The good news is that the proposed People’s Festival will provide cultural expression for the capital’s peripheral housing estates.

The bad news, for lovers of chucklesome frolics, is that the event is being organised by those well-known purveyors of jollity, The SSP.

An official spokesluvvie for the existing unofficial, er, official, festival, confirmed to The JT that the official Fringe is little more than an annexe for collective Home Counties luvvydom.

"With ticket prices topping £15 an expensively styled skull, we accept that local, ill-dressed people smelling of chip fat are likely to be excluded. Which is the whole point obviously. And we welcome this prole-directed distraction that will keep the trackie-bottomed underclass amused far away from the City centre."

• A five hour long production of Tommy Sheridan’s "We must sweep away the forces of reaction with the iron broom of revolutionary praxis." A laugh-a-millennium account of the rise of The SSP, with Elaine C Smith and The Krankies.
• "I know you’re out there, I can hear you breathing." Rosie Kane’s matchless humour-free stand up routine.
• "The Potemkin Mutiny" Key moment in the Russian Revolution re-enacted by local kids off Leith shore. (NB: To be performed in Community Hall if wet.)

Organisers of the unofficial, official Fringe confirmed this week that the anglocentric tenor of the programme will be addressed in future years - with the centre of Edinburgh simply being cut out, towed by tugs and moored off Canary Wharf.