No matter how much you rave about how good – or bad – an adaptation is, you can almost always expect the same response: Yes, but is it faithful to the book?

Fidelity to the original, popular wisdom tells us, is all that matters. Look at the 11,000+ people on Facebook who believe that ‘Harry Potter 7 Better Be 7 Hours Long’. Adaptations should, apparently, behave towards the books they’re based on like clingy lovers, doing everything their partners do and never falling out. They should be considerate, reliable and above all else faithful.

Or, to put it another way, unoriginal, uninspired and uninspiring.

That’s not to say that faithfulness is in itself a bad thing. It’s the commonly-held misapprehension that faithfulness matters more than anything else that’s the problem. If this were true then adaptation would be a pointless art-form: why adapt, if you’re just treating a film like a dot-to-dot or paint-by-numbers, lazily transferring the black and white of the printed page to the moving pictures of the cinema screen?

Why adapt if you accept the popular belief that the book will always be better?

The truth is that just as novels and short stories can achieve things which film can’t mimic, filmmakers can do things which writers can only dream of. Every art form has its limits – and its potential. The best adaptations are those which pretend they’re not adaptations at all: those which don’t try to repeat what the book has already done, but focus on what the film can do instead.

The opening sequence of The Exorcist is a case in point, nine and a half minutes in the Iraqi desert which prove that the difference between reading and seeing can, quite literally, be believing.
The film vacillates obsessively between loud, rhythmic noises – the call to prayer, pickaxes on rock, hammers on anvils – and periods of near silence. And then there are the faces, a series of unsettling close-ups punctuating the wider shots. The one-eyed blacksmith. The increasingly anxious Father Merrin. And, most disturbingly of all, the barely-glimpsed, utterly malevolent visage of the old woman in the carriage which nearly kills him – so blurred and so quickly gone that we are left wondering if it was even human.

The effect is lost in writing about it. But when watching the film, the presence of evil is utterly palpable; our reaction to it, visceral. All this before we have any plot – before the conventional work of adapting a book begins.

The recent adaptation Children of Men succeeds for similar reasons. Unlike The Exorcist it bears no resemblance at all to the original novel, other than its use of the book’s dystopian premise of worldwide infertility. Uncomplicated by plot and character, the film hangs on a series of action set-pieces conveyed to us through unbelievably long and highly-choreographed tracking shots. It’s what the film can do, not what the book did, which matters.

The filmmakers behind both films realised that whereas our response to a book is ultimately linguistic – we process the words, then respond – our response to film can be sensual and more direct. Overemphasizing the value of faithfulness to plot and character ignores what gives film its distinctive power, namely the hypnotic interweaving of sound and image which transports the viewer to another place.

But adaptation, of course, is more than simply a synonym for filmmaking. It’s about grasping the power and potential of cinema, but it’s about grasping the power and potential of a book as well. Ultimately an adaptation’s success (or lack of) depends on how it uses its source material. The problem for filmmakers is that the all-important balance between faithfulness and unfaithfulness, borrowing and originality is unique to every film.

Just compare Brokeback Mountain and M*A*S*H – the former so clingy in its relationship with the story on which it’s based that they could get married (or at least get a civil partnership), the latter so sluttish in its use of improvisation that it bares little resemblance to its script, let alone the original novel. That both are excellent films has both nothing and everything to do with how faithful or unfaithful they are. They’re excellent because they strike near-perfect – though completely different – balances between use of their source material and original input. Ang Lee’s unobtrusive style is exactly what Brokeback required – just as the episodic anarchy of M*A*S*H reflects the film’s focus, the madness of war.

Once we get over the tendency to condemn filmmakers for the sort of creative freedom which we celebrate in authors, it’s difficult to say definitively that any book is unfilmable. Certainly, the more stylised the writing, the trickier the process of adaptation becomes. Billy Bob Thornton’s All the Pretty Horses is disappointingly flaccid compared to Cormac McCarthy’s brilliantly idiosyncratic prose style.
But then Hubert Selby Jr’s equally unconventional portrayal of addiction in Requiem for a Dream has more than met its match in Darren Aronofsky’s disorienting adaptation, a film not unlikely to induce seizures – and in that respect, it does complete justice to the book.

