Alex Horne at the Edinburgh Fringe

The Horne Section have become a must-see act at the Fringe as there's no one really doing anything like them, and they are brilliant at what they do. I saw them performing a preview show in a tiny venue in Camden, London before their first Edinburgh a couple of years back and loved the combination of Alex Horne and his five piece band.

Alex isn't especially musical and tries to operate the band as though they are a rather cumbersome piece of technology whereas they are in fact superb, very tight musicians and the end result is an alchemy that only their long-standing friendship, patience and trust makes possible.

Our first series for Radio 4 aired earlier this year and as we're between series it's been great to have this opportunity to do a one-off up in Edinburgh. We recorded the show in the special BBC compound at Potterow where all sorts of performances and masterclasses have been happening during the festival.

Although it is generally rather hectic and everyone looks more ill as the month progresses the key advantage of doing a radio show at the fringe is that everyone is in the same place, so it's easy to meet up and rehearse, and there are also plenty of comedians held captive there which makes guest booking a bit easier. We were thrilled to have Al Murray and Tim Key agree to be guests in this show - they are both performers who have won Edinburgh comedy awards in their own right, and also sell out their own shows consistently.

Al Murray appears as a guest

As is traditional with most artists who have been hoofing the stage night after night, often in more than one show, and not eating anything green for the entire month of August, all of the band seemed to go down with a sore throat and a cough - so that was a bit of a worry when we had to do a run-through with most of them rasping and hacking away.

Dramatically there was even more of a scare when Alex had a really quite serious accident a couple of days before the show which involved another comedian who shall remain nameless (but there might be a clue in this blog) and some rum. The drinking of the rum was not the problem. Paramedics were involved and the group had to cancel one of their own Horne Section gigs in order for Alex to recover. But Nurse Showbizz nursed him back into the limelight and he made an excellent return to form and the radio show went ahead as planned with no further mishaps, and you can hear the results here.

We do have one other surprise appearance in the show who I have not listed and you'll need to listen to the end to see who. Sadly only those in the audience on the night will have seen whether he wore any underwear, and yes that really happened, if you were there.

Julia McKenzie is the producer of Alex Horne Presents The Horne Section on Radio 4.

• Visit the Alex Horne Presents The Horne Section website and listen to the programme.
• Relive the highlights of Radio 4 at the Fringe in our Edinburgh Collection.
• Visit the Edinburgh Festival 2012 BBC website.

'Mark Steel's In Town' has come up to the fringe festival to record a one-off episode of the stand-up show - this time about the Edinburgh district of Leith, home of Irvine Welsh, the Proclaimers, and some of the most bonkers pubs in Christendom. Here's some of what we picked up along the way...

1. Leith is NOT Edinburgh
   Well, it is. But to say as much to a Leith local seems to be tantamount to perpetrating a hate crime. The district is very much its own place, with a unique mindset that comes from its history of having once been an independent port town full of hard-drinking dockers and sailors - as Mark observes, it's now a mixture of old industrial Britain, and a crazed squat.


2. Visit the docks
   The docks are the heart of Leith. As well as being the commercial centre of the town, it was once the centre of the thrillingly - often illegally - lively nightlife. It's now home to a bizarre mix of new-Leith Michelin star restaurants and old-Leith warehouses and high rise flats. We met several ex-dockers with great tales to tell of when the docks were in full swing. One of them, Frank Ferri, has some excellent stories of the dancehalls and, bizarrely, the wrestling arenas of 1950's Leith, along with some even better (but sadly unprintable) stories of the powerful effect American-import Old Spice had on the young women of Leith...


3. Leith's pubs are amazing
   Leith has a brilliantly grimy and eccentric nightlife, but a special mention has to go to the Port O'Leith pub. Everyone in there seems to be having the kind of good time normally depicted in a 1990s American teen comedy movie about frat parties. There's always - ALWAYS - someone dancing on the bar, sometimes in PVC shorts, and often to the Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack. As the pub never seems to close, we can only assume this bar dancing has some kind of formal rota system, with dancers having to punch-in and punch-out at the start and end of their gruelling shifts.


