Mark's history of the Hollywood publicists - how the Fixers, Fakers and Star Makers Created the Celebrity Industry.
Improperganda: The Great Edinburgh Stunt Twithibition
Archaos announce that their Iraqi strongman has quit the 1990 Edinburgh show to put his strength to other uses – fighting in the 1st Gulf War
Archaos’s Iraqi strongman, Zanouk al Habib, made the front pages of The Sun and The Guardian because “his conscience had told him to fight for Iraq in the first Gulf War” instead of appearing in the Festival show.
Scottish strongmen pricking up their ears at the news that Archaos was instigating a desperate search for a strongman to replace Zanouk, who was apparently able to bend lampposts- certainly there are still bent lampposts in Leith Park, where the show was set up before Zanouk left to fight
Dexter Augustus launches Taboo, a domestic dispute as theatre, in a private house. Critics are fed beer to ‘disable critical faculties’.
Dexter Augustus’ previous projects included an anti-homelessness “installation”, Dead Man In The Strand, and a dodgy situation show based on shoplifting in Somerfields.
In 1993, he arrived in Edinburgh with a hazy idea for a show. Having rented a house, he was thinking of staging something in the sitting room and was looking for a sponsor. He hatched a plot at a bus stop to hold a press night to promote the game Taboo, which the company was about to launch for MB Games. It made little sense, and by the time it hit Edinburgh, it made even less. There were ghetto blasters on the roof, semi-naked extras for no apparent reason, guest appearances by Edward Tudor Pole and Judy Balloo (who were sharing the house), and a pre-show barbecue of undercooked sausages, served by Dexter riding around the minuscule back garden on a rusty black bike.
All six journalists attending the press night were given a £10 bribe and forced to drink four bottles of Damm beer before entering the house. Once inside, with the heating on high, an ample supply of over-salted snacks and another pallet of beer on offer, the audience was forced into intoxication.
Augustus, in the guise of Charlie Pink, spent a lot of time running round the house shouting nonsensically at Sidney Squeezie. The embarrassing argument finally wound in towards the point of the evening: a game of Taboo played (as it should be) with a mixture of vociferous alacrity, good spirits and incredible stupidity.
When the audience of critics showed no sign of leaving, Augustus phoned a mate who took the names of the journalists attending. Minutes later, the fax phone in the front spit out, “Charles Spencer from the Daily Telegraph: F**K OFF”. The fax was handed over, and Charles dutifully departed. Six times the phone rang, and the room emptied. Outside, a journalist discussed the question “What is art?” with Channel 4; ghetto blasters played Dexter Augustus’ theme tune over and over; and the police were summoned by a local resident who claimed the racket was driving him out of his mind.
Over the following months, Taboo secured a level of coverage it could never have achieved on its own.
Malcolm Hardee one of the great, prolific Edinburgh stuntsters, launches a show with a firework in Chris Lynam’s backside.
“To say that he has no shame, is to drastically exaggerate the amount of shame that he has,” a journalist claimed of Malcolm Hardee, one of the great Edinburgh stuntsters. His early life as a petty criminial – he once set fire to a Sunday School piano so he could see what Holy Smoke looked like – led him naturally into showbiz. “There are only two things you can do when you come out of prison and you want immediate employment,” he said. “You can either be a minicab driver or you can go into showbusiness.”
Amongst his many stunts and promotional wheezes, Hardee launched The Greatest Show on Legs in Edinburgh by letting off fireworks from Chris Lynam’s backside and called his Tunnel Club shows at Edinburgh Aaaargh: The Tunnel Club, to guarantee that it made the first page of the Fringe programme every year – he would annually add an ‘A’ to the word Aaaargh to make sure no one pipped his position. When the listings format changed, he slipped a rave review, which he wrote about his own show at the Fringe, into the Scotsman’s intray under the byline of their comedy critic – it was published verbatim, much to Hardee’s glee and the paper’s chagrin.
