To report on the Edinburgh Festival satisfactorily, you need to be in the company of a transvestite, some form of puppet, a celebrity author, an MP in fishnets and either a non-English-speaking Russian clown or eight Korean drummers. Otherwise, news editors wearily raise their heads from organising something straightforward, such as coverage of Chechnya, and groan: "Not Edinburgh again." They don't get it. But then nor does anyone who isn't there. If you're not going to make it to Edinburgh at all, then the news that Andras Schiff is playing 48 fugues and preludes in a drained swimming pool, or that Ross Noble is up for the Perrier, is highly unriveting. Like all great live events, the further you get from it, the deader it becomes.
Yet you have to cover it. Edinburgh is a non-negotiable arts event, our annual cultural Olympics. If only it were more Olympian in spirit, it would be much easier. Sport enjoys blanket coverage on TV over the summer because it is such a doddle on the small screen. Semi-famous people wearing easily understandable uniforms turn up for a pre-scheduled event and form a neat line across a pool, field or track. A race begins. Someone wins. The end. It's perfect televisual fodder.
At Edinburgh, on the other hand, reporters are faced with the nightmare of focusing on drama students from Ohio or Boston Spa who turn up in a variety of venues, ranging from a filthy church basement to someone's sleeping bag, and do any number of not very funny things, including speaking the alphabet backwards in Serbo-Croat and rendering The Canterbury Tales while juggling with fire. And that's just the easy stuff. You can forget about filming Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh or any other piece of classical music or recital. Unless Bryn Terfel is singing "Ode to Joy" and will give you a live spot afterwards, news editors simply couldn't care less about the formal side of the festivities.
One year, the TV execs were rather inspired. I was working for Granada at the time, and rather than simply report on the madness, we decided to create it for ourselves. I and two others were sent up to Edinburgh for a month to "unearth talent", which was to be put on stage and transmitted across the nation. We found talent all right: a young Caroline Aherne (pre-Mrs Merton), a man who balanced a ladder on his nose, a contortionist in a glass case, Jack Dee, Kiri Te Kanawa and 12 Russian ukulele players. They all turned up and performed like crazy - everyone, that is, apart from the ladder man, whose party piece failed and who has probably never dared perform in public again. The night was, shall we say, an idiosyncratic piece of art.
Small echoes of this appear on the schedules each summer. In a white-knuckle attempt to "bring the best of Edinburgh to you", reporters grin nervously while their guests gambol across Carlton Hill or drive a flock of sheep up the Royal Mile (thank you, Mark Borkowski). Which is why I can guarantee that on television this year, at around 7.30am, you will find someone in the Scottish capital gamely juggling between Sandi Toksvig, a Russian clown, V S Naipaul and Gyles Brandreth in women's underwear.
