Preview: My Daily Mail Hell | The School for Scandal

By JONATHAN TREW
Published: 6/8/2009

FORMER jobs are often fertile territory for stand-up comics and a stint working on the diary column of the Daily Mail has gifted Bridget Christie with a glut of colourful material to work from. From being given a lapdance by Peter Stringfellow to being strangled by Gene Wilder, her five years on the diary desk have provided the Gloucester-born comic with plenty of stories to fill My Daily Mail Hell, her show at this year's Fringe.

Actually, the show's title is misleading. The youngest of nine children, Christie was brought up in what she describes as "a very liberal, old Labour, working-class family"; a background that wouldn't seem to be the most obvious fit for the rather more right-of-centre Mail. Despite this, she reckons that her time at the paper was actually quite fun.

"I did have a good time," says Christie. 'The show is about the unusual situations that I got myself into. It was a world that I didn't really belong in.'

Acting, archaeology and, seriously, being a detective had always been much higher up Christie's wish list of careers than journalism. Working for the Mail came about through chance more than design. Christie had been sent to the paper by a temping agency as a typist, work which fitted in with her fledgling career in comedy. Her job was to find out what parties were on and who would be attending them. If there weren't enough proper journalists available to cover all the events then Christie would be sent out. She quickly discovered that she wasn't a natural.

"I was really crap," she laughs. "You just wouldn't believe how rubbish I was. I would meet these celebrities or important politicians and ask what they had had for tea. My colleagues wouldn't do that because their jobs depended on it. They had to report back to the editor with something they could use. It was a bonus if I got something."

Many of Christie's would-be interviewees told her to push off in no uncertain terms but the fact that she was so glaringly bad at the job actually worked in her favour occasionally.

"I came across as so naïve that I think I caught a lot of them off guard. A lot of them were quite nice to me and gave me funny little stories. I met Nick Robinson, the BBC's political editor. He has met some big fish in his time and I could have asked him anything.

"So I said, 'Hi Nick, it's Bridget from the Mail. Have you got any mad fans?' He said, 'No but someone keeps on sending me copies of my own face wrapped up in toilet paper. Does that mean I am a shit or does it mean that they are trying to protect me in some way by wrapping up my face?'" Needless to say, the front page wasn't held for that particular story but, while Christie may not have earned a reputation as an ace newshound, she did gain an insight into the tawdry world of celebrity PR.

"They court the press like nobody's business," she says. "They will call you up and tell you things that have happened and then complain if you get their age wrong or use a slightly unflattering photo or mention that they were a criminal five years ago. They try and have it all ways."

Christie gave up the job a couple of years ago when she became pregnant and is now married to fellow comic Stewart Lee. Since leaving the Mail, her comedy career has begun to take off and, among other writing projects, she is currently working on a treatment for a sitcom inspired by the Mitfords.

Historical figures have always loomed large in Christie's imagination. For the last couple of years, she presented Edinburgh comedy shows loosely based on the life of Charles II. This year, she is one of several comedians taking part in RB Sheridan's 18th Century farce The School For Scandal. An enthusiastic member of the Sealed Knot historical re-enactment society, she has always had a slightly oddball fascination for the past.

"In Paddington station yesterday, I saw a man with really long curly hair like something from the 1640s. He looked like he was in the English Civil War and that made me so happy.

"It's not just the 17th century that I like but I do particularly like that period because I've always thought that I looked like Charles II."

"I mean I look like him when he was 18," she adds just in case there might be any confusion. "Not when he was 55."

• My Daily Mail Hell is at the Gilded Balloon Teviot, Edinburgh. The School for Scandal is at the Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh. Both shows run until 31 August.

Spoiled for choice in a true musical mêlée

By Jim Gilchrist
Published: 5/8/2009

FROM pub gigs to recitals in kirks and concert halls, the Festival cometh, bringing a bewildering mêlée of music – folk, jazz, world, you name it, as the hugely protean Fringe kicks off on Friday and the "official" Edinburgh International Festival (EIF) opens a week later.