Hardee has been called the father of alternative comedy and used Edinburgh to relentlessly and anarchically promote the new talent he discovered. This legacy has been remembered by the Edinburgh Fringe with the annual Malcolm Hardee Award for Comic Originality which was set up after his death in 2005. In 2009, an additional award was announced: the Malcolm Hardee Cunning Stunt Award, given for the best Fringe publicity stunt of the year.
Sideshow guru Jim Rose hammers a spoon up his nose on Graham Norton’s radio show, bursts a membrane, cancels his 1994 show and takes to his bed.
Jim Rose hit the headlines after he unsettled Graham Norton on the star’s BBC Scotland Festival radio show by appearing to puncture a membrane as he attempted to insert a spoon up his nose. Rose was bundled into a cab after the event, leaving Norton to go to a record whilst staring at the spoon – covered in gore – which had been left behind.
A representative said that Rose, who rose to prominence after his Sideshow took off at the 1992 Lollapalooza festival, had not performed the trick for some time. “He had eaten a lightbulb on the show before and wanted to do something different,” said Mark Borkowski. “He usually manages it with a nail.”
A pre-fame Alan Carr playing to post-lunch old folk in 2003 – the press report that ‘Young comedian dies in Edinburgh nursing home’.
Alan Carr, pre-fame, couldn’t even get arrested until he decided to accept an invitation to perform at an old people’s home. Unsurprisingly, the press came flocking to see a young comedian die 1000 deaths – and they were rewarded with a crowd who, having just eaten lunch, were falling asleep and snoring wildly throughout his set. Even more unnervingly for Carr, one man kept on laughing hysterically throughout his set – only stopping for the punch lines. He was also told off by an old woman for standing in front of the telly in the middle of Diagnosis Murder. The headline that launched Carr’s career was a gift – ‘Young Comedian Dies in Edinburgh Nursing Home’.
Carr is a hard worker and was very keen to get noticed. He threw himself into publicity stunts with alacrity – even taking the opportunity to work this immensely tough gig with a smile on his face and an open mind.
Country singer Hank Wangford’s shows at the Edinburgh Festival in 1989 were launched here with the UK’s first Cowpat Flinging contest.
Hank Wangford, the singing gynaecologist, who took his witty and irony-laden Country music show to Edinburgh to much acclaim. The show was launched, appropriately enough, with the UK’s first cowpat flinging contest at Holyrood Park. What the organisers of the contest, who knew that it would achieve plenty of publicity, had not accounted for was that British cowpats lacked what their American counterparts had – desert heat.
The British pats were not exactly flingable in their natural state. This lead to the Radio 1 DJ Andy Kershaw putting out a call on his show for more cowpats to be sent and a long stint with a microwave in a flat hired for the festival, drying cowpats until they were fit to fling. The deposit on the flat was flung quite as far as the dried cowpats were…
Archaos split a car in two on the Royal Mile. A journalist nearly gave birth in shock. There are still gouges in the road if you look.
In 1987, a wild-haired French gypsy called Pierrot Bidon turned up at publicist Mark Borkowski’s office. He planned to bring a grungy Mad-Max-meets-Blackpool-tower style circus to Clapham Common in a small, shabby tent. As a business proposition, it seemed unsound.
Four years later, and a large number of crazy, authority-baiting stunts at Edinburgh later, Archaos was on the road playing to crowds of five thousand at a time. On the way, Archaos re-forged the ancient art of circus ballyhoo using chainsaws, which is at the root of all great PR.
One of their most spectacular stunts was splitting a car in half on the Royal Mile. A journalist in the car following was so surprised by the event that she nearly gave birth a month before she was due.
The Daily Record got wind of this particular stunt and arranged to have the police turn up and arrest all concerned, believing this to be a better story – the upshot of this was that the organisers, who got wind of the plan, informed everyone but the Daily Record that the stunt was moving a few streets away.
