Why are we waiting?

The bar has been cleared, the five-minute warning long gone and the audience sit and wait in anticipation. And sit and wait, staring at the drawn curtain. They begin to stir in their seats in Edinburgh’s Gordon Aikman Theatre and murmur between themselves about the delay, but there is still no sign of the main act, the comedian Frank Skinner. He’s meant to be performing his new show, aptly named Showbiz, on the Fringe before taking it on tour. But still no sign. Eventually the curtain rises and Frank bounds, well shuffles really, on to centre stage.

It turns out, as Skinner explains, that he’s not responsible for the delay. Indeed, his greasepaint was almost melting in anticipation as he took deep breaths in the wings. The opening has been delayed, he goes on, for the late arrival of a “celebrity guest”. It’s Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, and his chums who called the theatre to ask if they could hang on for a few minutes so that Mr Congestion Charge could get there. He’s been in Edinburgh guesting for Iain Dale, the right-wing screwball who has a show on LBC, which I’m told comes from a cupboard to a few diehards in London.

Of course, Frank’s explanation causes the audience to turn around and glare at the mayor and his party. “You don’t mind waiting if the person you’ve come to see comes on late, it tends to build the anticipation,” one audience member told the Diary, “but why should we have to wait for someone who slopes in, someone who seems to expect different rules to the rest of us?”

Indeed. In the interests of fairness the Diary asked the mayor’s office for a comment about it and asked what he thought made him so important that a performance could be delayed and an audience inconvenienced. No reply. As Skinner put it: “I can’t imagine a gig in London would start late if they were waiting for the mayor of Edinburgh.” A smidgeon terminologically inexact about an Embra mayor, but spot on with the observation.

Are ye, Ae?

I passed through the village of Ae early last week and, no offence to the couple of hundred people who live there, that’s the best thing to do. It’s not pretty and there’s hee-haw to stop for. But Ae does hold two firsts. It has the shortest place name in Britain and is the only one with no consonants in its name.

But it set me off on a spiral of unusual and funny town names. There’s our own village of Dull, a single street of houses by the River Tay. Cannily, Dull twinned with the town of Boring in Oregon which joined with Bland in New South Wales. Dull, Boring and Bland, what a trinity.

Then there’s Bell End in Worcestershire, Ugley and Nasty just a few miles apart in Hertfordshire, Butts County in the US and Middlefart in Denmark. Muck in the Inner Hebrides is nothing of the sort. Be careful driving in the Maryland town of Accident. Anus is a small village in France, Brown Willy is a hill in Cornwall which apparently gave rise to the eponymous effect, some meteorological occurrence involving lots of rain (which seems so common you wouldn’t think they’d name an effect after it). There’s a Nowhere in Oklahoma and, in California (of course), there’s what’s claimed to be the place with the last word in the English language, the village of Zzyzx (which is the opposite to Ae in having no vowels).

In Dorset, the residents of Shitterton not only resisted attempts to switch the name to Sitterton but – after one too many signpost thefts – they clubbed together to have the name engraved on a theft-proof, one-and-a-half ton rock.

Finally, I’m grateful to my pal David Low for alerting me to the Donegal village of Muff. And, yes, it really does have a diving school.

Beyond belief

A few days ago the broadcaster Jeremy Vine tweeted “Oh my God” over a newspaper story featuring a rogue seagull which swooped down on a naked male sunbather in his back garden and ripped off his right testicle, mistaking it for an small egg, which is apparently a bird delicacy. The man was rushed to A&E at Ipswich Hospital. The story appeared in the Suffolk Gazette. Well, at least the last sentence is true. The story, which was actually two years old, was a spoof. In fact, the whole “newspaper” (online only) is just that, a site full of laugh-out-loud hoax stories which are ritually picked up by the national media, not realising they are the invention of the paper’s entire staff, Simon Young.

Young, a former Sun journalist based in Suffolk, produces the stories for “beer money” and to “satisfy creative desires”, and clearly to enrage residents of adjoining county Norfolk, who are portrayed as dim-witted clodhoppers. Sky News picked up one of the spoofs the day of David Bowie’s 69th birthday (three days before the singer’s death) that he had performed in a Suffolk curry shop for patrons. “Morris dancers and blind footballers in mass brawl” is another which had traction.

The current crop includes: “Outrage as Queen agrees to suspend Prince Andrew”, so that he won’t be forced to answer questions over his connections to Jeffrey Epstein. And: “Furious farmer caught Theresa May running through wheat field”; as well as “Boris Johnson has big shoes to fill”.

Two of my old colleagues, Neil Rafferty and Paul Stokes, started the satirical website The Daily Mash 12 years ago which they sold in February for £1.2 million. Their spoofs have also been picked up and put out by the mainstream media. At the height of the Labour anti-Semitism row, Sky News read out a headline claiming former London mayor Ken Livingstone had a pet newt called Adolph.