What recession? And what dying medium?

And we're off. The starter's pistol has fired and the Edinburgh fringe programme has sprinted into view, all 344 pages of it. First, inevitably, we will be dazzled by the statistics: 40,245 performances of 2,453 shows, a recession-defying 17% increase on last year. Then we will be enticed by the starry names: Clark Peters in Five Guys Named Moe, Simon Callow with his Shakespeare show, Alan Cumming doing his I Bought a Blue Car Today cabaret turn. But what, then, do we actually want to see?