For those intrigued by the folk-classical interface, the EIF's Caledonia Sessions at The Hub should prove rewarding, with the ever-adventurous Concerto Caledonia and guests exploring the Scots music scene of the 18th century. There are beguiling Scots folk overtones, too, in the New York-based Mabou Mines' acclaimed puppet theatre production Peter and Wendy, with its haunting music written by former Silly Wizard fiddler Johnny Cunningham before his untimely death five years ago. Meanwhile, Greyfriars Kirk sees a rare excursion to Edinburgh for the unmistakably plangent heterophony of Gaelic psalm singing from the Lewis Psalm Singers (see www.eif.co.uk for details).

Meanwhile, a flick through the orange-headed music pages of the Fringe programme ( www.edfringe.com) shows the Acoustic Music Centre @ St Bride's ( www.acousticmusiccentre.co.uk) hosting a three-week run, ranging from folk stalwarts such as Dick Gaughan, the all-women Poozies (launching a new album), award-winning singer-guitarist Kris Drever and Edinburgh bluesman Tam White to interesting visitors such as the powerful singer-songwriter Nick Harper, zany Virginian bluegrass outfit the Hot Seats and, from Australia, the wonderful Spooky Men's Chorale. Some of the AMC's regular seat-filers have spilled into Acoustic Music Centre @ The Queen's Hall concerts, including the ever-popular McCalmans and Women In Harmony (Annie Grace, Corrina Hewat and Karine Polwart). The Queen's Hall's own programme ( www.thequeenshall.net) offers folk supergroups Blazin' Fiddles and Capercaillie, veteran guitarist Bert Jansch, singer-songwriter Eric Bogle on his final UK tour, jazz diva Barb Jungr's Tell It Like It Is show and the idiosyncratic sounds of Music From the Penguin Café.

With its famously intimate "folk living room", the Royal Oak pub ( www.royal-oak-folk.com) once again boasts its Festival Folk at the Oak programme, a random sample from which includes Claire Mann and Aaron Jones, guitarist Kevin MacLeod with accordionist Freeland Barbour, and the irrepressible daily Air Alba cabaret. David Ferrard (with a fine new album just out) hosts his nightly Scottish folk Roots and Offshoots show there, as well as his Songs of Conscience show with veteran protest singer Roy Bailey.

From crowded howff to busy delicatessen, Valvona & Crolla ( www.valvonacrolla.com) once again hosts music acts including the inspired clarinet-accordion pairing of David Vernon and Dick Lee, Luca Villani's classically programmed Guitar Fiesta! and Burns-themed one-woman shows from Gill Bowman.

Burns songs meet those by fellow-songsmith Robert Tannahill in Burns and Tannahill: Twa Robs, interpreted by Wendy Weatherby, John Morran and others, at Diverse Attractions in Riddle's Court ( www.diverseattractions.com). Amid an extensive classical programme, there is once again Scottish harping, including Scots virtuoso Catriona McKay (in Celebrate the Music of the Scottish Harp 2) and Chinese counterpart Yi Dong, at St Andrew's & St George's ( www.standrewsandwww.canongatekirk.org.uk), features the notable Chinese singer Fong Liu with Scots flautist and composer Eddie McGuire, as well as a night with McGuire's band, the Whistlebinkies. stgeorges.org.uk) while Canongate Kirk (

Meanwhile the Jazz Bar's nightly programme ( thejazzbar.co.uk) includes the formidable New York-based Russian trumpeter Valery Ponomarev with his quintet, Scots trumpeter Colin Steele's Kind of Blue Miles Davis tribute, and the Dana Dixon Blues Band, among others, while at the Outhouse ( www.outhouse-edinburgh.co.uk), former Ray Charles band vocalist Barbara Morrison offers a bluesy take on the great American songbook.

There is, of course, much else – dig into that programme for eclectic delights ranging from the Soweto Gospel Choir at the Assembly Rooms ( www.assemblyfestival.com), to the exuberance and melancholy of the Yiddish Song Project at The Lot (www.the-lot.co.uk).

