Itching for the great Edinburgh flea extravaganza

I think I've found the classic Silly Season story. Amid the meta-political wranglings about whether Cherie Blair is a modern Medea, amid the bogus reports of a scientific breakthrough that left-handed people eat more bananas, amid the warnings that mobile-phone users are sending Treen Death Rays coursing through their brain like a laser kebab, there was one gen-u-ine collectors' item. It had all the Silly Season components: wildlife, pathos, crisis and figures of authority looking foolish.

I think I've found the classic Silly Season story. Amid the meta-political wranglings about whether Cherie Blair is a modern Medea, amid the bogus reports of a scientific breakthrough that left-handed people eat more bananas, amid the warnings that mobile-phone users are sending Treen Death Rays coursing through their brain like a laser kebab, there was one gen-u-ine collectors' item. It had all the Silly Season components: wildlife, pathos, crisis and figures of authority looking foolish.

It's the story of the Aussie flea champions. By some ghastly blunder among the gauleiters of the Home Office (Immigration division), the Cardoso Flea Circus, a travelling troupe of acrobatic Siphonaptera from Sydney, was refused entry through HM Customs on Monday evening.

The fact that they were scheduled to appear on stage in the Edinburgh Festival cut no ice with the clueless philistines employed by the fleaphobic Straw. They were suspected of being bogus asylum-seekers and sent home on the next 747, a 42-hour round trip that left many of the sensitive creatures disoriented. (Some of them started drinking the duty-free, an ugly sight; there's air rage, and then there's flea air rage...)

Now, in a creditable, and rather moving, attempt to pull victory from the tiny mandibles of defeat, Maria Cardosa, founder of the circus, has apparently been recruiting scab flea tightrope-walkers from (I am not making this up) the universities of Cambridge and Bristol and getting them trained in time for a show that started last night at the Assembly Rooms.

You can just see (with the aid of powerful 4x100 binoculars) the drama unfolding. The arrival of the swaggering, flaxen Aussie surfer fleas at Heathrow, with their Cutler & Gross shades, their sun-factored white lips and cries of "Hey, babe!" to the Middlesex trollop-fleas hanging out in the arrivals hall. The surly and jealous British fleas, with their bad hair and awful zip-fronted sweaters, emerging from their owners' hair and armpits to have a discreet word in their ear...

And once the brash intruders were packed off back to Van Diemen's Land, what happened? The humans decided to recruit some Cambridge-graduate fleas to fill in for them. Oh brilliant. That is such a good idea. Such a make-do-and-mend, all-hands-to-the-pumps idea. So British. Instead of a troupe of rippling musclemen with Bondi shorts and tinnies, audiences will get a crew of effete, crypto-Marxist poseurs who all look like Jacob Rees-Mogg and are secretly plotting the overthrow of capitalism. They will be - I sort of know it - absolutely hopeless as performing fleas. They will trip over the mini-barbells and fall off the tightrope. They will ask what their motivation is. They will demand more money.

What will become of the circus at the Edinburgh Festival? The crowds will vote with their feet and take their custom to the snail-racing event at the Pleasance. Left with a crowd of unemployed fleas on her hands, the enterprising Ms Cardosa will invent a TV show called Big Sucker, in which her charges are locked into a box for a fortnight under 24-hour CCTV surveillance, and spend the time conniving against each other.

The most interesting piece of information that surfaced from this tale, however, is that the best performing fleas come from kangaroos or cats or a subtle hybrid of both. Not humans. The one kind of flea that Ms Cardosa never uses is the human flea. Too stupid, apparently. All those hours spent sucking blood from human arms and legs leaves the average flea stupefied, dull, incapable of acrobatics or performance. What a tragic indictment of the human condition.

Hang on. I feel a silly-season feature coming on.

j.walsh@independent.co.uk