The Edinburgh Fringe Show

Explore the world-renowned Edinburgh Festival Fringe with Ewan Spence through a mix of reviews, news, and interviews.

Hosted ByEwan Spence

Welcome to the Edinburgh Fringe Show.

This BAFTA-nominated podcast is a mix of news from the biggest arts festival in the world, with interviews and reviews from the world of comedy, theatre, and music; featuring over 1000 guests since we started coverage in 2005.

Just as the Edinburgh Fringe went on hiatus in 2020, so did the Fringe podcast. The Fringe returned to a full roster for 2022, as did the podcast. Following the 2022 Fringe, we explored our extensive library of guests with a weekly showcase interview from the archives.

With Fringe 2023 here, the big show is back, bringing you the best flavour of the Fringe that we have done for nearly twenty years.

Listen to all our shows online at edinburghfringe.thepodcastcorner.com. Follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or in your favourite podcast app, to never miss an episode.

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All Episodes

The Edinburgh Fringe Show 2023 – Sid Singh (Table For One)

Featuring cameos from Columbo and The Eiffel Tower, here’s my chat with Sid Singh. His Fringe show for 2023 is “Table for One”, where Sing talks about his dual career as a stand-up comic and human rights advocate – careers that see him taking on the US Government over human rights before dealing with deportation from India while staying in Germany. 

The show, which is supporting and raising money for the Centre for Gender and Refugee Studies, asks how you can fight the good fight while you are far away from home.

The Edinburgh Fringe Show 2023 – Emily Walsh (Dad Girl)

Emily Walsh brings her show ‘Dad Girl’ from the clubs of New York to the Grassmarket of Edinburgh. Emily does not know if she wants kids, but she would like to be a dad. It’s a show about making decisions in a world where others believe the decision has already been made for you by society.

The Fringe offers something that many comics, including Emily, rarely get. A chance to spend an hour with an audience. That allows more complex topics to be addressed, to go into much greater depth, but also a chance to look at a wider picture. It’s an offer that Emily luxuriates in.

The Edinburgh Fringe Show 2023 – Sikisa (Hear Me Out)

Sikisa’s Hear Me Out is her second hour-long show at the Edinburgh Fringe. During last year’s debut, after reading a passage of text an audience member wondered if she might be dyslexic. To cut a long story short (and not give away any spoilers), Sikisa was diagnosed, and this year’s show is about that journey.

Sikisa and I talk about her performance and how it rarely reflects how she is away from the comedy stage, the importance of music, and how her 2023 show can be summed up in a single question… “why is it so hard to say the right things?”

The Edinburgh Fringe Show 2023 – Bed: The Musical

‘Bed The Musical’ is centred around the titular piece of furniture. The show examines a twenty-year-long marriage through the presence of the bed that Alice and Ben bought instead of going on a honeymoon. If beds could tell their own stories, this bed has a tale to tell, and it’s all put to song.

Written by Tim Anfilogoff and Alan Whittaker Bed is a musical about a place we spend a third of our life in, and much more of our life around it, making it, and thinking up new things to do in it.,
Ahead of the show making its worldwide premiere at this year’s Fringe, I spoke to writer Tim Anfilogoff and director Matthew Gould about the devilish divan that can be found at the Gilded Balloon.

The Edinburgh Fringe Show 2023 – Patrick Susmilch (Texts from My Dead Friends)

Patrick Susmilch has spent time looking back over all the messages, memes, and moments with his friends on social media. Many are still around, yet some have died. Through those older messages, he feels connected to those who have passed on.

Through the medium of PowerPoint presentations, Susmilch introduces us to his dead friends, their impact on his life, the bursts of joy and laughter as well as darker moments. Think Twilight Zone and Black Mirror mixed with Who’s Line Is It Anyway.

The Edinburgh Fringe Show 2023 – Chloe Radcliffe (Cheat)

If the world is becoming more used to shades of grey, why is infidelity still a black-and-white conflict with a clear villain?

Chloe Radcliffe is one of many comics who has made the trip from the US to Edinburgh this year (something, something. exchange rate, half-price trip, something). Her show. ‘Cheat’ is in the classic fringe style of examining the human condition first through the eyes of the comic and their lived experience, before moving that out to the wider world and finding something intriguing to explore over the hour.

The Edinburgh Fringe Show 2023 – Kuan-wen Huang (Ilha Formosa)

Kuan-wen Huang’s Fringe show for 2023 is ‘Ilha Formosa’, (which means ‘beautiful island’ in Portuguese, a nod towards the sailors who landed on the islands in the 16th century). In it, he talks about how he traded his beloved Taiwan for the rainy British Isles, what it means to be Taiwanese and what it symbolises through generations of migration and shifting identities.

The show does have some autobiographical elements, how could it not given its subject, but it does offer that time-honoured use of comedy to take a sideways look at both politics and the human condition through a medium that makes it easy to talk about complicated issues.

The Edinburgh Fringe Show 2023 – Emily Carding (Let The Bodies Pile)

The Edinburgh Fringe is a mix of every genre and emotion; from stand-up and dance, through music, to cabaret and theatre, and beyond, the Fringe swings from light and fluffy to hard-hitting and heavy themes and emotions. It’s the latter that we’re going to talk about in this episode.

Emily Carding is one of the performers in Let The Bodies Pile, the other performer, Henry Naylor, is also the writer. This is an intensely political piece that looks at the reaction to Covid here in the United Kingdom, primarily in nursing homes and how society comes to terms with the decisions made by politicians.

The Edinburgh Fringe Show 2023 – Bedlam Theatre Returns To The Fringe

Bedlam Theatre is home to the Edinburgh University Theatre Company… and when August comes around Bedlam Fringe comes around with an eclectic and varied programme of shows. Except it’s not been at the Fringe since 2019.

That changes this year, as the gothic 90-seat theatre opens its doors once more. Ewan sat down with venue manager Marie Rimolsrønning to find out what it takes to return to the Fringe, what Bedlam represents, and some of the shows we can expect.