Edinburgh: critic Copstick ejected from Gilded Balloon; Freestival venue burned

Papa CJ with two passing strangers in Edinburgh’s Cowgate

On Sunday, I thought Papa CJ was going back to India on Monday.

Then he announced an extra show in Edinburgh tonight (Tuesday). I had no idea how or why.

I didn’t ask him until last night.

“I had 18 back-to-back full-houses,” he told me. “Then, during a coffee chat with (comedy critic) Kate Copstick, she mentioned it would be great to be…

.. only one week to go glummer chums and we'll be taking the low road [yes .. it is quicker] to Edinburgh .. one week left to watch the remainder of our flawless plan swing into action .. publicity is almost done .. t-shirts are designed and ordered and our in house cartoonist is currently working to an impossible deadline to create the illustrations for a minor tome we’ll be producing for the Edinburgh Fringe .. we’ve checked and double checked our poster and flyer information .. especially the spelling .. I’d hate to disappoint an audience member who’d come along expecting a show of stand-up pottery ..

.. this weekend we'll be tirelessly drilling our pit crew .. before each of our Edinburgh performances we have around 10 minutes to set up and sound check before we let our audience into the venue .. just to complicate matters during the very same 10 minutes the previous show will be striking and clearing their audience out of the space .. it could all end in tears .. we have a slightly technical show .. FX pedal/looper/guitar and mics .. so we'll be spending most of this weekend setting up and striking until we're confident we can do it within the required time .. we've even bought colour coded cables to make the process a bit easier .. I'll let you know if it works ..

You can see the glummer twins live at the Edinburgh Fringe as part of the La Favorita Freestival, Venue 186 [Fingers Piano Bar] at 6.30pm from Tuesday 25th to Sunday 30th August. Free entry, pay what you want.

website www.theglummertwins.com twitter @theglummertwins

Jaw droppers of the Edinburgh Fringe

Lewis Schaffer Googles himself near a mosque

“You should consider Lewis Schaffer for the increasingly prestigious Malcolm Hardee Award for comic originality,” Lewis Schaffer told me yesterday. “I’m so original people are starting to imitate me.”

“No-one could imitate you,” I told Lewis Schaffer.

“Yeah, they’re starting,” said Lewis Schaffer, “I saw this young comic who said he had done 1,000 bad…

.. so .. let’s begin back in the good old days .. David Harmer and Ray Globe were once part of a comedy poetry group Circus Of Poets which also included Ian McMillan and John Turner. Circus of Poets toured Europe and appeared on TV reading out their words – angry, funny, politically angsty verse – to anyone who’d listen. One reviewer called them “the Four Tops of Poetry”. Then they grew older, got respectable jobs and decided living out of a van in the name of verse was a younger man’s game. Now, some 30 years after they first appeared on stage together as idealistic pups, David and Ray have formed the Glummer Twins to put the 21st century to rights..