Ellis & Rose: Jim Davidson's Funeral @ Bob & Miss Behave's Bookshop

Here Lies The Fringe: Never has awarding starry-shaped symbols been so difficult or meaningless. There are any number of reasons this could be a one star show; it just so happens there were many more reasons that it's a four star show (off stage body parts = one star deduction). Ellis & Rose are in town for one night only to mentally assault an assembly of onlookers with fifty minutes of brilliance bordering on lunacy bordering on comic suicide.

The winners of last year’s one-off Malcolm Hardee ‘Pound of Flesh’ Award have brought an untested show to about the only venue that will allow such shenanigans, and thank the Fringe Gods (apparently Stewart Lee amongst others) that they did. If the message is clear (commercialism has ruined The Fringe) the existence of a script isn’t. Luckily laughter badges aren't awarded for how well put together a show is; only how funny it is.

The lack of repetitive performance allows for the sort of spontaneity that in lesser hands may have been problematic; for Ellis & Rose it seems to give them the freedom that they, in all honesty, could easily take way too far. Three suitably dishevelled guest comics come onboard to offer remembrance in their own unique way. This only adds to the overall sense of anarchy.

People laugh, people cry, people wond what the hell was going on. It matters little, in a show bemoaning the death, not of Jim Davidson but of the Fringe itself.  The irony is that shows like this may well be its saviour.