4. Shopping there is unusual
   Leith Walk is one of the best streets in the UK. Recently torn up and haphazardly re-assembled under the almost comically disastrous plans to install trams in Edinburgh, it's still home to some of the most, well, unique shops in Scotland. Some favourites: Borlands, which only sells two things - darts and televisions; Leith Cycles, which held a full birthday party for the endless building works outside its premises; and Robbie's bar, once the centre of Irvine Welsh's circle of literary outlaws, and the venue from which they cooked up a plan to impregnate one of their self-published magazines with LSD and slip it in to John Menzies for sale...

Leith often gets overlooked by those visiting Edinburgh, but we can't recommend it highly enough.

Sam Bryant is the producer of Mark Steel's in Town.

• Listen to or watch Mark Steel's take on Leith in Mark Steel's in Town.
• Visit our Edinburgh Collection to see highlights of Radio 4 from the Edinburgh Festival.
• Follow Radio 4 on Twitter and Facebook

Clive Anderson called Edinburgh the Athens of the North during Saturday's recording of Loose Ends (and not just to lead into a gag about Greece's economic collapse). For a few weeks in August Edinburgh becomes one of the cultural capitals of the world with thousands of shows taking place at the Edinburgh Fringe - including over 100 BBC shows.

If you come down to Fringe Venue 25 at the corner of Potterrow, you will find a tented village where you can experience the best of the BBC under one roof, including Radio 4 shows and workshops.

Festival-goers queue to see Just A Minute outside the Blue Tent.

The Blue tent is being used almost every day in August for radio and television recordings and has been hosting Radio 4 shows such as The Unbelievable Truth, Just a Minute, Front Row, Dilemma and the Today programme. The tent seats 300 people and Jim Naughtie confessed during the Today recording that being in the Blue tent was much more luxurious than his usual surroundings in the Today programme's London studios.

Live performances take place in the Pink Tent

You can hear music and comedy in the Pink tent, where there are free live performances happening every day to keep you entertained while you look around the site or wait to see a show. If you are very lucky, you might even be able to join The Horne Section in a bit of Band-a-Oke (like karaoke, but with musical backing from the famous band).

There is also an opportunity to learn more about Radio 4 by attending the workshops '45 Years of Just a Minute' and 'Radio 4 and the Fringe', which give you a behind-the-scenes glimpse of how we make programmes. At the Information Point you can book an appointment to see BBC staff in action in the working on-site radio studio. You may even be asked to paricipate in a programme. We asked people on site to tell us their dilemmas just before the recording of Dilemma. Here is what the crowd (including Radio 1's Scott Mills & Radio 4 Extra's Arthur Smith) told us they were worried about:

If you don't get into the recording of your favourite Radio 4 show, there is still plenty to do in the BBC Venue. There is a big screen which has broadcast moments from the festival, including Nicholas Parsons discussing 50 Shades of Grey on Just a Minute and Mark Watsons' short story about a disasterous club sandwich on Comic Fringes. You can also have your photo taken in front of our green screen and we will put your picture in a scene of a BBC show of your choice.

Mark Lawson told the audience at Wednesday's Front Row recording that if the BBC at the Edinburgh Fringe was the Olympics, then Front Row would be beach volleyball. And we like to think the Olympic spirit is being kept alive (in a small way) by the on site ping-pong table, which is in near constant use by competitive festival-goers.

It's not just Radio 4 at the venue, there are more BBC shows here than ever before with seven radio networks on site in total. Plus BBC Three hosted an all-night comedy marathon in the Blue Tent which was broadcast live on Red Button.

Entry to the site is free, so if you are in Edinburgh, why not come and see us on the corner of Potterrow and Marshall Street? If you are not in Edinburgh, then you can catch up with the highlights of the festival in our Edinburgh collection.

Great highlights from Edinburgh Festival this week include:

• Sex in Ambridge from Beatboxer Tom Thum on Front Row.
• Jane Godley's menopausal meditation in Just a Minute.
• George Wendt (Norm from 'Cheers') tells Sue Perkins how he wrestled a swan.
• Poet Kate Fox ponders The Great North Run in the Wondermentalist Caberet
• Hear Ross Noble, Mitchell and Webb and more from Radio 4 Extra Comedy Club all week on Radio 4 next week.

Plus there's still plenty more of Radio 4 at Edinburgh yet to come, including Mark Steel's in Town, the Horne Section and The Kitchen Cabinet.

