With more than 2,450 shows competing for punters' attention in Edinburgh, there's one failsafe way to get bums on seats: make a show about sport. It's a perennial Fringe theme – last year, for instance, cricket commentator Henry Blofeld made his Edinburgh debut, with a show looking back at his illustrious career – but this year, the number of sport-related shows has rocketed.
Blowers is back this week for three nights only while, at the Assembly Rooms, Abi Titmuss is starring in Up'n'Under, Hull Truck's feelgood tale about an amateur rugby league team, complete with choreographed scrums and a slow-motion scoring sequence. Later this month, the Japanese acrobatics troupe CUBE – billed as "the football maniacs from Japan" – will perform a show about becoming physically stuck to a football (the mind boggles), while comic Paul Sneddon's foul-mouthed, vodka-swigging alter-ego, Scottish football manager Bob Doolally, returns to the Stand. And, at the Gilded Balloon, the infinitely more polite comic and cricket fan Miles Jupp presents Fibbing in the Heat (A Cricket Tale), a hilarious and touching account of his successful attempt to blag his way into the press corps to cover the England team's 2006 Indian Test tour.
So how, I ask Jupp, do you ensure that a show about sport has enough to keep the fans interested – but doesn't make a total sports refusenik such as myself steer clear? "Well, I don't make a lot of obscure cricketing references," he says. "The show is more about my obsession with the game, so any I do make, I explain. And I did put a clue in the title – so if anyone actually vomits at the word 'cricket', they have been warned."
