Festivals diary: Why Make it Happen gave me flashbacks and who is the Fringe's comedy audience legend?
Make It Happen gave me flashbacks to the credit crunch
I’m a bit late to the party, but I finally saw the Edinburgh International Festival’s brilliant Make It Happen, starring Brian Cox as an hilarious ghostly incarnation of economist Adam Smith who loves John Lewis.
I’m happy to be corrected if I am wrong in this, but I would stick my neck out to claim that I am probably the only Scottish arts correspondent who, at the time of the credit crunch, was working in business journalism in Edinburgh. James Graham’s play gave me flashbacks, actually recreating on stage an RBS shareholders’ meeting proposing the notorious rights’ issue that I attended - and covered - as a junior business reporter back in 2008.
I can vividly recall that particular meeting, because it was terrifying. I was in my 20s, having accidentally fallen into business journalism, with no first clue what a rights’ issue actually was. I just knew that this was very significant - and if I messed it up, I’d be in trouble.
It turned out to be one of the most iconic moments of the entire financial crash, as proved by Graham’s decision to feature it in the play.
There were elements of the play that hit very close to home, not just because of the major impact the situation had - and is still having - on everybody’s financial situation. One of those was when Gordon Brown introduced his senior Treasury adviser, now known as Baroness Shriti Vadera, to chief executive Fred Goodwin’s predecessor, George Mathewson, only to have him look through her as if she was invisible and speak to Brown himself. As one of only a couple of female business reporters - and later business editor - to cover financial journalism in Scotland at the time, I was used to that look, not specifically from Mathewson himself, but from many other financial men in grey suits.


The play perfectly captured the zeitgeist of Edinburgh’s financial world at the time: the permanently sloshing champagne, the private jets and the priceless works of art hanging in the hallowed halls of Gogarburn. I’m glad it’s a world to which I don’t have to return.
Comedy audience legend
Hands up if you've been in a show with a man waving a prosthetic leg recently? I'm not sure if it's the same person, or if there's more than one of him, but two separate performers have now told me about an audience member who has taken off his leg during their show.
Comedian Craig Hill has a history of leg-related incidents in his shows, with one woman who broke her leg just before his show refusing to go to hospital until after she’d watched it. But this week, one man in the front row took it to a new level when during Craig’s dance off at the end, he took off his prosthetic leg and waved it wildly in the air in time to the music.
Separately, a man also took off and waved his leg at improv rapper Chris Turner during his show, when he asked for suggestions of topics to base his rap on.
If you are the mysterious man, please identify yourself, you're becoming a bit of a comedy audience legend.
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