Spank's Edinburgh Diary, Thursday 22/08/2024

Reviewed today: Blindboy Boatclub, Garrett Millerick Needs More Space, Nish Kumar: Nish Don’t Kill My Vibe, Rukmini Iyer, Two Hearts: Till Death Do Us Heart.

I chop, you stir. Not my words: the words of The Belated Birthday Girl on June 14th 2023, which she said to me as part of our civil partnership ceremony. (For those of you who were there that day, there’s a bonus joke coming up in the next paragraph.) It symbolises how we’re an equal partnership in absolutely everything, including cooking - that's genuinely how the division of labour works in our kitchen. Which makes it all the funnier that one year, she bought me Rukmini Iyer’s cookbook The Green Roasting Tin for my birthday, only to find that every recipe in it goes “chop up loads of veg, chuck them into a pan and heat them up, no stirring required.”

Elliott’s, yeah, is a tiny shop in the vague vicinity of Summerhall, where Jess Elliott Dennison lives, writes and organises cookery demonstrations. In an inspired move, the Edinburgh International Book Festival is teaming up with them to run a series of events with food writers, involving the live preparation and consumption of actual food. So for your entrance fee you get an interview with the author in question, a decent portion of just-cooked scran, a glass of wine, and a recipe card for you to recreate the experience at home: plus, inevitably, the chance to buy cookbooks and have them signed. So we're now the owners of a second Rukmini Iyer cookbook, with our names written in it, and this time there's a bit more work for me to do in there.

Iyer chats to Dennison as she's preparing her chosen dish for the day, which is miso barley mushrooms with coriander pesto. She started out studying law in Edinburgh, realised it wasn't for her, and took up a career in food styling: not much of a surprise, given that a large part of the appeal of her books is the way the food looks. Gradually she moved over to working in restaurants to make food that people would actually eat, throwing in the alarming fact that a good 70% of the staff in high end eateries aren't getting paid, and are doing the job just to get a big name on their CV.

The Roasting Tin series came from a pretty basic impulse: as she was raising a family, she wanted to create decent quality meals with as little effort as possible. It's an approach that's become massively popular, but her new book - The Green Cookbook - is a collection of more general vegetarian recipes (her ideal is 'vegan, but not so as you'd notice'). The mushroom dish she's making today actually involves two roasting tins, one for the barley and one for the mushrooms. Unfortunately, distracted by the interview, Iyer messes up the stock in the first and forgets to put the beans in the second. Happily, that's not the batch being served to the audience: the words 'here's one I made earlier' have never been more welcome.

We'll get onto our Antipodean Taskmaster contestant of the day a bit later on. But this is a good time to mention that back in May we saw Paul Williams, the assistant to the New Zealand Taskmaster, performing live in London (in an album launch show for an album that somehow still hasn't come out yet). He brought along a couple of big name friends to open the show for him, and Nish Kumar was the first one. He was, if anything, even more enraged at the world than usual, and it made for a bracing ten minutes. Alarmingly, Nish Don't Kill My Vibe (the new show he's warming up here in preparation for a national tour) has him working at that level of intensity for a full hour.

The opening of his set is basically the same as it was back in May, but the context has changed: Kumar being irritated that Rishi Sunak was making British Indians look bad, while feeling the smallest possible level of sympathy over the racism he experienced.("How racist is the Tory party? They voted for Liz Truss instead of him.") Sunak's no longer in charge, but this hasn't made Nish any happier. From that point it's a show structured in multiple sections (he even obligingly tells you in advance what they're going to be: each section starts with a ton of factual exposition delivered at high speed ("I’ve never taken cocaine, which some of you must be incredibly relieved by"), and once he's got the setup in place he can let loose with a torrent of related gags. It means that the audience reaction seesaws between periods of deathly concentrated silence and absolute hysteria, which balance out to make the best hour of stand-up I’ve seen here so far this year. And because Nish plays by the rules of work-in-progress shows, it only cost us a tenner.

At the end of his show, Kumar gives a few recommendations of other shows we should see (including one we've already got tickets to for tonight, so hooray). But he also suggests taking a punt on somebody unknown, which we've been a bit bad at doing this year. We have a couple of hours to fill before dinner, so we put ourselves at the mercy of the Fringe app, asking it what's playing nearby and about to start. It points us in the direction of Garrett Millerick Needs More Space at the Tron, which is literally next door to where we've just been. The writeup suggests Millerick is going to give us a potted history of the space race, but theres a little more to it than that – his story runs parallel with that of him trying to get his young daughter as inspired by the idea of space travel as when he was a kid.

Kumar's reasoning for seeing a show by an unknown is twofold: if it's great, you get bragging rights when they eventually become famous, but if it's terrible, then it can be added to your bank of stories about terrible Fringe experiences. This one, frustratingly, is somewhere in the middle. Partly because of the subject matter, and partly because of his cadence, Millerick sounds a lot like Robin Ince, although much less pleased with himself, and maybe a notch or two higher on the volume. It's a perfectly decent hour of comedy, and if there's one complaint I'd make about it, it would be this: because Nish plays by the rules of work-in-progress shows, it costs a pound more to see Garrett Millerick than it does to see the famous bloke off the telly.

For at least a decade now, The BBG and I have gone to all our Edinburgh shows together: we make lots of horse trading decisions along the lines of 'I'll come with you to that if you come with me to this'. There are only three occasions when we've gone our separate ways. Two of them were performances by The Rubberbandits, where The BBG decided she'd rather see something else instead. The third is tonight, where there's a talk at the Book Festival by former Rubberbandit Blindboy Boatclub, and... well, you get the idea.

Months ago, when this was first announced, they said that Blindboy would be interviewed by Edinburgh poet Michael Pedersen, and that's still the case: but it's just been announced that Pedersen will be the new Edinburgh Makar, which elevates the event a bit more. Pedersen turns out to be the perfect host, as capable of wild digressions as his interviewer: a good third of this hour is dedicated to a rambling chat on the subject of the sauce they serve in Edinburgh chippies. Blindboy declares his love for the stuff, refusing to take any of it back home to Limerick because the location's part of the experience: Pedersen talks about how he used to drown chips in it as a child, and nearly gets into a fight with an audience member over which chippy has the best one. "Getting a good bang of autism off that one," observes the man with the plastic bag on his head.

It's far from being a typical Book Festival event, even if you ignore the box of Paolozzi lager cans next to Blindboy on the stage ("it tastes like fizzy nails"). There's no concession to anyone who's wandered in here not knowing about Blindboy's music or writing, so it just becomes a freeform chat like one of the man's podcasts. The time just flies by, so even the reading from his latest short story collection has to be truncated to the first three pages of I'll Give You Barcelona, which he splendidly reads in the manner of a Limerick taxi driver.

We started off the day talking about our civil partnership, so it seems fair that my post-Blindboy reunion with The BBG is at a celebration of another couple's marriage. And it's time for our latest Antipodean Taskmaster people - Laura Daniel from New Zealand season 2, and Joseph Moore who's one of the main writers for both the NZ and Australian editions. They've been performing as the musical double act Two Hearts for several years, but last year they took the big leap and got married. They don't think their lives have changed dramatically as a result. But is that true?

To be honest, even after seeing the show I couldn't answer that for certain, but I do know that I laughed myself silly for a whole hour. The show's partly a reenactment of their wedding, with interesting gossip about which comic was off his face on ketamine all night, and which one offered them the chance of a threesome on their wedding night. But mostly it's a collection of brilliantly written songs about their relationship, performed with more energy than people should be capable of at 11 o'clock at night. If you're looking for late night belly laughs, this is definitely the show to see.