Si vous parlez bien français - I do, so there - the Francophone version of Monty Python's Flying Circus is one of the funniest things in the Edinburgh festival, writes Phil Daoust. Who'd have guessed the infamous Yorkshiremen sketch would work without those boorish accents, or that "Je suis un bucheron et ça me réjouit" would get as many laughs as "I'm a lumberjack and I'm OK"?
But anyone who spends much time in France will have horrible memories stirred by two sketches set in a TV studio, which see a sports commentator with a ludicrously overblown turn of phrase interviewing a barely sentient footballer, and a chat show host nodding and smiling as three invisible, inaudible ghosts "discuss " the afterlife. The style of broadcasting being satirised may have all but vanished from Britain, but it still flourishes the other side of the Channel.
Apart from vacuous lite-ent and old Dutch detective series, French TV consists almost entirely of one member of the nomenklatura interviewing another with an expression of rapt reverence, before popping up on a friend's programme to pontificate about the importance of the media to cultural life and the body politic.
As for radio, any old rubbish will do: I once tuned into a broadcast of a university lecture, in which the speaker was talking at length and in great detail about Drawing A and Drawing B, and inviting his audience to note the differences and similarities. Yes, on radio. That, messieurs-dames, is the one without pictures.
Edinburgh seems to be full of French people at the moment. I suspect they're not so much drawn by the Fringe's rich pickings as fleeing famine at home.
