Strange place Edinburgh: the city that produced both the prim and proper fascist sympathiser Miss Jean Brodie also produced the eloquent smack addicts of Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting. It's an even stranger place during the numerous cultural festivals which all coalesce for the month of August.
It's not just the 15,000 performers from over 50 countries or the 3,000 different shows in over 400 different venues, it's the fact that it's too hot during the day and too cold during the night, there's an extra one million people in the city clogging up the pretty streets and everybody is running around in a fit of cultural mania. It may or may not help that during the festival the nightclubs close at 4 a.m. and the early house drinking dens open at 5 a.m. The biggest and boldest festival of them all is the Fringe, which is listed in The Guinness Book Of Records as not only "the largest arts festival in the world" but also "the most rock 'n' roll".
It all started 51 years ago when the Edinburgh International Festival was formed with the haughtily noble intention of providing a platform to "promote peace, unity and harmony between people of different countries after the second World War". Nice to see that all these years on, the people on the Fringe interpret "harmony between people of different countries" in a slightly more physical way than originally intended.
The first International Festival attracted so much attention that eight uninvited theatre groups turned up to put on their shows, but with no venues available they decided in true trooper showbiz fashion to "put the show on right here".
The phrase "the fringe" was coined by a local journalist who referred to the unofficial theatre groups as being "round the fringe of the official festival drama". The International Festival still exists but it has now been overtaken in terms of numbers and popularity by the Fringe, partly because of the latter's avowed intent to "democratise the arts".
To this day, the Fringe never officially invites anybody to stage a show, you simply organise your own venue and publicity and get yourself into the programme. It's all delightfully DIY. Admirably, there's never been any artistic vetting of shows on the Fringe and over the years, local Edinburgh newspapers and politicians have mounted severe attacks on some "depraved" or "blasphemous" show taking place in their city. It's all part of the fun.
The Fringe really forged its identity in the heady days of the late 1950s when the Oxford and Cambridge revues were staples each year and Edinburgh was credited with discovering the talents of Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, John Cleese, Alan Bennett, Michael Palin and Eric Idle among others - most of whom either went on to become members of Monty Python or pursue successful solo careers.
The Cambridge Footlights in particular have always had a mafia-like hold on the Fringe which extended right up to the 1980s when Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson and Tony Slattery won the first ever Perrier award.
With Margaret Thatcher's arts cutbacks in the 1980s, the theatre side of the Fringe fell off and was replaced by the significantly cheaper "one person and a microphone" format of stand-up comedy. Nowadays the Perrier (still the biggest comedy prize in the world) is dominated by stand-ups and has helped bring names like Eddie Izzard and Jack Dee to national prominence.
Despite the fact the Fringe is now far too big for its own good and is showing signs of becoming more "corporate" than it ever was before, it still remains, and thankfully so, the least luvvie of all arts festivals. Out of the total Fringe audience, the majority is made up of what advertisers call C1 and C2 categories and age-wise the audiences are dominated by people between ages 25-35. Such a demographic profile facilitates the Fringe's manifesto (unwritten, naturally) of promoting all that is radical, unorthodox, innovative and irreverent in the arts.
If it's a Kabuki version of Waiting For Godot performed by mime artists, an all-singing, all-nude lesbian acrobatic troupe or an Aboriginal version of a Harold Pinter play, the Fringe has it all and more. There's really nothing quite like it.
The Edinburgh Festival Fringe runs until August 31st. Box Office: 0044-131-226 5138. Inquiries: 0044-131-226 5257.