Edinburgh

Where else should Today be in August but Edinburgh? The festival city comes alive, and has a fizz of its own. Jugglers on the Royal Mile, young actors finding their feet in hard-to-find basements and silent church halls, the best story tellers and comics at the book festival and on the fringe and still, beating away, the heart of it all in the International Festival itself which, for more than sixty years, has thrown some of the best artists in the world together and told them to get on with it.

Now, of course, there is more. The argument over the future of Scotland involves the whole of the UK, to make an obvious point that's sometimes forgotten. So when I present the programme from George Square on Saturday (August 11) we'll be diving into the arguments that are now being rolled out ahead of the referendum on independence, probably coming along in 2014. Although Scots have been dipping their feet in these waters for a long time, you can't miss a quickening in the pace. We'll talk about defence, about money and the economy, as well as the more generalized question of whether it's sensible to reconfigure the UK. But, fear not, Liz Lochhead will also be with us, Scotland's Makar, equivalent of the Poet Laureate, because we need a bit of her grit and fun, and Simon Callow will give us a bit of Dickens, because it is His year.

In other words, it will be a true Edinburgh event. I'm told that hundreds of listeners are coming along - they're great folk in Scotland for free tickets - and we'll try to catch something of the spirit of an elegant and vibrant place, even if it is in the midst of a terrible kerfuffle about the trams that are on the way and have - how can I put this delicately? - brought some angst to a city that Voltaire once called the most civilized place in Europe.

There was a time, in the heat of the eighteenth century Enlightenment, when a visiting English scientist said that you couldn't stand on the High Street outside the Kirk of St Giles for more than a couple of hours without shaking the hands of fifty men of genius. Festival-time always feels a little bit like that in the Edinburgh of today.

I've had some of my happiest times in those weeks when all the rules are lifted, and anything goes. Brilliant musicians, surprising plays and one-person shows, daft theatrical enterprises that go wrong, fireworks and out-of-tune pipes. There's nothing like it.

I hope we're a bit serious, and a bit festive. In August, Edinburgh becomes - how can I avoid the comparison? - an annual Olympics, fired up against the backdrop of Arthur's Seat, the Castle, and the elegant terraces of the New Town. I confess I bias - those BBC obligations always kick in - because I live part of my life there, as much as I can. I love it, and so do the people who zoom in from everywhere for festival month. I'll be at the Mass for Life by Delius in the Usher Hall tonight; I'll see some stand up comedy over the weekend; there are some shows I want to catch; and, above all, I'll surf the streets to find something new.

• Listen again to the Today programme from the Edinburgh Festival.
• Read Radio 4 Commissioner Caroline Raphael's blog post about finding talent in Edinburgh.
• Visit the BBC's Edinburgh Festival website.

The Boom Jennies

Loads of Radio 4 names will be there but here are some of the names you might be less familiar with or perhaps were less aware were on Radio 4 or who have literally just been commissioned to appear on the network.

Tim Fitzhigham will be heard on Radio 4 later on this year recreating an astonishing challenge from history. Tim is rather good at setting his own challenges including rowing a paper boat down the entire length of the Thames.

Can be seen in Edinburgh in Tim Fitzhigham: Stop The Pigeon.

If you enjoyed Rory Bremner's Tonight heard recently on Radio 4 (and about to record a Festival special) you will have caught Nick Doody's often blistering contributions.

Can be seen in Edinburgh in Look at This Massive Picture of My Face.

The Boom Jennies are a three woman sketch group . You might have caught them on a recent Sketchorama but you will be hearing more of them on Radio 4 as they have their own comedy show Challenging Jane. Think boys' own adventures for girls!

Can be seen in Edinburgh in The Boom Jennies: Mischief and Catriona Knox: Hellcat.

Thom Tuck

At last year's Festival I was utterly charmed by Thom Tuck's first solo show in which he demonstrated a slightly freaky interest in straight to DVD Disney films! We went onto broadcast that programme and have now commissioned a series from him.

Can be seen in Edinburgh in Thom Tuck Flips Out

Someone else whose 2011 Edinburgh show we broadcast was John Osborne's John Peel's Shed. It was an endearing personal memory of winning a box of John Peel's records. He's taken it back to the Festival this year. And you will hear more of him on Radio 4.