Preview: East 10th Street: Self Portrait With Empty House

By Jackie McGlone
Published: 6/8/2009

Edgar Oliver

AS WE enter the despairing, old tenement building in which he's lived for more than 30 years, Edgar Oliver whispers: "I sometimes think of this house as a ship, a sinking ship since it's very, very leaky. On dark and stormy nights it feels as if you are at sea in a shuddering schooner.

"But then I am reading Moby Dick at present and I've also begun imagining that the house is a whale. Herman Melville is always talking about how big the whale is, so I'm thinking it's probably the size of my house."

Call me Ishmael, but entering this creepy abode in New York's East Village is more like being on the set of a Hammer horror movie, given that Oliver's home is the embodiment of the classic haunted house. Indeed, his neighbours whisper that it is haunted, but he insists that it's only by his memories.

Nonetheless, the number 104 might have been etched in blood and the peeling paint on the front door of the house on East 10th Street – the title of the one-man show that Oliver, the Edgar Allan Poe of downtown New York, brings to the Fringe – crackles with age and neglect.

Oliver, 52, has written volumes of poetry, a dozen plays, including The Drowning Pages, starring Debbie Harry, and appeared in several indie movies (most recently Napoleon Dynamite director Jared Hess's comedy Gentlemen Broncos). And yet, for all the success the avant-garde actor and writer has enjoyed, decay still drips down the crumbling walls of this abandoned apartment building where the eccentric aesthete lives with his tiny black cat Alma Louise, who keeps the rodent population in check. On the ground floor all the rooms are boarded up. As you climb a perilous, winding staircase, littered with the dusty corpses of dead insects, the 35 shadowy steps creak eerily beneath your feet.

You pass more locked rooms – God only knows what lies within – up to the top floor where Oliver lives in two rooms filled with tottering piles of books and manuscripts, an assortment of bizarre bric-a-brac, and strange, surreal paintings by his late mother and elder sister Helen.

There is no kitchen. He washes his dishes in the bathroom, a room over which I shall draw a veil. He cooks his evening meal of vegetables and tofu on a single hot plate.

"What may I get you?" he asks hospitably, offering me his best chair, an explosion of stuffing, which like all his other "furnishings" was liberated from a dumpster (skip), he reveals.

Picture the charming love child of Blanche Dubois and Quentin Crisp, who was, inevitably, a dear friend and you have a portrait of Oliver, who exudes an exquisite, fading southern gentility. He and Helen were born and raised in Savannah, Georgia, by their aristocratic, wildly bohemian mother, a childhood that is the very stuff of a Tennessee Williams play or a Truman Capote novel. But he's transmuted it into the sweet, sinister memoir, East 10th Street, which he also performs. It has, of course, a cult following in New York, where Oliver is an iconic performance artist.

In the show, he tells how, in the early 1970s, he and Helen ran away to Paris. "Ostensibly to get away from Mother," he drawls in his peculiarly affected, distinctive voice (which the New York Times critic described as "dipping like a bat on the wing"). Others have compared his lingering pronunciation to the accent and tone of Bela Lugosi, or even Peter Lorre crossed with Peter Cushing, though that may be due more to his hollow eyes and pale, spidery fingers, which adds to the cryptic air of a crypt.

The siblings wanted to become artists and bohemians. "Although you couldn't get more bohemian than Mother. Oh Gaaa-aaa-haad!" he exclaims, displaying his famed ability to stretch syllables into infinity. Mother, a recluse, never let anyone into their isolated home, claiming that their father had died of a heart attack when Oliver was 18 months old. When he was 16, Mother revealed the secret of his father's death: an addict, he'd died from a morphine overdose about two months before Edgar was born. "We gleefully accused Mother of having driven our father to suicide. Becoming bohemians was therefore an inescapable destiny for Helen and I, ingrained in us by Mother. I've come to realise, though, that my greatest ambition now is to be like Mother, who died in a rooming house in Washington DC 25 years ago."

From Paris, Oliver moved to London, where he spent a year in a "weird" hotel, a run-down Georgian mansion in Earl's Court Square – "another abandoned, ruinous rooming house".

