Entertainment in Edinburgh.
This
page is supposed to be about Entertainment in Edinburgh, so I suppose
I have to mention the Festival, but I'm going to cheat and give the
Festival a page of it's own, and also a page dedicated to the Military Tattoo. The other
major yearly event is Hogmanay, which is
really New Years Eve, but has now come to cover four days of
celebrations with Hogmanay itself going over the top.
During the
rest of the year entertainment in Edinburgh centres mainly around the
pubs and clubs although there are of course other, more sober
alternatives. Your best bet for an up to date guide as to what's
actually happening is buying the Edinburgh Evening News or the Scotsman each day and
checking out the ads. There is also a fortnightly publication, The List, which covers events in Edinburgh and Glasgow.
- Theatres. The main theatres are the Festival, Kings,
Playhouse, Royal Lyceum and Traverse. there are also some smaller
places such as the Bedlam and the Churchhill.
- Cinemas. In the OLD days, when I was a boy, there were cinemas all over Edinburgh, little places that showed a main feature, a B-movie and a few small features and changed their programme twice a week. You never worried about missing a particular film as you knew that you could catch it somewhere else next week. Nowadays there are only a few cinemas left, but as they are mostly multi-screen centres you still don't worry about missing your film as you know it'll probably be there for a few weeks yet. The main cinemas are the MGM, the Odeon, the Dominion, the UCI and the Hailes Plaza, all multi screen centres showing main stream films. For the niche market and art (sub-titled) films there are the Cameo and the Film House, the Film House is the headquarters for the Film Festival.
- Pubs. Once upon a time, before I began to drive a taxi for a living I considered myself quite an expert on the pubs of Edinburgh. In those days you could expect that any pub you were in last week would still have the same name and would look pretty much the same this week. Nowadays, it seems that there is some sort of competition to see who can confuse taxi drivers the most by changing their pub name the quickest.
There are still a few of the old pubs left in Edinburgh, I mean the type of place where the men went to get away from the women and chat to their pals about football, life and other irrelevancies while sinking as much beer as possible.. Example of these are The Diggers, Stewarts, Speirs, Nobles, etc.
- Clubs. I'll need to divide these into two sections, private and public, by private I mean clubs where you need to be signed in by a member or have a ticket if it's a special function, and public meaning anyone can turn up at the door and get in (providing they fit the appropriate dress code, if any). As is usual the private clubs are where the locals go to enjoy themselves, but a large part of the fun lies in being in the company of friends and even if a visitor does manage to get in they are likely to feel out of place unless they've been invited by someone who'll make a point of getting them involved in their company. The public clubs are really more or less pubs with extra entertainment laid on and some measure of restriction on entry.
- Tourist Traps. This is not, perhaps, the best choice of title, but it's the best I could come up with on the spur of the moment. I mean the type of entertainment that is purely designed for visitors and very rarely, if ever, attracts locals. I don't mean to detract from these shows - there is one that has been running at the King James hotel for over twenty years, and one of the others out at Dalhousie Castle regularly packs the crowds in by the busload. That kind of success and longevity isn't achieved without hard work and talent.