You may not be aware but two of the stars of the blissfully wonderful long running comedy Clare in the Community are Edinburgh and comedy regulars. Nina Conti plays Megan and Sarah Kendall plays Libby. Nina is also one of the best ventriloquists I've ever seen. Not only can she do the whole speaking without moving your lips bit, but the characters she creates for her 'puppets' are so compelling they begin to exist in their own right. The highlight of one of her early shows was Monkey taking over and becoming her. Shiveringly scary! Ventiloquism on radio....? Well, would not be the first time!

Can be seen in Edinburgh in Nina Conti: Dolly Mixtures and Sarah Kendall - Get Up, Stand Up.

Yasmine Khan is one half of Akram and Khan. With another writing and performing partner Aisling Bea she will be broadcasting a not always straightforward retelling of some Irish myths and legends.

Can be seen in Edinburgh in Ford and Akram: Bamp!

Jigsaw are Dan Antopolski, Tom Craine and Natt Luurtsema. The clever thing about Jigsaw is that each tiny sketch is a fragment that piece by piece they build into a chaotic picture of their lives. Their first series will go out on radio 4 next year.

Can be seen in Edinburgh in Jigsaw: Getting Jiggy.

From BBC Radio 4 Extra come Peacock & Gamble - stalwarts of the Radio 4 Extra Comedy Club. Wonder how seriously we are supposed to take the title of their Edinburgh show?

Can be seen in Edinburgh in Peacock & Gamble Don't Even Want to be on Telly Anyway. Who needs to be on telly when you can be on Radio 4 and Radio 4 Extra!

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe Brochure (or Comedy Catalogue as I call it) is enormous so I may have missed someone. I'll tweet others as I find them and do let me know what you recommend.

• Find out more about the Fringe on the BBC Edinburgh Festival site.
• Get tickets for shows and masterclasses
• Explore our Radio 4 Edinburgh collection

The Horne Section is one of the Radio 4 shows at the Edinburgh Fringe

It's not just comedy coming from Edinburgh - Jim Naughtie will present the Today programme from Edinburgh on Saturday 10th August and editions of Front Row and Loose Ends will take place at the festival. There'll also be episodes of Four Thought, The Philosopher's Arms and Tonight taking place, and Jay Rayner will be presenting an episode of The Kitchen Cabinet at the festival.

There are still some tickets available for the programme recordings on the BBC, apply for tickets on the BBC shows and tours site. These shows will be transmitted on Radio 4 over the coming weeks.

On top of the programmes being recorded there are also masterclasses featuring Radio 4 talent. Nicholas Parsons and Paul Merton appear in conversation for 45 Years of Just a Minute. There'll also be the chance to hear from Radio 4 Commissioning Editor Caroline Raphael and Head of Radio Comedy Jane Berthoud as they talk about Radio 4's relationship with the festival during Radio 4 and the Fringe.

David Mitchell records The Unbelievable Truth in Edinburgh

On Radio 4 Extra Arthur Smith will be taking the Comedy Club to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe to chat to some of the comics currently vying for audiences.

Apply for tickets to the masterclasses on the BBC shows and tours site.

We will be gathering the best of Radio 4 at the Fringe in our the Edinburgh collection.

• Find out more about the Fringe on the BBC's Edinburgh Festival website
• Get tickets for shows and masterclasses
• Explore our Radio 4 Edinburgh collection

Here's the quite lovely video that the Radio 4 comedy gang shot on The Royal Mile at the beginning of the Edinburgh Festival. It was made specially for use on the red button and it was a hit. Well over half a million people pressed the red button on their digital TVs and watched it there - something of a breakthrough for Radio 4 content.

You'll see Paul Merton, Mark Watson, Nicholas Parsons, Susan Calman, Stephen K Amos and others entertaining festival-goers on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

This film contains extended highlights of the event, including a special edition of Just a Minute with Radio 1 DJ Scott Mills.

Steve Bowbrick is editor of the Radio 4 blog

People probably came out this afternoon thinking "I hope I don't run into a flashmob of comedians". Well, bad luck suckers, 'cos that's exactly what they're going to run into...

So said Mark Watson as he kicked off last weekend's rather friendly invasion of The Royal Mile by Radio 4 comedians. The whole thing (including a special outdoor episode of Just a Minute) was filmed using the latest high definition cameras and you'll be able to see the full-length version on the the red button on your digital TV later this week.

