The News At Kate 2010

(This post stays at the top of the blog all fest - scroll down for new news!)

This year's Edinburgh Fringe shows are as follows, please come along if you're in town!

The News At Kate 2010. My one-woman solo show. Politics and comedy and feminism and a sock puppet pornographer. Really. 9th - 27th Aug (not 17th) at speakeasy@voodoorooms (venue 68) 8.25pm FREE!

The Comedy Manifesto. Hugely popular political comedy panel show hosted by me. 7th - 28th Aug (not 17th) at The Beehive on Grassmarket 3.45pm FREE!

The Midnight Hour. Late night showcase of talent from around the fest, again hosted by me. 7th - 29th Aug (not Sundays) at The Canon's Gait, Canongate 12midnight FREE!

I'll also be hosting and appearing on lots of other things so keep your eyes peeled (or if you see me - ask!).

Record Breaking Stuff

Press release that has just gone out (sorry too busy to actually write about this right now, but hopefully makes sense):

Largest ever live audience for a Fringe show – more than 300,000

Comedienne Kate Smurthwaite broke an Edinburgh Fringe record in the early
hours of Wednesday morning by performing to a live audience of more than 300,000!

The 100-plus audience at The Midnight Hour show at the Canon's Gait venue were joined by hundreds of thousands of BBC Radio Five Live listeners around the country and the world as Smurthwaite performed a joke from the stage simultaneously on the microphone and on national radio via her mobile phone.

The Tony Livesey Show attracts a regular audience of three to six hundred listeners. The joke was one of many submitted via text (also breaking the record for the most popular text-in to the programme ever) and was not well particularly well received with a brief cheer and then some groaning and booing and one audience member audibly shouting "awful!".

Smurthwaite is a regular guest on Tony Livesey's late night chat show and had been on the programme earlier in the evening discussing declining standards of politeness and modern etiquette when Livesey challenged her to perform one of his listeners jokes live on air at her late night Edinburgh Fringe show. The gag - chosen by Livesey and his team from thousands of submissions was: "A dating agency for chickens has been forced to close. A spokesman said they couldn't make hens meet!"

Later in the programme an audience member - comedy promoter Paul Haslam from Urban Comedy - joined Livesey on air to provide a review of the show saying "Kate is marvellous. She's just so multi-talented. She can ad lib, she can do gags, she can improvise and of course she's fantastic eye candy". Asked about PBH's Free Fringe in general he added "Down here in Edinburgh, at the Fringe, for free I have seen guys who are every bit as good as the comedians who have their own Saturday night BBC shows."

Speaking about the incident Smurthwaite said “It was really exciting to be actually performing to such an enormous audience, knowing we were breaking a record. It’s just a shame they didn’t send me a better joke – I would rather have been performing my own material!”

Additional info: Kate Smurthwaite’s Edinburgh show is called The News At Kate 2010 and is an hour of political satire and humorous tales of political activism. It’s on daily until Friday at speakeasy@voodoorooms at 8.25pm. She also appears in political panel show The Comedy Manifesto (3.45pm to Saturday at The Beehive and late night show The Midnight Hour (midnight to Saturday at Canon's Gait). All shows are part of the award-winning PBH's Free Fringe, the organisation founded by Fringe veteran and Edinburgh Comedy award winner Peter Buckley Hill which has been bringing free shows to the festival for the last 15 years.

Kate Smurthwaite is a regular guest on many BBC talk shows including the Tony Livesey Show, the Jeremy Vine Show, the Stephen Nolan Show, Women's Hour and the Richard Bacon Show. She is also a political activist and blogger. Her main blog is www.cruellablog.blogspot.com and her festival blog is www.thenewsatkate.blogspot.com.

The Tony Livesey Show is available on BBC Listen Again for the next six days.

Dear All The Journalists At The Fringe...

So I managed last night to bump in to the (as far as I know) one journalist who has been to my show. And he tells me he was just watching my show for fun and had no intention of reviewing it. Which of course he is quite within his rights to do, and he bought me a beer and offered to ask his colleague to try to find the time to review the show. Lets hope he does - otherwise I am at serious risk of doing a full Edinburgh run of the best show I've ever written and getting no reviews at all. That is seriously depressing.

Furthermore it makes no sense. Reviewers this fringe have been vicious in calling out and criticising a lot of the boring repetitive sexism being pedalled by male acts - so why not come and see a female act who actually talks about feminism? Keith Farnam's "feminist" show has come under fire for having good intentions at heart but ultimately falling back on sexist punchlines to maintain the humour. My show doesn't do that, it doesn't need to, because it's funny about the sexists. The Scotsman has criticised burlesque at the fringe for failing to really break through conventional beauty myths and stereotyped gender roles. My show discusses all this. While being really funny. Finally the panel show The Comedy Manifesto had one review last year: five stars from Broadway Baby and one review his year: five stars from Scotsgay. Don't you think the woman who devised and wrote and hosts that might be worth reviewing herself?

