FestBuzz

What: The Early Edi­tion (Mar­cus Brig­stocke and Andre Vin­cent)
Where: Udder­belly
When: 12.25pm daily until 30 August
How Much: £10 — £12.50.

In 140 char­ac­ters or less: “Brig­stocke, Vin­cent and guests bring TV panel show to life with mixed results.”

The panel show has become ubiq­ui­tous on tele­vi­sion over the last few years as Mock the Week and 8 Out of 10 Cats have blurred the line between news and com­edy with sharp writ­ing, care­fully cal­cu­lated gags and slick pro­duc­tion. It’s a com­pelling, if for­mu­laic, approach to TV com­edy, which, with a lit­tle bit of edi­to­r­ial magic, gives the impres­sion of a thirty minute bar­rage of con­stant gags. It’s jar­ring then, to see the for­mat trans­planted directly into a live envi­ron­ment, warts and all.

The Early Edi­tion, the live descen­dant of Mar­cus Brig­stocke and Andre Vincent’s irrev­er­ent tele­vi­sion panel show The Late Edi­tion, sticks to much the same for­mat as it has in pre­vi­ous years at the Fringe. Brig­stocke and Vin­cent, along with a pair of panel guests, dis­sect the day’s news­pa­pers (“and the Daily Mail”) in front of a live audi­ence. Save a few sta­ple gags, the show is almost entirely impro­vised and audi­ence par­tic­i­pa­tion is actively encour­aged. Inevitably, over­all qual­ity varies some­what depend­ing on how brisk the day’s news is and on how suc­cess­fully the guest stars inter­act with the hosts.

Of the two stal­warts, Mar­cus Brig­stocke essen­tially acts as anchor­man. Not only does he keep the show roughly on track, he facil­i­tates most of the exchanges between audi­ence and per­form­ers and leads with some of the juici­est news sto­ries. As ever, he’s bit­ing and sar­cas­tic though rarely strays too close to con­tro­versy. Andre Vin­cent, on the other hand, is brash and loud and careers head­long into del­i­cate top­ics with all the sub­tlety of an enraged wilde­beast. In spite, or per­haps because of, this how­ever, Vin­cent is the only panel mem­ber to really step away from safe mate­r­ial and take risks. His won­der­fully taste­less one-liners about 9/11 and basement-dwelling Aus­trian fam­i­lies may get a few groans but they’re cer­tainly memorable.

Though nom­i­nally appear­ing as a panel guest on The Early Edi­tion, Car­rie Quin­lan has been a reg­u­lar on the show since it first ran in Edin­burgh in 2007 and is by now as much a head­line name as either Brig­stocke or Vin­cent. Quin­lan tends to grav­i­tate towards softer sto­ries and off­sets some of Vincent’s blus­ter and Brigstocke’s acer­bic wit though her brand of humour is no less inci­sive, despite the mate­r­ial she chooses to work with. The sec­ond guest slot rotates daily and has been filled by such lumi­nar­ies as Phil Jupi­tus, Stew­art Lee and Ed Byrne in the past. On the day Fes­t­buzz popped along to the show, Amer­i­can come­dian Jamie Kil­stein was sit­ting in on the panel.

Back home Kil­stein has cul­ti­vated a cer­tain level of infamy as a bit­ing left-wing comic, loudly tout­ing his athe­ism and veg­an­ism as well as rad­i­cal polit­i­cal polemics. Despite his fire­brand rep­u­ta­tion, how­ever, Kil­stein is sur­pris­ingly tame. His rebut­tal to the right-wing sav­aging of the NHS in the Amer­i­can press is cer­tainly timely but lacks real bite. Oth­er­wise, he plays it safe stick­ing to tried-and-tested rou­tines about the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion, US insu­lar­ity… noth­ing we haven’t heard before a dozen times over.Kilstein is clearly capa­ble of much greater things, beg­ging the ques­tion of why he chooses to regur­gi­tate the same kind of low­est com­mon denom­i­na­tor polit­i­cal mate­r­ial that has seen both Janeane Garo­falo and Rich Hall take a beat­ing from the crit­ics this year.

While The Early Edi­tion is cer­tainly an enter­tain­ing way to spend a lunchtime, it remains too closely tied to the tele­vi­sion panel show for­mat. At an hour, it feels overly long, as if attempt­ing to jus­tify the cost of admis­sion. While the show picks up towards the end, the mid­dle seems flabby and lack­ing in struc­ture. With the absence of an editor,the cracks in the for­mat really begin to show in a live envi­ron­ment and the audi­ence is left at some­thing of a loose end. Though The Early Edi­tion is cer­tainly worth check­ing out, it seems that Brig­stocke and Vin­cent may need to rework the for­mat before bring­ing it back for another run in 2010.

Fes­t­buzz Rating:

Words: Jodi Mullen