PublicationsThree Weeks


Three Weeks

Three Weeks, it is fair to say, knows nothing – starting with how many weeks there are in the Edinburgh Fringe.

If someone from Three Weeks is coming to your show, then take out any reference to things that happened more than a month ago. Abandon all attempt at irony, nuance, understatement, overstatement or subtlety. Actually, just cancel your show. Because your friendly Three Weeks reviewer will reduce your magnum opus to 200 words of What I Did In the Holidays.

They will eschew the rudiments of sentence structure that our grandfathers killed thousands of Germans to protect. They will manage to convey nothing about your show. They will, at the same time, reveal all the punchlines in your show. Some have pondered whether Three Weeks is really a publication and not a piece of anti-art; a 20-year rumination on the very impossibility of communication.

The one area where Three Weeks had an edge was in its daily photocopied newssheets of all the latest reviews. People wopuld snap these up from the venues around Bristo Square and it was quite nice because it was reminiscent of the 18th century when the pamphleteers would stamp out a three-colour bit of scandal and the public would snatch it up. But nobody would buy advertising on the photocopies so they stopped doing that after 2014. Its record for publishing the greatest number of reviews each Fringe has been soundly overtaken by Broadway Baby now, yet the paper still prints very short reviews because these were needed on the printouts that no longer exist.It’s still printed on pulp newsprint which makes it difficult to read on a bus but great for starting fires in waste bins.

In short, it’s a bit lost. It’s still edited by Caro ‘Holy’ Moses who is prone to such unequivocal generalisations as “All American comedians are really good by the time they make it to Edinburgh” (Ever Mainard, 2016). In fact, Moses’ week-one roundup of who is going to have a great Fringe in any specific year is the most reliable known prediction of the acts that will implode, shrivel and disappear from the face of the earth. Moses, along with her doughty staff, leads the tribes of comedy into the wilderness.

Three Weeks has nothing much to do with the Fringe, or Edinburgh, or Scotland, for the rest of the year and is operated by UnLimited Media who are based in Shoreditch EC1. As anyone who has been to Shoreditch in the last decade can attest, this part of London is very short of wankers, so it is an act of unalloyed kindness that the company spares so many of them for the Fringe.

Edmund Rumania


Reviewers for Three Weeks

Nina Keen

Is the world just wrong? Or is Nina Keen just wrong? Because one of the two MUST be wrong. Nina ...

Stephanie Withers

Stephanie Withers gives the impression of being scared of running over the word limit. Her reviews release their information in ...

Jon Stapley

There are some toys at FringePig who seem to think that that theatre-hags and cabaret-whores and music-prostitutes and childrens’-show…erm… whatever ...

Robert Stevens

Robert Stevens’ reviews are like Volvos. Solid little review Volvos, chugging through the Fringe with their 120 words of reasonable, ...

Ben Shannon

Ben Shannon is a likeable presence whose relaxed hand on the tiller eases the audience into the situation, combining a ...

Daisy Malt

What would the Fringe be without Three Weeks waking up really late in the proceedings and sneezing embryonic reporters all ...

Gemma Scott

We’ve been wondering here at Fringepig why, when Three Weeks is such an insubstantial piece of festival trash, so many ...

Bruce Blacklaw

The thing about Bruce Blacklaw is that he writes a bit like Steve Bennett from Chortle. He even looks a ...

Laura Gavin

Laura Gavin "has an MSc in creative writing from the University Of Edinburgh" apparently. Yet there is nothing whimsical or narrative ...

Tom Bragg

Tom Bragg, the magazine’s podcast editor, is not your usual Three Weeks hack, by which I mean he has very ...
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