"Oh, yaaah, it was even stranger than East 10th Street. I never paid any rent; the proprietor's only interest was the defunct British Poetry Society, which he ran from the basement. The dah-aaah-kness! The drunken poets!" he exclaims.

In 1977, he moved to New York to study at Columbia University. Wandering along East 10th Street, he discovered a beautiful block, lined with many trees. He looked up and saw "a gnarled hand" reach through the Venetian blinds and tape an old, beat-up paper bag to the inside of the parlour-floor window. Written on the bag, "in a kind of horror handwriting," was "Room for rent."

He rented it immediately for $16 – about £8 at the time – a week. The building superintendent – Mister Supter – complained bitterly about the many ghosts who would collect on the parlour-floor every night. He said they would lie down and stare up at him fixedly. He claimed that there were so many ghosts lying across the floor that it would take ages, stepping over them very carefully, one by one, to make his way to his cot at the back of the house.

Driven out of Paris by giant sewer rats crawling into her apartment, Helen joined her brother at number 104. Slowly they enlarged their domain as one by one various other roomers were carted off to insane asylums or old-age homes – "strapped to stretchers, struggling to break free and make it back to their rooms. No-one left willingly."

Why would they? It must have been a riot. On the second floor, in a tiny room, with a tiny door at the turn of the stairs lived an ancient little lady, Frances Aine, who had been the landlord's wet nurse. She spent her days washing rags with large cakes of soap, "the Lady Macbeth of rags". During her obsessive laundering she was often terrorised by one Donald Milburn, "the retired mulatto postman," who drank vodka with milk for his ulcers. He would spray Frances with roach killer, while laughing maniacally. Sharing the top floor with Oliver and his sister were two different lunatics: a rotund, elderly German, Edward Lindner – "Helen and I were convinced he was a Nazi in hiding," reveals Oliver who never went to the bathroom – and in the back room was Freddie Feldman, midget cabalist.

"Freddie tried to kill us on a daily basis, He would steal our empty wine bottles from the trash – of which there were many as we liked to entertain – and he would plant them one by one, lying on their sides on various steps, hoping that Helen and I on our many trips to the bathroom would step on an empty bottle and it would roll out from under our feet, causing us to plunge down the stairs and break our necks," Oliver explains. "It was quite amazing that Freddie was able to plant his booby traps without making a sound, because the stairs creaked horribly."

So how did he do it? "First, he would remove his clothes. Then he would walk up the stairs very carefully on tiptoe, balancing on the very outer edge of each step with his whole body pressed against the wall, then he'd walk up the wall like a fly would. To see Freddie – naked, walking up the wall – was truly to witness the most dread and awe-inspiring of acts," replies Oliver.

"None of it fazed either Helen or I, given our hermetic, cocooned childhood in Savannah, where we were brought up in a sort of myth world. I think that's why I sound the way I do because we had a secret language. We heard only Mother's voice so we learned to speak without any outside influence. By the way, Helen sounds exactly like me. Oh yaaah!"

As well as tales of the roomers – pronounced "roooooooomers" – East 10th Street tells of Oliver's hopeless infatuation with a beautiful young actor and his long, solitary walks through desolate stretches of New York City, a flaneur in a long coat that flaps behind him like wings.

Twelve years ago Helen got married. She still paints and sculpts, dividing her time between homes in Italy and West Virginia. Since the landlord has died, Oliver has no idea how much longer he'll be able to stay. Recently, three men from a realty company let themselves into the house. "They went from cellar to roof, photographing every crumbling step, all the holes in the ceilings, every crack in the walls.

"I got a very bad feeling that maybe they were going to condemn the house," he confides. "As they left, one of them said, with a rueful smile, 'if you need any repairs give us a call'.

"People ask if I'm afraid all alone in my house and I always say no, I love my house and my house loves me. Of course they also ask about ghosts and ghouls and things that go bump in the night, but it's just occurred to me that one day people will say that the shade of Edgar Oliver haunts the house on East 10th Street. Oh yaaaah, I've been so happy here."

• East 10th Street: Self Portrait With Empty House is at the Traverse, Edinburgh, tomorrow until 16 August, various times, with a preview performance today at 11:15am.