People are bringing me flowers, putting £10 and £20 notes in my collection bucket and writing to the BBC to demand I be put on everything from QI to Question Time so why are journalists overlooking me? I know that begging journalists to come and see my show sets me up for bad press of the "She clearly thinks this is great because she dragged us here but..." but at this stage I do not care. Please someone come and review my show. Please please please. It runs daily 8.25pm at speakeasy@voodoorooms until (including) Friday and if that doesn't work I will gladly come round your flat and perform the whole thing in the doorway to your living room to you and the cockroaches behind your sofa...

Views and Reviews

Had a great solo show today - packed audience and went really well. Still no sign of a review from the journalist who was in the other day and I'm starting to get paranoid about whether it's going to disappear into the ether. Impossible to tell with a free show whether any other journalists have been, be gutting not to get reviewed at all.

This year the edfringe website has been magically set up so that it's totally impossible for audience members to leave reviews of free shows (which is infuriating) so I skipped over to the chortle website to see if anyone had put any comments up under my name there...

Well one person wrote something nice but then I see someone has slated me at great length for a performance I did at an awards ceremony a few months back for the National Union of Journalists. This was a gig where due to a mix up I found out I was on less than an hour before I was onstage (shower, taxi, panic) so I hadn't had time to prepare anything special. I was ill but decided to attempt to be heroic and go on anyway. The crowd - all regional journalists 90% of whom hadn't won an award - saw me in the middle of the afternoon after dinner and a lot of long boring speeches and weren't allowed dessert or any kind of break before I was on. One group at the front were ignoring me and chatting among themselves throughout regardless of what I said to them. It was never going to go well. And certainly it was the worst reception I've had in several years, an incredibly tough gig which I fought and fought to win round but ultimately just couldn't save (although there was a group of lovely people in who took the time to come and tell me they liked my stuff and apologise for the others). Why is it though when I have one bad gig someone feels the need to publicly lambast me (and not bother to mention any of the extenuating circumstances of course) but when I have night after night of really rocking gigs the reaction is minimal? If you liked my show (or performance at another show you've seen recently) please head over to chortle and write something nice. About ten nice comments would chase the nasty remarks off into obscurity on page 2 of the comments and cheer me up enormously!

Lee Camp and Tobias Persson at Midnight Hour tonight and I'm actually going to go out and have a few beers afterwards for once!

Entering Review Purgatory

Had a reviewer from Scotsgay in my solo show last night. I was very happy with the show so I'm optimistic. Still now stuck in limbo of checking every ten minutes for the review to appear. Of course journalists are not super-heros, they can't be expected to write reviews in ten seconds but the sooner it's published (if it's good) the sooner it can affect my audience numbers. So catch me now quick before the review comes out and the queuing starts... or not.

Things I Didn't Plan To Do On My Day Off

Well yesterday was my annual festival day off. I had big plans to go to Leith Waterworld but ended up feeling ill and staying on the sofa all day watching TV and napping. Still better to be ill on that day than a day when I have 3-6 shows to do! Sadly my restful day ended abruptly around 1am when I discovered that my Midnight Hour show, the only one still running without me - with a guest compere - had run into trouble. An act (David Whitney) had had his set ruined by a persistent heckler. This is not all that surprising at a late night show when the audience can be pretty drunk (though often such people get chucked out if they're ruining the show for others). However the act after coming off stage decided to exact revenge by head-butting the guy. The police arrived and Whitney (quite rightly) spent the night in a cell. We won't be re-booking him.

I'm feeling better and will be back at The Midnight Hour tonight where hopefully things will be running a bit more smoothly. Just hoping the press coverage makes it clear that in three years this is the first time there's been a problem at the show and that it happened when I wasn't there.

Festival Meanderings

Yet to have any reviewers in to see my solo show and I'm not in that much of a stress about it cos really I know the show's good and I'm more bothered about "real" people seeing it. The woman who runs Edinburgh feminist network saw it two days ago and recommended it to the rest of the group. She told me today she's already had two women specifically thank her for the recommendation. Another person who enjoyed it was Jes from the blog Circuitous Meanderings. She writes:

"The evening ended with the hideously underused, under-recognised and generally talented Kate Smurthwaite with her News at Kate in the Voodoo Rooms.

"What I cannot understand is why with comics of the calibre of Kate Smurthwaite and Susan Murray and Helen Keen and all the other funny women around, we are continually subjected to banal, sexist, unoriginal and frequently offensive male comics dominating TV programmes all week long. And without going into the full "I pay my licence fee too" rigmarole, it's undeniable, I and my demographic are completely failed by programme producers who play it safe with the same old faces on every panel game and sketch show."

Thanks Jes, glad you enjoyed the show!