When adaptations are at their best – when they surpass the original – the book versus film debate can be settled with a simple analogy: it’s the difference between inhaling a drug and injecting it, as the characters in Aronofsky’s film find out to their peril.

by Laura WilliamsFrom the 1930s until as late as the mid-’60s, American movies were subject to a production code that imposed massive restrictions upon what they could and could not show on the screen. The list of rules included regulations banning portrayals of ‘vulgarity’, ‘excessive or lustful kissing’, ‘sex perversion’ (homosexuality), and forbidding the villain from ever being allowed to get away with his crimes. The resulting films portrayed an idealised America, a reassuring social morality and an optimism about everyday life which was lacking in the decade following the Wall Street Crash.

The Awful Truth is one such film, but it deserves to be remembered as more than just another 1930s slapstick comedy. Cary Grant and Irene Dunne star as a newly separated couple, who spend the ninety days before their divorce is finalised sabotaging each other’s new romances, obviously still crazy about each other. The witty dialogue and physical humour creates a hugely underrated comedy film of a quality rarely seen since.

The couple’s misadventures culminate with Grant arriving at Dunne’s singing teacher’s house, suspecting the two are having an affair, and he tries to barge in. During a tussle with the doorman, Grant does a hilarious pratfall – almost his trademark in his early films, a talent from his vaudeville days – he lands almost entirely on his face. Eventually bursting through to the living room, he find his wife singing to a crowded room, with her teacher accompanying her on the piano. Astonished, Grant slowly takes off his hat, listening to his wife sing, then sits down awkwardly on a chair at the back, while Dunne glares at him, still singing. It’s not over yet, as Grant leans back on his chair and falls again, and the fall just keeps on going.

Eventually, he rights himself and looks over to his wife with an expression of endearing helplessness. As Dunne catches her husband’s eye in the last phrase of the piece, she laughs a little out loud – perfectly on key – and then ends the song. She’s not only realised that her husband has shown up because he’s still in love with her, but also that she’s still in love with him, and all she can do is laugh. The scene is a perfect moment in life and cinema, showing love, huge and simple, in that instant – and it gets me every time.

What makes this film even more enchanting is that much of the script was improvised. When shooting began, director Leo McCarey only had a very sketchy script for the cast to work with, and both the leads, convinced that without a script the film would be a flop, tried to walk out. (Cary Grant allegedly wrote an eight-page letter to the film studio entitled ‘Things that are wrong with this picture’.) As it turned out, Grant was the one who was wrong. Irene Dunne was nominated for an Oscar for her performance, and Grant was rocketed into super stardom, becoming one of the most sought after leading men for the next three decades.

by Mary WaireriThe Times BFI London Film Festival is by far and away Britain’s biggest public film event. The Festival is known for providing a platform for a vast range of innovative, exciting films catering to a broad audience. This year, 185 feature films and 133 short films from 43 different countries were premiered at the Festival. The festival also attracted a record number of accredited press delegates from 52 countries as well as the highest ever audience attendance – a mark of its increasing popularity and success.  Suffice to say, the Times BFI London Film Festival is a big deal.

The London Film Festival is also a good place to get a sense of the films that we can expect to see over the coming weeks and months. In short; the good, the spectacular, the bad and the incredibly bad are all available here. David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises  quickly found a place on the more positive side of the fence and has already attracted rave reviews from such unforgiving critics as Mark Kermode. Written by Steve Knight (who also wrote the screenplay for Dirty Pretty Things), Eastern Promises stars Viggo Mortensen and Naomi Watts and explores the dark sub-cultures of London within the context of thriving immigrant communities; organised crime, people-trafficking and other similarly jolly themes. Interview starring Steve Buschemi and Sienna Miller has also garnered positive responses. The film explores the relationship between a world-weary ‘serious’ journalist and the soap-star he’s forced to interview.

From the mainstream to the downright weird, quality documentaries from around the world also emerged at this year’s festival. One of the most interesting was In the Shadow of the Moon, which is based on the Apollo missions and features commentary from Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong and other survivors of the Apollo missions. In the Shadow of the Moon features stunning photography and is all the more interesting because it is largely based on previously unseen or long abandoned footage.
Amidst all the quirky but glittering gems to premiere at the London Film Festival there were of course some lumps of coal. Luckily I was only exposed to one of these; Closing the Ring. Starring Shirley MacLaine, Pete Poselthwaite and Mischa Barton, Closing the Ring is the story of a young woman whose fiance – a pilot in the Air Force – crashes his plane in Northern Ireland during World War II leaving her embittered and unable to love again. The most distinguishing thing about this film is that the wooden performances given by the leads are very well disguised by the plethora of clichés in the script and direction – I found myself looking around to see if anyone else was cringing as much as I was. However, all in all, the Festival seems to have gone off with all the usual glamour, flair and just the right touch of the bizarre.

