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Oh, that I had more time to blog about my frolics at the Fringe. I might even be able to relate the story which led to me declaring “Pond, will you stop pimping Adam!”

Okay, it’s quite simple really, Pond was offering a random girl a large sum of money (in cash) to sleep with Adam Kay, who was so scared that he very convincingly made a sustained pretence at being gay.

It really has been incredibly hard work all round – yes! unbelievable, doing a one-man show for the entire Fringe is hard work…! But it seems to be going well and thanks to a timely review my audiences are on the up. And last night I sang probably the most unexpected improvised love song of my career.

If you haven’t seen the show, what happens is this: I take one audience member and, in character, go on a “speed date” with them, which climaxes with a love song made up on the spot based on what they have told me.

Sometimes people try to be funny and tell me things that aren’t strictly true. This usually makes my life difficult.

So when a woman got up on stage last night and told me what she did was artificial insemination, my heart sank and I thought “not another…”

Only, when I looked at her, she seemed to have an honest and quite serious face. She was a middle-aged woman with children in the audience and, after a little probing, gave me quite a detailed description of how to artificially inseminate a cow.

Turns out she was telling the truth after all.

So I sang her a love song about artificial insemination, in which I managed to rhyme the word “impinge” with “syringe”.

It was a good show.

According to today’s Herald, the reason that musical comedians are a perennial fixture at the Fringe is that “the hour-long format allows them time to indulge their latent rock-star ambitions.”

Yeah, alright.

Assuming I actually make it up to Edinburgh tomorrow, I’m a little concerned that I’ll have to deal with James’ racist past. Are people going to assume I’m racist? Am I going to have to apologise?

This is particularly important because on Monday we’re on Radio Scotland (again, in James’ case), and I can’t help feeling that it will come up. I reckon I have three options:

Claim it only applies to men

The section in question is the rules of The Fit Scotsman Contest, a game that James and some other people who like Scotsmen, or at least men, played while we were performing An Extremely Memorable Emergency. Although the actual sentence talks about ‘Scottish people’, that has to be taken in context.

Not go

I could just not turn up. I missed an interview with Edinburgh Evening News because I’d been up all night fixing stuff for work after what I can only describe as a power girder (in that it was twenty foot long and the width of my leg) blew up. Given the current plot to overthrow the government by refusing to let people take anything on plane journeys that might while away the tedium, I think I could come up with a pretty good excuse for simply not showing.

Lie

“I never saw that. It must have been inserted by the copy editor.”

It’s probably not a good idea to go with the first option, because we’re being interviewed by two men. I assume they’re Scottish, it being the Scottish national radio station. The second option might annoy James as he’s already flat out publicising and performing his own show.

By the way, no matter what Ken Smith of The Herald writes, the description of Scots as irredeemably ugly doesn’t come under “fleeting amorous relationships” – it’s not even in the index as such, although frankly now it’s been pointed out I can’t believe we didn’t put that in. It would fit well next to “Fit Scotsman contest”.

In the book, we say that wherever possible you should see the Macbeth with the naked lesbian witches. We also suggest it’s not a good idea to have a show where the cast is nine-year-old nuns.

Thank heavens we didn’t think of combining the two, although in the 1970s anything was possible:

Frankfurt Opera’s production of Prokoviev’s The Fiery Angel was the talk of the worthies before the 1970 Festival, as its last act included an orgy, with half-naked nuns. Big-wigs, including the Lord Provost, flew to Frankfurt to see this filth before allowing it to be shown. But, having been wined and dined, [at] least two of the panel fell asleep before the offending orgy. The Fiery Angel was given a seal of approval.

Found in The Independent (while searching for evidence of James’ racism). Not actually nine-year-olds; that is beyond even The Independent.

I’ve now flyered two people who have responded, perplexed, “an Asian rock star?”

“No, no, an aging rock star,” I’ve hurriedly reassured them.

But I’m wondering how many other people I’ve flyered think that my show is based around a tasteless racial stereotype. Like Ed Weeks’ Spanish comedian but with songs.

What with the Independent’s Fringe diary, I’m worried that I might get a reputation for being a racist in the name of comedy.

Be careful. (Via Gareth Taylor.)

At one point on the path I walk into Edinburgh on every day there is the painted motto “O CYCLING”. I think this is a rather lovely sentiment and it’s certainly what I’m thinking by the time I reach that part of the time-consuming trot.

I also saw something else on the same path, only this was walking BACK to my accommodation at a ridiculous hour this morning: one of my flyers, looking damp and sad and trodden into the ground.

My director left Edinburgh on Sunday, since when I have been flyering for my show all by myself – so I was heartened to see that, all by myself, I have handed out enough flyers for one of them to end up randomly trodden into a path about a mile and a half away from anywhere I’ve been giving them to people.

Oh, and I’m mentioned in the Independent’s Fringe diary today. Essentially for being a racist.

I’m sorry, you must have missed me.

I have of course been terribly busy. Here I am at the Edinburgh Fringe, where not only have I been publicising and performing a show far too frantically to blog, I’ve also been blogging for a different blog altogether.

I hope James Aylett doesn’t feel too snubbed by this. I wonder if he feels like he’s the BBC to my Des Lynam, rejected for the altogether glitzier but less charming surroundings of Sky Sports.

