Hello, and welcome to the Red Box Politics Podcast on The Times. I'm Matt Jorley. This is the second in our series of special Beyond the Fringe episode, speaking to some of the political acts taking shows to this year's Edinburgh Fringe. I'm delighted to be joined by Matt Ford, star of Unspin-on-Dave and host of the Political Party podcast. He takes his show Brexit pursued by a bear to the pleasance. And Grace Campbell,

whose dad is Alistair Campbell, is at the Gilded Balloon with her show, Why I'm Never Going Into Politics. Welcome to you both. So the first pitch is, if you're outfliring, maybe you're too posh and successful now to do your own flowering, but if you were outflowering, what's your pitch to someone in the street.

It's a while I should come and see your show.

Let's start with you, Grace.

And I pointed out who your dad was because

it's interesting that having had a dad who's been in politics and still is you you are so determined

not to go into politics well that's my pitch probably my dad's alister campbell i grew up in politics

and i'm an activist and i've worked a lot in the kind of

feminist campaigning area since I was like 17 years old. But I have decided to kind of write a show

which is all about a rejection of Westminster, basically, by someone who was born the month month her father started working for Tony Blair

whose third birthday was ruined by the general election of 1997.

My life has been dominated by politics.

So it's not like, oh, hi my dad, Alistaira Campbell, come and see my show.

It's like I'm writing about my life which has been quite bizarre at times

and it's quite feminist and I also talk lots about sex and masturbation. So it's got a good

bit. Quite similar to yours, Matt. I'm in. I'm definitely coming. Now, the interesting thing, I was

looking at the blurbs for the Ed Fringe.

And Grace's is very detailed, she's thoughts about, as she was saying, a Dan's, Alastaird-Marstor-Colmortar for many years, co-founder of the pink protest, expect for vagina jokes, mental health in Parliament, anecdotes of hanging out with Putin's kids. We'll come on to that a second. Matt, yours is just. join Britain's leading political comedians

he once again promises his last show as an EU citizen maybe

and then a load of reviews.

My sentence... Matt, yours is just Join Britain's leading political comedians He once again promises his last show as an EU citizen maybe And then a load of reviews My sense is that when you wrote this You didn't know what your show was going to be about I think that's absolutely right It's good pun again Brexit pursued by a bear I'm running out of Brexit puns And I'm trying to do ones that other people wouldn't do And the danger with doing ones that other people wouldn't do is that you do ones that other people can't understand or that it's gibberish. But I think at least it's silly. So it says, you know, it's Brexit, but it's daft. So it's not... What are the less good rejected ones? Oh God. Oh God. Fire Brexit. You know what? I've got a word document on my laptop of about a hundred of shit Brexit puns. And if that's the one that got through, imagine. Imagine how bad the ones. And last year was Brexit through the gift shop. Brexit through the gift shop, yeah. It's kind of, it sort of says what it is on the tin, that it's going to be a satirical comedy show, but it's not overly, overly serious. It's a muck about. It's funny. And if you spent the last month, six months, a year with people saying, oh, I bet you're going to have to rewrite it all now, aren't you? Yeah, the last sort of five years. The last five years, basically since the Scottish independence referendum, it's been so volatile. So in 2014, there's a referendum,

2015 in election, 2016 in a referendum, 2017 in election, 2018 in leadership content. So just

...