Waking on a Sunday morning in Oxford, vaguely hazy about a bop the night before, the gentle tinkle of bells filters across Radcliffe Square to your college room.“Oh no,” you’ve probably thought at least once, “who on earth could be making such a racket this early?” So the bedcovers are pulled a little higher and it’s back to sleep.But for a small and dedicated band of slightly mad individuals, braving the cold morning air to yank at ropes connected to colossal metal weights is the only hangover cure they’ll ever need. And surprisingly, tens of thousands of ordinary people are prepared to get up and ring for weddings and church services, as well as evening practices, every week for an entire lifetime.Bell ringing is one of those peculiar cultural interests unique to England, like cricket and warm beer, and has remained popular since the 17th century. Formerly the preserve of male, vaguely genteel types with too much time on their hands, now anyone can ring, and it’s the sort of equalising interaction that brings wealthy financiers onto a level playing field with kids from deprived inner-city backgrounds.Change ringing is the art of ringing a set of tuned bells in a series of mathematical patterns known as ‘changes’. It’s not quite music, and it’s not quite maths, but it’s a good way of imagining how numbers might sound if you could hear them. There are around 6000 rings of bells used for change ringing across the world, and the vast majority can be found in England and other English-speaking countries. Oxford alone contains a fair few of them: the most prominent are the six particularly heavy bells hanging in the University Church, St Mary the Virgin, next to the Radcliffe Camera. Other towers with bells are St Cross, opposite the Law Library and on the way to St Catherine’s, St Mary Magdalen opposite Sainsbury’s, and in New, Merton and Magdalen colleges. Bells and churches have, like so much of the historical architecture in Oxford, blended seamlessly into the changing landscape around them.Groups of swinging bells in English church towers date from the 10th century, and certainly by the 15th orderly ringing with changing note patterns was taking place. But change ringing only really took off after Charles II’s restoration in 1660, when puritan rules forbidding bell ringing were swept away. It may seem hard to imagine now but under Oliver Cromwell, ringing bells was the equivalent of staging an all-night rave and trying to get one over on the authorities. There are records of bell ringers being pilloried or, even worse, investigated as Catholic plotters and agents.The first recorded society of ringers was the Ancient Society of College Youths, founded in 1637 and still in existence almost four hundred years on. But the man most influential in developing the science and art of change ringing was a determined amateur mathematician named Fabian Stedman. His first book published in 1668, Tintinnalogia, set down all the available information on systematic ringing, and the principles in his 1677 follow-up Campanologia remain essentially unchanged today.Ordered ringing works by hanging bells in large wooden or steel frames inside a belfry, and pulling them from a rope attached to a wheel that goes down into a ringing room. When pulled, the bell rotates almost full circle, with the clapper inside swinging round and striking the bell: pulling the rope back again through two successive revolutions constitutes a whole pull. A kind old man once came to my tower when we were going up for practice one night. He asked me, slightly bizarrely, if we could play Elvis for him. Or maybe The Hollies, as he hadn’t heard them in a while. I made some sort of blustery apology about how bells didn’t make that kind of melody, but were just permutations of bells governed by a pre-determined algorithm that happened to sound quite nice when put together. The bemused expression on his face told me I was never going to be a maths teacher.Perhaps more simply, imagine there are six bells in a tower. The lightest bell is called the treble, or 1, and the heaviest is called the tenor, or 6, and in between are bells 2, 3, 4 and 5. Ringing the bells in order 123456 is called, rather simply, rounds, and makes a pleasant sound that any musician will tell you is a descending scale. Swap all the bells around one place to make 214365 and you have another row of