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George Aikman Theatre
Aug 10-27 (20:50)

Fugit Irreparabile Tempus

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The cult of celebrity was very much in its vogueish ascendance the other night, when I visited the George Aikman Lecture Theatre in Edinburgh for Frank Skinner’s ’30 Years of Dirt.’ While all around him, the young comedians of the Fringe whirl around in fiendish hurricanes as if they were fallen Dantean souls spinning like the Autumnal leaves of Vallambrosa in a seemingly eternal round of gigs & beers & one night-stands – Frank needs none of that.

He’d won the Perrier Award at the Fringe in 1991, co-written the national football anthem of England in 1996, & became a royalty-hobnobbing M.B.E. in more recent years. Perhaps that’s why folk are willing to pay the £18 a ticket, for his personal comedic insights into his Royal connections, but definitely not the, what he thought was, a well-crafted £18 joke. It went over my head like, but this comedian I was sitting near thought the whole piece a masterwork – so what do I know?

Well, I do know it weren’t that funny, like – just because you can chuck in a callback or two doesn’t mean it’s gonna be any good. There’s more of an Ebeneezer Scrooge vibe to Skinner these days than the Britpopping, side-splitting legend that he was thirty years ago. Thusly, in the spirit of me coining new words this Fringe, to the common lexicon I would like to add the acronym O.A.C. – Old Age Comedian.

Despite all that, the crowd absolutely ador’d him in an acolytical kinda way, a bit like when I witness’d the devotees at the feet of an orange-clad Sathya Sai Baba in Puttuparthi. The best parts of Skinner, for me, consisted of his crowd work, in which moments I witness’d that, despite a slowing down of his firecracker energy, & a general cracking of the voice, his mind was still as sharp as a razor.

The show was quite a nice mix of materielle, actually, with only an occasional skiffing over the smutty ‘dirt’ mention’d in the title, such as the Ronaldo joke which was rather crass really & actually spoil’d the vibe. In general, however, Skinner swansong’d his way thro’ an entertaining hour & a bit more of well watchable stuff, but it just cannot be plac’d among the very best of the comedy on offer in Edinburgh right now.

Damo