Western culture is in decline, says Chris Addison. But is he symptom or solution? On the one hand, his show surveys the history of civilisation - which is refreshingly ambitious. On the other, he can't focus on it for more than five minutes at a time. I'm an admirer of Addison's erudition, but he doesn't always follow through on his intelligent reputation. Here, he's often very funny, but there's a gulf between the weightiness of his theme and the insignificance of his conclusions.
An hour's not long to cram in thousands of years, so why digress? Addison divides his whistle-stop history into sub-sections: City Life, Rules & Rulers. He claims barter is preferable to money, because it's more difficult to forge a pig. He touches on interesting truths: the importance of writing, for example, in humans' efforts to order the universe. "Before the invention of the alphabet," he tells us, "filing was impossible." Pause. "Or very easy."
There are fine jokes elsewhere that have nothing to do with the study of civilization. I liked "It's easy to distract fat people. It's a piece of cake." And he gives a well-earned kicking to several baleful modern phenomena, such as the asinine interactivity ("text us your views!") of TV news. But his show would be better still if he dug deeper into the subject he set off to explore.
· Until August 30. Box office: 0131-556 6550.
