To paraphrase Cilla Black circa 1994: the Fringe is full, full of surprises.
I should add that I don’t want to encourage Cilla Black to sing. But she has a point in this paraphrased line nonetheless. At last night’s show, after torrential rain for much of the day and on what is traditionally the quietest day of the Edinburgh week, we had our largest audience so far.
We had a whopping 13 in, which I am genuinely delighted by. It shows that the two and a half hours of flyering I did, where everything I had on me was drenched, wasn’t for nothing and proves that if you promote it well enough, they will come.
As I am working remotely for the first half of the Fringe, it means that I am slightly limited to the amount of flyering time I can do. Thankfully, Paul ‘Unemployed’ Langton has no such commitments and has been out like a trooper for the comedy cause. But I think we may have found a sufficient level of time required for getting people to come along.
During my drenching, a girl I tried to give one of my flyers to refused to take it. Seconds later, she slipped in the monsoon conditions and fell on her arse while walking down a slope. I initially thought that was her punishment for not accepting my flyer. My smugness was short-lived, when I dropped my handful of flyers into the small stream that had formed on the pavement.
Back to the gig, it was nice to have a fuller room. And they were a good audience, with big laughs to be had; but at the same time, they didn’t just give them away and you had to work for them. Both myself and Paul had decent gigs, we made £23 in our collection bucket. But we know we can do better still with our sets, which is a good position to be in after the third day of our show.
- Love and Langton’s Dirty Laundry is on at 11pm every day until August 25 at the Kilderkin, 67 Canongate, Edinburgh, Lothian, EH8 8BS, as part of the PBH Free Fringe.