Jim Rose uses an old bylaw to walk sheep through Edinburgh before 6am. The sheep ran through the open doors of City Chambers…
Sideshow guru Jim Rose, when he was not pushing spoons up his nose for Graham Norton’s festival radio show, was publicising his show in all sorts of crafty ways. Discovering an old bylaw that allowed Edinburgh residents the right to drive sheep through the city before 6am, he gathered up a flock of sheep, branded them with the mark of Gordon’s Gin, his sponsors, and drove them and some attendant journalists through the city in accordance with the bylaw.
Driving the sheep past City Chambers off Edinburgh’s High Street, Rose didn’t count on the council doors being open – it was 6am after all. The doors were, however, wide open and the sheep, perhaps sensing an opportunity to bleat at authority, ran into the empty building. They were swiftly herded out again, leaving a trail of fecal matter that must have bewildered the occupants of the city chambers when they finally arrived for work – at least until the pictures appeared in the papers the next day.
Richard Demarco presents Macbeth, with Johnny Depp, on Inchloss Island. The audience, clothed in sacking, suffer in the poor weather.
Richard Demarco isn’t exactly a stuntster, but every show he’s put on at Edinburgh fringe has had a news hook to die for. In the 1960s he pulled off one of the original fringe stunts, in which two men rolled around the streets nude, to the consternation of many Morningside ladies. They then supposedly committed a homosexual act under a black plastic sheet – this was before homosexuality was legal.
Demarco creates stunts almost without realising he is doing so, in the name of art. He gave a young Damien Hirst his first Fringe exposure, worked with Joseph Beuyes and brought artists to the festival from the besieged city of Sarajevo in 1995, and ran a production of Macbeth on the very exposed Inchloss Island. The audience for this production were all dressed in blankets held on with safety pins, which made them look like ragtag monks. A couple of members of the audience nearly died of exposure.
Many people felt that Demarco should have been the Festival’s director, but he was perhaps too maverick a spirit
The Smallest Theatre in the World, guaranteed a sell-out every show, accidentally burnt the venue down when a publicity stunt went awry.
A promotional stunt for the Smallest Theatre in the World – a motorbike and oversized sidecar, which had an audience capacity of two and guaranteed a sell-out every show – went badly wrong when flames from the soapboxes and old motorbike frame, which had been set alight behind the venue, based in Pleasance Courtyard, to make it appear as if the theatre had caught light, spread – and razed the actual venue to the ground. The production playing at the time was Macbeth – another notch on the wall for the curse of the Scottish Play!
The late Marcel Steiner had been taking the tiny theatre to Edinburgh for years before the stunt that burned it, and the shows he put on featured such stellar cast members as Bob Hoskins, Sylvester McCoy and Jim Carter. It was often seen on Tiswas – when the erratic VW van that carried it everywhere could make it into the studio, that is.
The Smallest Theatre in the World ran from the side of a Russian Neval motorbike; Ken Campbell apparently told Steiner that the machine was so big you could run a theatre from the side of it – and so a legend began.
The Smallest Theatre in the World was the perfect example of stuntsmanship in action – the theatre itself was only part of the show. Steiner made money by busking, milking the silver lining of the crowd that gathered to watch the mayhem. It was curbside culture for the masses.
Archaos terrorise Edinburgh for the sake of column inches by leaping motorbikes over stationary cars. Many no claims bonuses go out the window.
Of all the death-defying stunts that are normally kept away from the general public, behind the circus ring, the motorbike leap over stationary cars is the one most people would least expect to make a break for the open road. This particular death and taxes-defying stunt took place at The Mound, near Princes Street.
Archaos were always Barnumesque in their outlook and keen to take the show onto the streets in the name of publicity. The shows were packed with danger within the tent and Archaos saw no reason to behave more tamely on the streets, as this stunt shows. It could have gone wrong at any moment and they didn’t even tax or insure the cars and bikes they used to leap around the streets of Edinburgh.
But that was Archaos through and through – their name is a blend of Anarchy and Chaos after all – and this stunt had hearts pounding, palms sweating and pulses bulging extravagantly on foreheads. And that was just the insurance men…
