Doin\' The Festival (14.9.99)

1999

Weirdest moments from the Edinburgh Fringe festival and beyond.

Doin' the Festival's best bits programme covers the 1999 edition of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and events in the surrounding environs. The programme opens with the unbridled weirdness of the Fringe's singing dolls, before turning to interviews with various comedians appearing. Among the scattergun vox pops from across the festival, there's an interview with Fringe director Paul Gudgin, who discusses how wide-ranging the acts are. Featuring among the interviews are Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt, whose 1999 stage show Arctic Boosh was the second part of a trio of stage shows which would be developed first into a radio series and then the cult British TV comedy, The Mighty Boosh.

In the second part of the programme, Doin’ interviews directors from across the film festival, including Scottish director Bill Forsyth, who talks about his last film, Gregory’s Two Girls, a follow-up to 1980's Gregory’s Girl. Lead actor John Gordan Sinclair joins presenters Rich Hall and Lynn Ferguson for an in-studio interview.

Compilation programme of the best bits from the series, which covers events from the Edinburgh Festival.

Edinburgh - Festival City

A taste of Edinburgh's extraordinary history as a centre for the arts.

The Edinburgh International Festival, founded in 1947, is one of the world's most celebrated cultural events, an annual feast of fine art, theatre, ballet, opera and more. Created to offer healing through the arts after long years of war, the festival brought a swell of excitement from the start. Immediately, eight uninvited theatre companies joined the festival, creating an alternative arts festival that was eventually termed the Edinburgh Fringe (where comedy would eventually become the dominant force). The international film festival, which sadly announced its closure in 2022, came into being in the same moment of artistic reformation. In this collection, we look at Edinburgh as a media, arts and culture centre, giving a taste of how these intersecting events conspired to make Edinburgh a global cultural hub.