It is rather difficult to review a tour, because to some extent you are reviewing your own city, the content your town has to offer a tourist who may buy the Edinburgh Comedy Tour app. Does Edinburgh have enough interesting stories, buildings and attractions to fill an hour and a half of an audio tour?
Yes it does. The tour is given to you by five voices: the kindly man who directs you every now and then, Bruce Morton, Susan Morrison and the travelling duo Professor Jamie MacDonald and Harry Gooch. As someone who can barely remember the same journey to work each day, I did quite well keeping to the designated paths directed by my headphone guides. I had been to all the places the tour took me, but it still had lots of information I had never heard before, as well as pointing out shops and places of interest that I don’t notice on my daily travels. The chemistry between the blind Professor MacDonald and his visual guide Harry was quite fun, playing on the relationship of the knowledgeable Scotsman explaining Edinburgh to an ignorant Englishman. I would not recommend this as a couple of hours of comedy though. At no point did I find myself laughing out loud; this is a tour of the Comedy venues in the Edinburgh Fringe with some trivia and anecdotes thrown in, rather than a piece of alternative comedy.
The advantages to having a tour guide you can switch on and off and carry in your MP3/iPhone/Android/iPad include being able to mould your tour around Edinburgh’s ever changing weather, your own time and obviously you can pause the tour and explore your surroundings whenever you like. However, it is probably not the best if you have come to Edinburgh with a group as you can’t really talk over the guides and you’d have to synchronise the clips. I would recommend it for people visiting Edinburgh alone with a free afternoon, or even for locals who have some spare time to explore their city a little more.
The Tour will be available after the Fringe finishes and although it might be nicer to enjoy the sights without all the people everywhere, it may also be a hindrance as so many of the places described are described by their Fringe alter-ego (the Gilded Balloon, the upside-down cow in Bristo Square, Underbelly). Experiencing the Tour outside August may give the feeling of being on a ghost tour.