changes. With six bells, there are exactly 720 different combinations of bells that you can make, or in the words of a mathematician, six factorial. On seven, there are 5040 possible combinations and on eight, 40,320. Ringing every one of those 5040 changes is called a peal, and takes around three hours to do, but few ringers, no matter how mad enough, are likely to try and ring for the 24 hours it would take to perform 40,320 changes in one go. In an alternative reality where human fatigue was not a problem, ringers could spend hours and hours ringing thousands of unique changes with no outside direction or coordination. Rather than memorising endless reams of numbers, ringers use a neat trick by following a simple pattern of where their bell moves around the other bells, known as a ‘blue line’ due to the colour of the patterns shown in ringers’ books. Method ringing involves memorising this pattern and other potential permutations that could be affected by a call from the conductor, the most common of which are called bobs and singles. No one knows why they’re called that, but having someone loudly shout ‘bob!’ in order to make things happen just adds to the general aura of eccentricity. Like other ringing jargon, methods are named to show what they involve. ‘Minor’, for example, means a method on six bells, while ‘major’ is a method on eight bells, all the way up to ‘maximus’ for twelve bells. Of course, this gives rise to silly names for methods like Coal Minor or Sergeant Bob Major (ho ho!) but most methods are named after places. There are, for instance, Oxford Treble Bob Major and Cambridge Surprise Major: combine them both and you have a method informally known as ‘Boat Race’.There are certain standard methods which every ringer knows, or has heard of, each of which has a name that only a bored English eccentric could come up with: Plain Bob, Little Bob, Grandsire and Stedman to name but a few. And of course, asking for some Reverse Canterbury Pleasure could get you more than you bargained for.
There are tens of thousands of ringers in England and Wales alone, although their average age must be well over 40. The bell ringing community even has its own weekly newspaper called The Ringing World (probably named in a spasm of excitement) which usually involves pictures of old ladies holding new ropes and endless pages of recent peals. Nevertheless, the number of ringers is rapidly declining as the popularity for something that rewards thought and patience wanes in a fast-moving 21st century. There is, however, some room for optimism: churches with towers, particularly in urban areas, are increasingly attracting young people from a mix of social backgrounds and religious beliefs (including those without any) who want something to keep them busy and off the streets. At one tower in Colliers Wood in South London, almost three-quarters of the band are still in their teens, and they are proud of their collective ethnic diversity. Although the stereotype that most ringers are white, middle-class and old remains largely true, especially in southern England, a gradual shift is taking place.At a tower out in the sticks, however, it can take months to learn how to handle a bell correctly, and years before you could be classed as a ‘good’ ringer. Ringers speak of having a ‘ringing career’, as you go from country bumpkin struggling to hold a rope to conductor of St Paul’s Cathedral. It really does last that long, but therein lies one of the attractions: there’s a real sense of satisfaction to be had from perfecting and honing a skill over the course of an entire lifetime. The sound of bells is something that, in England, forms a continuous part of our existence. Whether you happen to be religious or not, church bells can be found in cities, towns and villages across the country. They are there when we marry, when we die, and when we go about our daily lives by unfailingly chiming the time for us. They can be jubilant and cheerful at times of national celebration, or sombre and reflective at times of national mourning.The only extended period of time when English bells were silenced was during the Second World War, when they were supposed to only ring in the event of enemy invasion. But perhaps this goes to show how, even if bells aren’t ringing from shire to shire, they’re still always there to reassure us against the worst.

