Fringe 2016: the final show, snorted dogs and owl collapse

I realise the whole Fringe diary kind of stopped. This is because I'd booked to attend more shows than that time the Queen snorted a load of Corgi dandruff and went HAM on Ticketmaster.

I also realise that my regular music readers have been starved of audio love, so to keep you going I've embedded a live session of A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From The Centre Of The Ultraworld. It sounds nice.

Where was I? Oh yes. The last show. My fourth and final Hey Fat Roland! 40 Minutes Of Idiot got a full house. Someone even entered the room halfway through, looked at the number of people, thought "stuff this" and bogged off.

@FatRoland 💯 glad to hear u had a full house

— ｚａｃｈａｒｙ (@zach2504) August 7, 2016

While last year's show took a preview and four Fringe shows to really get off the mark, this year's show worked pretty instantly. There's a lot of content, and I'm much more attuned this year to laugh-points throughout.

The mixture of stupid cartoons (the sky picture with "pop-up" weather symbols), deliberate failures (the owl / pussycat paper collapse), actual spoken word content ("millions of dogs") and plain stupidity (the lyrics of Desiigner's Panda) seemed to work.

Indeed there's a LOT of content in this one, and my main struggle was to allow time for comedy moments to hang in the air. Like allowing time for the audience to giggle, or allowing a beat for a 'topper' comment, or giving space for a heckle? That. It's a good problem to have.

@FatRoland Great show again yesterday!

— David Wood (@fewtrem) August 8, 2016

Overall then, very pleased. I'm disappointed to have to finish after four shows, but I'm utterly grateful to Laughing Horse for the opportunity. I got fantastic audience reactions and twice the average audience attendance than last year. Brills.

Roll on next year, right? Bigger and better. And yes, I'm already writing next year's show in my head...

@FatRoland Bit of flyer-ing for you chum! Loved the show earlier #owlandpussycat pic.twitter.com/nCUYW4u4WR

— Mark Slater (@marksl8r) August 5, 2016