ARTS / Cries & whispers in Edinburgh

'BRILLIANT', 'magical', 'spell-binding': these aren't the only words that sell tickets. In Edinburgh for the festival this week, I overheard two girls in a pub.

'Have you seen Jim Rose?'

'Yeah, he's disgusting. You must go.'

'Yeah, I really want to.'

The Jim Rose Circus Sideshow brings the Victorian freak show back to the Fringe. One act involves running a tube up a performer's nose and down into his stomach. Beer is poured down into the stomach and brought up again into a glass. One man in the audience agreed to drink the beer when it resurfaced. I spoke to his friends later. They had decided that under no circumstances would they tell his wife.

ONE OF the problems with audience participation is that the audiences here don't always participate. Less accomplished acts collapse as members of the public refuse to budge. The opposite problem is that there are many actors in the audience, and the last thing a comic needs is someone else looking for a spotlight. It's not often, though, that you can report an instance of participation by someone else's audience. The American comic Greg Proops was so fed up with the Doug Anthony Allstars making a racket in the room above that he led his entire audience upstairs and joined in their act. There are limits, though. When Jimeoin takes someone's handbag and threatens to look through it, the audience goes cold. It's the last taboo. Personally, I'd go to see shows that guaranteed on the poster that there was no audience participation. But then I prefer to get the jokes, not become one.

THE USUAL pleasure in seeing a show - that it stays with you with several days - is absent here. Seeing three or four shows a day is like being back at school, where you go from French to Maths to Art to Gym. An awful lot of drama has flowed past between breakfast and bedtime, and like those lessons, not much stays in the mind. Still, the awards so far. The Dirtiest Laugh in the Festival prize goes to June Brown, Dot Cotton in EastEnders, for Double-D. The Worst Piece of Logic was the man who said he could talk through a show if he wanted to because he'd paid for his ticket just like everyone else. The Unhealthiest Joke comes in Porky Palmers, when Will Buckley smokes a cigarette in 30 seconds. The Best Comedy Performance goes to Ben Miller as the wimp who takes charge in Tony Hawks's musical comedy, The Heartbreak Kid. The Longest Queue is the one shortly before noon for Steven Berkoff at the Assembly Rooms. And the Most Tedious Question, as always, is 'Seen anything good?'