Fringe Benefits for Edinburgh

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe got under way yesterday, kicking the city’s annual arts extravaganza into full swing.

Hundreds of thousands of visitors from across the globe will descend on the Scottish capital over the next few weeks for a massive range of entertainment.

The Fringe, which runs until August 25, sprang up alongside the International Festival in the 1940s in a disused pub above the city’s Royal Mile, but has mushroomed into a major date in the arts calendar.

This year it has more than 30,000 performers are heading for the city to perform in over 2,000 shows, at 250 venues.

More than a third of the acts are comedy, around a third are theatre, and musicals, opera and dance also make up a sizeable proportion.

Famous faces this year include Clive James and Paul Merton.

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