In the meantime, click through to YouTube and play the HD version of the video for a quite dazzling sample of the event as it happened and click the embed button to put the video on your own web site.

Steve Bowbrick is editor of the Radio 4 blog

You'll know Kathy Clugston's voice. She reads the news on Radio 4 (and plays the ukulele). Knowing her as you do, you probably won't be surprised to learn that she's now a star of the Edinburgh Fringe too. She's just returned from a week in Scott Mills the Musical - the unlikely hit that David Hasselhoff calls "a true story, apart from the facts" - in which she reprises her on-air role: the posh Radio 4 lady. Listen to her exclusive report:

• Watch the whole of Scott Mills The Musical on the Radio 1 web site.
• Lots more about the adventure in Edinburgh on the Scott Mills blog.
• Kathy wrote about being told off by James Naughtie on the blog earlier this year.

To the person who commented on my Latitude blog post, 'nice work if you can get it', yes, it's fantastic work. And not just because I'm writing this on Sunday morning on the train to one of the most beautiful cities in the world, Edinburgh. I'm working in Scotland for the next fortnight. We are recording a raft of comedies, Front Row, Loose Ends and some readings from The Pleasance as part of the Edinburgh Fringe.

Every show is 'full' so about 5000 people will get a chance to watch the recordings; they sold out very fast, but if you happen to be up there and would like to come to a recording we do create a standby queue. As the tickets are free people don't always turn up or don't use all the tickets they requested so we can very often fit you in. Full details are on the Edinburgh Fringe web site or come and find us in the Pleasance courtyard. I'll be there with Lea Lauvray and Gill Carter who are managing the shows with me and we will be sporting incredibly bright pink tee-shirts with BBC Radio 4 splashed across them with an amusing quote from R4 star and Fringe doyenne Arthur Smith and hopefully not looking too bedraggled. Because we are in a fully functioning city the planning is less extreme than for a music festival in a field however, of course, it will still rain. But the venues are usually boiling hot so you steam dry quite quickly.

Radio 4 has been broadcasting from the Fringe for about 15 years if not more. It is important for us, as home of Radio Comedy, the place where some of the biggest names in British comedy started out, to be there both as participant and audience. Programmes such as Today, Front Row, Saturday Review and others look across the breadth of events and report back on this truly extraordinary cultural event.

Planning which shows will be available to broadcast, creating new ones especially for the Festival, programming them so that each has just enough rehearsal time, the outside broadcast team have time to do the technical turnaround and we can get audiences in and out, sorting out the precise venues and the tickets with the Pleasance and the Edinburgh Fringe Box Office (endless forms and proof checking) and then making sure that each programme does not end up booking the same talent and completing the Health and Safety procedures all starts in early January and finishes just before we come up here.

Between the recordings I go and see a lot of comedy. In previous years I have seen about 60 odd shows. I liken it to a squirrel harvesting for the winter. The comedy producers and I will find ourselves referring back to this year's performances till next August. The performers have worked incredibly hard to get their show into shape and for many this is as good as they are going to get for the next year or so, they are in peak condition and so this is the time to see them. It wasn't always like that.

This is my 31st consecutive year at the Festival - I started stage managing and lighting shows and then directing them as a Manchester University drama student in the days when students could afford to come to the Fringe and you could sleep on the floor of your venue - and in the olden days you knew some performers were still in rehearsal mode for the first ten days or so. You can't do that anymore. It is a showcase, a jolly expensive one at that, and the acts need to hit the ground running to get good early reviews, ensure sell out shows, happy audiences who can be paying upwards of £8 a ticket, as well as charm the broadcasters and woo the judges of what was the Perrier Award, then the if.commedie award and is now the Edinburgh Comedy Award.

And this year that's me - as I've been asked to be on the judging panel. I arrive in Edinburgh at about 1.30 and by ten tonight I will have seen my first five shows. We make the final decisions as to the winners in a fortnight so lots and lots and lots of shows to see first.

• The Edinburgh Fringe web site.
• The BBC's Edinburgh page, with links to all of this year's festival activity.
• The image is from a montage of archive footage from Edinburgh Festivals of the past, on the BBC's Edinburgh web site.