would really push us over the edge is musical comedy, but that’s very much their problem. As we stood at the door with our ‘pay what you can’ Pringle cans afterwards, everyone ran straight past us. No porridge for us that night.

As there’s two of us, we’ll give you a bonus cringe: we were stood in the doorway after a show once, again, asking for money, and an old teacher of ours came up to us absolutely buzzing (we did not know they had been in the show) and hugged us both. Not only are we not huggy people, but that rule especially applies to teachers who we thought were actively bad at their job/shit.

Fringe binge

What are the best parts of the festival that we want to gorge ourselves on until we are ill? The obvious one is shows. The best part of Edinburgh is seeing a load of shows. We want the weirdest clowns, the freakiest circus acts, the most tolerable cabaret performers, and some comedy maybe.

It’s a meat platter of entertainment that would rival anything Jamie’s Italian could rustle up, and we want to leave Edinburgh at the end of August feeling sick. In a fun way this time.

Rosie (blonde hair egg), is also going to binge some books, because she wants to, like Billie Piper. Nicola (dark hair glasses) will binge Red Box Noodles.

Fringe whinge

Our biggest whinge of the festival is that even though we’ve written them loads of letters and protested throughout the year, the festival won’t let us fill our unsold seats with Tickle-Me-Elmo’s.

They said there’s not enough storage to keep them all, and the ushers and stage management and tech teams are too busy to lay them all out in their chairs alongside the audience, and if they haven’t got a ticket they’re not allowed into the show. It’s horse shit.

Those are our cringe, whinge, and binges. We’ve been Flo & Joan. You’ve been alive, we assume. Goodnight.

• Flo & Joan: Sweet Release is at Assembly Roxy, at 8.10pm during the Fringe then on tour. More info and tickets available at floandjoan.com

Published: 2 Aug 2022