The Culture Show - 2009/2010 - The Edinburgh Festival Show

Lauren Laverne presents from the Pleasance Courtyard - the heart of the biggest ever Edinburgh festival. Lauren looks at the best of the first week of the Fringe, including The Hotel, a transformed building in the city centre which offers a different theatrical, comic or musical experience in every room (directed by comedian Mark Watson), and Internal at The Traverse Theatre, which explores the worlds of speed dating and group therapy, and makes the audience take part in both. There's also a look ahead to the start of the International Festival. Highlights include Faust, a theatrical spectacle featuring over 100 actors and musicians, and the bad boy of dance Michael Clark, who returns to the festival after 20 years. Andrew Graham Dixon revels in the major summer exhibition, The Discovery of Spain, at the Royal Scottish Academy. Four years in the making, the collection boasts over 130 works, with Spanish masters such as Goya, Picasso and Velasquez alongside work by British artists from Melville to Wilkie, as they discovered Spain for themselves. There's also a celebration of the quintessential Edinburgh writer Muriel Spark as a new biography is released, and the Fringe pays tribute with theatre performances of A Girl of Slender Means and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. US comic and actor Janeane Garofalo joins Lauren Laverne for a chat in the Pleasance Courtyard. Best known for her screen roles in The Larry Sanders Show and 24, Janeane returns to her sardonic stand-up routes for her first visit to the festival.