PublicationsThe List


The List

The List is sort of like Time Out, but for Scotland. And like Time Out it is a bit of a relic and is sold to the sort of people who still maintain magazine subscriptions. In short it records absolutely everything that is happening for the benefit of people who never go out. Many of them won’t even pick up the phone to ask someone to install the internet so that they don’t have to buy The List anymore.

The most anachronistic thing you can do in Scotland is to read The List into a tape recorder, and then make a little Dymo letter-punch label to stick on the cassette case. Actually that sounds more satisfying than thumbing through The List, because The List is too concerned with telling you absolutely everything to tell you much at all.

The List will typically review your show on day one of the Fringe, and then hang it up like a dead pheasant to go gamey, eventually serving it to the public on day 25. It will have been written by someone who banged out 500 words, then sub-edited down to 40 by someone with a pathological hatred of nouns, and then stuck on a page by someone who knows that print media is the new coal mining and nobody’s reading the damn thing anyway. The result is grammatically correct but unhelpful. A List review will read something like: “A disappointing hour of inventive comedy that was occasionally hilarious and often left a sour taste. The audience were left wondering what to eat, and why, which is a shame, because it could have been awful but was effervescent and slightly chalky. Three stars.”

In between the reviews is some rewritten PR bumph and some freakish people its reporters have stopped in the street to ask where they bought their clutch bags. For all its faults, however, The List is remarkably sober, even-handed and unexcitable, having seen everything that has ever happened in Scotland since Culloden. It gave the Jacobites three stars and wrote ‘Encouraging but could do better’.

Business Leopard


Reviewers for The List

Katharine Gemmell

Katharine Gemmell isn’t a bad reviewer per se, but her impulse to be all over the shows she sees tends ...

Rowena McIntosh

Reading a Rowena McIntosh review is a bit like seeing a social worker or a psychologist who you’re relying on ...

Craig Naples

Craig Naples has this infuriating habit of trying to give a tantalising flavour of something but just being bloody annoying ...

Dave Coates

Dave Coates is one of those reviewers who, like a teacher at a long-established school, wants everyone to try their ...

Yasmin Sulaiman

We at FringePig often bemoan the lazy reviewer who, either uncertain of their own credibility or unwilling to condemn a ...

Emma Newlands

This tired old Fringepigger started out not liking Emma Newlands. But that's largely because the term 'self-deprecating' winds me up ...

Claire Sawers

If I had to sum up Claire Sawers in one word it would have to be ‘dismissive’. She is airily ...

Graeme Connelly

Graeme Connelly doesn’t really know what sentences are supposed to do. Every time he begins one he has no idea ...

Maud Sampson

First, a confession: I do not always know what Maud Sampson is talking about. “Think less 50 Cent and his ...

Niki Boyle

Excuse me just a moment while I fact you with stats: so far this year Niki Boyle has reviewed eight ...
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