STEWART LEE – BIG ISSUE FRINGE DIARY #2

Some say The Fringe is becoming too commercial. My new stand-up show, 41st Best Stand-Up In Bristo Square, is in The Milk Carton, an 8000 capacity Big Top Sports Arena in Bristo Square. Ted Whey and Harley Curd, two can-do former Guards officers with an interest in Fringe Theatre and alcopop retail, opened their Milk Churn venue inside a 20-seater disused grain silo on the Meadows in 2001. Six years later they are major Fringe figures.

I liked performing in The Milk Churn when it was a cult concern, but I have anxieties about Ted and Harley’s new Milk Carton Big Top Sports Arena, which is sponsored by the cable TV porn station The Fantasy Channel. Videos of hot young British and American starlets and well-hung black studs are shown to the crowd while they wait for me to enter, and I worry this sets the wrong tone for my show, which is a comic look at the sacred nature of family love and those every day moments where little acts of kindness become transcendentally spiritual.

My show opened last weekend, and I can now see what a superb venue the Fantasy Channel Milk Carton Big Top Sports Arena is. An Acoustic Engineer explained that the cone shaped carboard space at the top of The Milk Carton sucks any silence in the tent into it, and refacts it back through a polyphonic sonic anomaly known as a Sound Hole, which bounces silence onto the stage in the form of laughter. A neuro-sonic micro-flange around the acoustic nanosphere of the tent also adds extra sinewaves, giving the laughter implicit qualities of wisdom, forgiveness and truth. Then, light filtered through the milk-skein outer-layer of the Big Top reverses the physiognomy of the audience members, making any frowns appear as smiles, and ugliness appear as beauty. Finally, low level magnetic pulses caused by the angles of the tent poles turn all evil feelings within the tent into emanations of pure joy.

The Fantasy Channel are very happy, and positive press so far means porn subscriptions are up 1.2 %. Come on down!