Edinburgh festivals diary: How five stars can be a double-edged sword and a city-wide game of Dobble

But for one comedian, a five-star rating from one of our reviewers has caused him some problems.

Nate Kitch, whose show, Something Different!!!!!, was described by one of our Scotsman comedy reviewers as “a show for true comedy aficionados”, says the five-star rating has attracted a different kind of audience to his comedy, who have not necessarily looked into his style of act before buying a ticket.

Instead, he says, many people trust a top review to direct them to a show that will be guaranteed to be a hit for them - no matter what their taste or interests.

“I did the Fringe last year and it obviously is very different this time,” Mr Kitch tells me. “The first week after I got my five-star review was crazy. The audience was suddenly split into those who get it and those who did not, but it has calmed down.”

One woman looked visibly unwell during Mr Kitch’s show, forcing him to stop his performance to check on her.

“I asked her if she was OK,” he said. “She told me ‘no, she definitely wasn’t’. Then she said: ‘This isn’t good and this isn’t a good show’.

“She said nothing I’d done had been funny. Then she told me that she was Edinburgh born and bred and had been attending the Fringe for 25 years - and that this definitely was not a five-star Scotsman rated show.”

Undeterred, Mr Kitch, who works as a graphic designer in his day job, has found the experience useful.

“Getting five stars has been an exercise in how to win more people over,” he says. But he doesn’t want to sound ungrateful.

“I know how much this means to me and other comics,” he says. “It’s a career milestone and I couldn’t believe it when I heard.”

Anyone for a city-wide game of Dobble?

As if flyering at the Fringe isn’t tricky - or expensive - enough, one performer decided to make his life even harder by making every single one of his 8,000 flyers unique.

Matt Parker, who performs Getting Triggy With It: Matt Parker Does The Maths, asked his printer to create 8,000 unique designs using “python code”, which allows the public to play a matching game with any two bits of his promotional materials.

“On the back of every one of my flyers, there are 102 symbols and any pair of flyers always have one and only one symbol in common - there are 31,996,000 possible pairings,” he says, adding he had “abused the 'can do' attitude” of his printers.

But how? Why?

“It’s a city-sized finite projective plane,” he explains, losing me immediately.

“It’s Dobble, but on a ridiculous, city-wide scale.”

Ah. I get it now.