But I wouldn’t want to push that analogy too far, because it suggests that The Friday Project are not charming. Which they are. They have charm in buckets. Certainly a lot more the Sky Sports.

Anyway, I’m back here now, having finally found a few spare moments in my schedule – mainly because I was woken up hideously early to do an interview on BBC Radio Scotland and everybody else is still in bed.

Being at the Fringe, even for this short period (and the Fringe officially only starts today), I have been exposed to certain omissions and occasionally erratum in our book Fringe, and to save time if we’re ever asked to do a second edition I’ve decided to note down the main ones.

1. If you’re doing previews at all, you HAVE to comp them. Not just a couple of comps, lots and lots of comps – with the expectation of about a third of the people you have given them to turning up. It’s not optional if you actually want an audience – professional comedians do it, West End shows do it, you must do it.

2. In the first week of the Fringe it is possible to live entirely on free handouts on the Royal Mile. But not advisable.

3. South Bridge ought to be called the street of temptation; it is not only home to the brilliant and delicious Piemaker, but to Forbidden Planet and Poundstretcher. I find it almost impossible not to walk along South Bridge without ending up clutching a steak and pepper pie, a remote control Dalek and a completely useless pack of fifty lightbulbs (because they were like, really cheap!).

4. Walking all the way to the end of Princes Street to see a copy of your book in Waterstones is good for the ego but bad for the legs.

5. The anecdote about Simon Munnery’s prop bus (page 52) is, it turns out, almost entirely wrong. It wasn’t a prop bus, it was a Reliant Robin, which Munnery drove all the way to Edinburgh at 40 miles an hour only to find that he couldn’t use it. But this wasn’t because it hadn’t been fireproofed – it just wouldn’t fit through the doors of the venue. The way Munnery told it to me, it made an even better anecdote than our fictional one.

6. We need a Scottish edition of the book from which the second appendix, or at least the sentence “all Scottish people appear to be genuinely ugly”, is removed. I say this because, nearing the end of my interview on BBC Radio Scotland, one of the presenters suddenly said, “I notice that you say here ‘all Scottish people appear to be irredeemably ugly’ – what do you have to say about this to all our Scottish listeners?” I stuttered “well…I don’t think we used the word irredeemably…” before being forced into making a formal apology to the whole of Scotland on national radio. A few moments later I chirped “can I plug my show?” to which both presenters smugly replied in unison “no!” … and there ended the interview.

No obvious progress on the one I’m writing (and a small amount of progress on the one I’m reviewing for James), but I’ve found Ken Levine’s blog, and he has excerpts from a script he wrote years ago, one of which tickled me.

I would have used the start of the last line as the title of this post, because I think it’s bloody brilliant – but that would have given the joke away. So it is.

So at the moment I’m doing research for a film I’m writing. By “research”, what I really mean is that I’m watching lots of other films, some for vibe, some for content similarity, some just because they’re good films I haven’t seen in a while. And while doing this I realised I never watch videos any more.

At least, other than at the moment.

So here’s my proposal: I have two or three hundred videos. If you want one, make me an offer, and you can have it. A tangible offer, of any value. Half a pint of beer is fine. Half a pint of love is not (unless it’s very good love). If the offer is sufficiently ridiculous, you’ll probably have to nag me or come and pick it up yourself.

But why, I hear the more percipient readers asking, do you call this a video game? Surely it’s a video giveaway, with cashback? Well, for two reasons.

Firstly, I’m not telling you which videos I own. Sure, you can figure some of them out by Googling through old diary entries. But it’s more fun if you just guess.

Secondly, some videos I haven’t actually watched. If you guess one of them, and I still want to watch it, you’ll have to wait a bit – so I’ll give you another video that is a bit like it, according to my own skewed criteria, as compensation for having to hold on. You’ll still get the one you asked for as well, eventually.

There are actually a very few videos I’m not going to part with, and if you guess one of them I’ll give you something else at random instead. You can refuse to accept the alternative in this case (but not in the previous case).

Questions you may want answered

• I don’t have a video player. Can I still play?
  Of course! Videos can be used for so much more than televisual entertainment. They make admirable bookends, for instance.
• How often can I play?
  As often as you like, although I reserve the right not to bother replying as quickly as people contact me.
• What counts as a tangible offer?
  Good question. Whatever seems fun to me. Try your luck, but in general for an offer to be tangible it should probably be an offer of something tangible.
• Can I be famous?
  Not really, although I will post the offers I’m given, and the films they were offered for. If you don’t want your name associated with this for the rest of the life of the Internet, let me know in advance.
• Do the videos work?
  Probably. Some may not. Some may catch fire. Your risk, not mine.
• What happens if I offer some excrement?
  You keep it. Anything that I deem to be unfair on me I’ll just refuse. If I’m in a good mood I might give you the video anyway, but I’m not guaranteeing anything. Don’t offer anything unnecessarily biological (unless you have a Hunter preparation: that’d be cool), illegal or otherwise daft. Also, don’t offer me back videos I’ve already given away, or anything by Celine Dion.
• How do I play?
  Just email me, or leave a comment here.