News > Festival Ferret: Tourist had to be persuaded there was no room at The Hotel
THE Hotel, the show, keeps being taken for the real thing.
The creation of comedian Mark Watson, The Hotel was one of the most anticipated productions of this year's Fringe. The show is part of the Assembly repertoire and occupies a nearby New Town house, where Watson plays a manic hotel inspector chasing up his wild staff from room to room.
In the first week of the festival, with the show in full swing, a German tourist came asking about room availability. A neon sign over the door, saying The Hotel, may have confused him.
He was whisked up by Jez Schaff, one of the general staff, for a tour of the bizarre and unsettling rooms. He was accosted by Mike Wozniak in the guise of a fitness czar and advised on how to "be well", was then jostled into a Guantanamo Bay-esque Admin Room for psychological tests.
He had a sketch performed to him in the restaurant by The Idiots Of Ants and in the Cabaret Bar where a drunk and dishevelled Dan Atkinson was compering the acts. Allegedly he then asked to leave – or possibly stay.
Veteran viewer
IS HE the oldest man ever to attend a Fringe show?
Edward Robinson, born in May 1907, joined an outing from an Edinburgh old folks' day centre to When the Poppies Bloom Again.
The show, at St Mark's Art Space, is a mix of memories and popular songs from the First World War, which began when he was seven.
Head start
AUSTRALIAN comedian Bec Hill is auctioning "the back of her head" for Cancer Research UK on eBay.
We think she means the back of her hair.
"I have contacted Irn-Bru informing them that if they bid the highest, I will bleach my hair, dye it orange, and have the Irn-Bru logo shaved into the back of my head," she says.
Strictly for birds
IF THAT wasn't bad enough, actor John Wild is playing a pigeon in his one-man show The Pigeon Affair, based on a Patrick Suskind novel.
He "makes one man's existential crisis into a dark comedy, using nothing but a chair and an umbrella as props," the show announces, as a "wicked, c in his quasi-judicial roleheeky pigeon... deploying music-hall-style routines and a variety of vocal effects."
