Culture correspondents from several national newspapers shocked when a whole city appeared from nowhere. Reporters dispatched to cover the Festival was delighted at discovering a beautiful city, called ‘Edinburgh’, which they had never heard of before.
One BBC correspondent expressed his delight at the appearance of the town out of nowhere, reporting a place of beauty, with a fairytale castle and a mountain in the middle of the town. Old hands assured him that Edinburgh appears for just three weeks in the summer and disappears from sight in the media as if it had never been there.
Others reported the suddenly irrupted town to be filled with theatrical and musical events, and people pretending to be comedians as well as a few off the telly.
To avoid shocking readers, writers have agreed to report on the comedians competing for the best one-liners, leaving reports on ground-breaking performances of Peer Gynt and The Crucible to the back pages of the Guardian where no one will read them, or the front pages of the Guardian where no one will read them.
