Milo Edwards on the best and worst of the Fringe

Milo Edwards is at the Edinburgh Fringe performing his show How Revolting! Sorry to Offend at Monkey Barrel  at 5.45pm.  Here he shares what he can't get enough of at the festival, his most embarrassing Edinburgh experience and the worst thing about the Fringe. Apart from the cost of accommodation, obviously…

Edinburgh binge

The focus. Being a comedian these days involves doing so many other things like marketing, social media, podcasts and sometimes magazine articles. 

So for a lot of us Edinburgh is the time of year when you feel like you can consistently focus on stand-up, doing an hour show every day, seeing your friends’ and colleagues’ shows and chatting to comics from all over the world whom you don’t see as often - it’s a chance to immerse yourself in the solely creative and social aspects of the job, and descend into alcoholism and nicotine addiction of course.

Edinburgh cringe

Once, probably about ten years ago, a friend took me to see a sketch show that some people from our university had put on. It was doing well and had sold a lot of tickets and gotten some good reviews but it was dire, properly awful - full of puns that made me groan out loud. 

After the show, I said this to my friend and she agreed. Two weeks later I found myself at a party and one of the people who was in the show in question comes over to chat to me - ‘Hey Milo I heard you saw our show?’ ‘Oh yeah I did, with XXXX’ ‘Yeah she said you thought it was shit.’ 

The moral of the story is, trust no one.

Edinburgh whinge

The worst thing about the Fringe is that there are so many distractions, really it should be about putting on a great show and audiences enjoying it - but a lot of focus is invariably on industry people, awards, reviews and so on, things which maybe shouldn’t matter but do. 

I say that’s the worst thing about the fringe, the actual worst thing about the fringe is the silent discos and ‘groundbreaking" theatre pieces.

Published: 16 Aug 2024