Festival Diaries #7: The Real Thing

Mark Thomas is as Sharp as a tack. Sharp with a capital 'S'. He leaves me in awe every time I see him. He is passionate and engaging and very, very funny. I love the way he uses his comedy to enlighten his audience about atrocities throughout the world.

This time he has taken on the mother' of multinationals - Coca-cola - exposing their deplorable Nazi past, and ongoing human rights violations throughout the world. Yes, it's political and anarchic humour but most importantly it's laugh-out-loud, bellyachingly funny.

Having said that, it obviously isn't everyone's cup of cola... this is clever, cerebral comedy and so if you're looking for easy, cheap laughs or slapstick, this is definitely not for you.

ASRWU - part seventeen

After the show we spent our last hours in Boston eating bad Mexican junk food and chatting intermittently with a bickering couple in some dive of a restaurant. Of course they weren’t bickering when we first spoke to them, but you know how you can sometimes unwittingly and surreptitiously be drawn into someone else’s argument? No? Must just be me then.

After debating the merits of leaving the Eastern seaboard for the deserts of Arizona, we made our excuses and left. We were departing for Florida on an early morning flight by which time our chilled bones were aching for vitamin D. It had snowed 2in overnight, and looked like an icy fairytale wonderland. So we said goodbye to the freezing Massachusetts climate and headed happily to the Sunshine State.

fly away 

Free the Benghazi Six

These 6 convenient foreign scapegoats, comprising 5 Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor (Kristiyana Valcheva, Nasiya Nenova, Valentina Siropulo, Valya Chervenyashka, Snezhana Dimitrova, and Dr Ashraf Jum'a al-Hajuj), were rounded up in the Libyan city of Benghazi, imprisoned, and charged with deliberately spreading a lethal infection, a charge to which they confessed under torture.

After five and a half years in judicial limbo, a Kafkaesque high court judge ignored expert evidence that the infections must have begun before the healthcare workers had even set foot in Libya, and ordered them to be executed for causing 400 children to be infected with the HIV virus in the hospital where they had been employed. Expert witness statements were mistranslated, and it seems sheer xenophobia took over, as the Benghazi six were sentenced to death by firing squad.

Local ignorance runs rife, as friends of those who died danced on to the streets to welcome the verdicts with whoops of joy. The condemned medics are awaiting appeal whilst profoundly inadequate "quiet diplomacy" is being urged on the Bulgarian government. This is simply not enough. If you can help, contact the Bulgarian Medics Solidarity Project.

Sanctioning the Demonisation of Black and Asian Youth?

This is the reality of Britain today... Political correctness and paperwork are undermining our police... The Macpherson report recommended that the police keep a record of every stop they make - and that anyone stopped by the police should be able to see a record of that paperwork... Conservatives would not implement this recommendation... Increased stop and search is part of the solution to rising crime.

Home Office plans to give all people stopped by police a receipt - detailing their race and why they were stopped - would be scrapped in the event of a Tory victory, Mr Howard announced. The receipt scheme was recommended by the Macpherson inquiry into the racist killing of black teenager Stephen Lawrence, as a way of discouraging police from using "stop powers" disproportionately against black and Asian people.

It comes just a month after figures showed the number of Asians targeted by stop and search powers had risen 302%. Black people have also been targetted, being 6 times more likely to be stopped by police than a white person.

So this is Mr Howard's vision of reality in Britain; nobody to police the police, and the government sanctioning the demonisation of black and Asian youth.

Festival Diaries #3: Best of the Fest

It seemed rather strange going to see a show called "Best of the Fest" when the festival has only just begun; surely you could only decide what was best AFTER the festival? Despite the incongruity of the situation, we were in good spirits for the show. Well, it was Friday night and we were ready to laugh.

The host of the evening; the unassuming, very likeable Irishman Dara O'Briain kept us grinning as he introduced the acts, the first of which was a homegrown boy, Des Clarke, with his own brand of bewildering babble. Definitely one to watch in the future.

Also performing was the superb Aussie Adam Hills. Sweet, charming and genuinely friendly, he has the audience eating out of the palm of his hand. Oh and he's funny too.

Last up on stage was the inimitable Rich Hall as Otis Lee Crenshaw. I was crying with laughter when I saw his own show a couple of years back. This performance was too short by far, but he remains a personal favourite - I urge you to see him.

Festival Diaries #2: Still Not Sorry

Natalie Haynes is a funny woman. She was billed as having a "perennial fixation on death ..and maths" which really doesn't do her show justice (although death features often in her stand-up routine). This is worth a look simply for the eye-opening secrets of the smurfs - you never knew they had a dark side, did you?
Recommended.

Festival Diaries #1: Hunter

Heh.. Look how many people came to watch me practise! quipped Reginald D Hunter on his first night, as festival season gets underway. His show this year a mystery wrapped in a nigga is full of attitude, and somehow manages to be both charming and incredibly vulgar. Sometimes funny to the point of bellyache, often rude, and always entertaining.
Highly recommended.

Preparing for Emergencies

Very funny take on the new booklet that the government here are planning to distribute to each and every household in the UK. Preparing for Emergencies - what you need to know by Her Majesty's Department of Vague Paranoia.
- via Aidan.