Tag Archives: edinburgh festival fringe

Lib Dems at the Edinburgh Festival

By Caron Lindsay | Wed 19th August 2026 - 11:22 am

If you happen to be visiting Edinburgh in the next few days, you’ll find that choosing the Fringe show you want to go to is even more challenging than working out your Conference diary.

Over the four weeks, 3649 shows take place over 268 venues, for a total of 53000 performances in the biggest cultural festival in the World. And that’s before you start on the Book Festival.

Two Scottish Lib Dems are performing in shows this week and beyond.

Fife Council candidate Eliza Twaddle appears in The Real Housewives of the Zombie Apocalypse.

The dead have risen! But that won’t stop our seven housewives from serving high-camp drama in the most high-body-count reunion episode yet! Can our favourite OG queens of reality TV survive the hordes – and each other – and manifest their way to the end? Clydebuilt Theatre Company’s original musical returns! ***** (MusicalTalk’s Pick of the Fringe 2025, podcast). **** (Scotsman).

The reviews refer to technical problems on one performance but these are easily resolved.

Elsewhere, Charles Dundas, the Scottish Party’s Campaigns and Candidates Convener, is appearing in a whole load of improv shows between now and the end of the Fringe. He has very usefully listed them all here.

Posted in Op-eds | 1 Comment

Review: Cabaret of dangerous ideas – What does sex sell?

By Caron Lindsay | Sat 4th August 2018 - 2:55 pm

There are definite advantages to living near Edinburgh and working in the city, one of them being an overload of culture or what passes for it during August. The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is eclectic and bold, pushing just about every type of boundary you can imagine.I haven’t quite got over meeting walking genitalia on George IV Bridge a few years ago.

The Fringe kicked off yesterday and I took in my first show which was part of the annual Cabaret of Dangerous Ideas series. Twice a day until 26th August, academics will present an idea and lead a discussion about it.

Last night’s show was all about advertising and the use of sex to sell products.

Sexy’ themes have been used in advertising for decades, based on the notion that ‘sex sells’. From yoghurt ads to shampoo, from perfume to fast food – these ads are ubiquitous and pasted in mainstream media. Researcher Kat Rezai (Edinburgh Napier University) broadens this debate to ask: what do ‘sexy’ ads really sell? Does it sell that ‘sexy’ product, or does it sell specific behaviours?

Kat Rezai took us through some beautifully improvised re-enactments of famous adverts which are designed to show men in powerful roles and women in passive roles. They ranged from the humorous to the tacky to the downright disturbing, with fashion labels like Dolce and Gabanna’s controversial depictions of violence against women.

It was an enjoyable hour, but, if I’m honest, it didn’t really tell me anything I didn’t know already, but then I am interested in this stuff. I was hoping it might advance my knowledge a bit more of how this stuff works in the digital age. When I was growing up, there was one telly and you all watched the same adverts at the same time. Not any more. You can have all the members of a household watching completely different tailored ads base on their Google searches.