by Kristen DiLemnoIn the stark halls of an Italian monastery, selfhood and spirituality are locked in a silent battle. Directed by Saverio Costanzo, In Memoria Di Me follows a group of young men encouraged to lose themselves through self-denial and isolation.

Lost in confused melancholy, Andrea (Christo Jivkov) joins a community of novices training for the priesthood. The Father Superior (André Hennicke) encourages surveillance throughout his monastery, and Andrea enters into a network of spies eager to report their brothers’ peculiarities. Depressed novices leave without any comfort or reassurance from their brothers, and Andrea grows increasingly tempted to follow their lead and return to the bustle beyond his window.

When Andrea witnesses Zanna (Filippo Timi) slipping through the halls at night, his curiosity leads him into a fellow initiate’s crisis of faith and silent self-destruction. Andrea watches Zanna creep into the infirmary each night, only to be watched by Zanna in turn as he retreats to his cell. The real world tantalizes Andrea across the water – the monastery traps the novices on an island – and its brilliant colours ooze into the greys and whites of his cell.

During the day, the men read scripture with varying levels of interest, present homilies with varying degrees of cynicism, and scrub floors with general boredom. While the monotony of their existence is clearly established, the drudgery leaves us feeling almost as depressed as the novices.

In Memoria Di Me employs a sterile silence that feels meditative at its best and agonizingly flat at its worst. Novices tiptoe along the whitewashed corridors, sneaking glances to catch each other looking troubled, unsure or generally unholy. Andrea enters the monastery with a friendly smile, only to find his fervour quashed by frigidity and suspicion.

Why the program doesn’t entail an open forum for spiritual discussion and education remains unexplained. The passive-aggressive environment leads otherwise healthy men to silent mania, but we’re never presented with justification beyond vague biblical quotations. When another novice bails, he could very well be headed to a more agreeable monastery.

Andrea manages to spark a bit of interest for us during his wanderings about the grounds. Once Zanna finally confronts his follower, the two strike up a hesitant and confessional friendship that almost becomes engaging – Andrea treats religion scientifically, whereas Zanna can’t locate love or compassion within their walls. But when the Father Superior learns of Zanna’s criticism toward their destructive system, he humiliates the pair in public and puts an end to all interesting dialogue.

While Costanzo captures the isolation inherent in spiritual devotion, the in-house fighting among the brothers turns their experience into a petty – and remarkably dull – game. The negativity of the system isn’t strong enough to be a critique of the priesthood, but no one has a revelation strong enough to justify the experience. Instead, In Memoria Di Me registers as a sombre, gruelling snapshot of inactivity.

*** After the well-earned success of 2005’s Takk (off the back of Planet Earth-soundtracking song ‘Hoppípolla’), many bands would have sought to cement their status with a rushed-out follow-up. Sigur Rós, inscrutable as ever, have instead chosen to release a collection of acoustic recordings and old but in the main previously unrecorded material.Hvarf brings together the odds-and-sods that missed out on album release. It seems fairly clear why this was the case. ‘Salka’ never quite reaches the heights of its live performances, despite an inevitable take-off at the end. ‘Hljomalind’ would not quite have fitted on ( ), and ‘Í Gaer’, while colossal, is rather too close to ‘Untitled #7’ for comfort.Unsurprisingly, the two re-releases fair better. ‘Von’ remains a thing of restrained beauty. ‘Hafsól’, originally on Von but here in its Hoppípolla EP guise, remains the best thing the band have put to record. Building slowly from a tapped bassline, it ascends to incredible heights, before releasing 6 minutes of bottled-up tension and collapsing in a heap of feedback.Heim, meanwhile, sees the band stripping down their sound. Without singer Jónsi Birgisson’s bowed feedback, the songs lose the overpowering, crystalline quality which has been their trademark. Some songs benefit from this sparse arrangement: ‘Starálfur’ in particular is achingly pretty; ‘Von’ filled with barely contained passion. Others, however, miss the woozy head-rush of emotion that characterises their best work. ‘Vaka’, so often a transcendental moment in the band’s live sets, falls flat here, and other cuts are pleasant but ephemeral.
If Takk was seen by many as the band coming in from the cold after the self-consciously bleak ( ), this double-CD (or at least its live disc) seems to be the band removing the veil of mystique which has followed them throughout their career. This seems a shame: so much of their appeal lies in their otherworldly, alien soundscapes, Jónsi’s voice one of (to us) wordless joy, hurt, loss. Perhaps after tying up these loose ends, they can get back to the job of breaking our hearts.By Robin Whelan

Tango music belongs, for most of us, in a completely different world. It conjures images of dark cafés, hot latin summers and a dance that was construed so fierce and sexual that attempts were made to ban it by US congress and the Vatican early last century. When asked how tango music is supposed to sound, most people will probably end up humming the same tune, accompanied in their head by the common trio of violin, guitar and double bass. The famous side of the genre is strident and strong, managing a sense of musical improvisation within a rigid atmosphere to accommodate dance. It in this style that Tango has featured in so many celluloid dance scenes – Scent of a Woman, Moulin Rouge!, Shall We Dance?, and Chicago, to name but a few. Yet the genre also encompasses a lesser-heard, subtle, overtly romantic style that is driven more by melody than rhythm.What few people know about are the revisions that tango has undergone; those same emotions finding new expressions. The earliest, more famed traditions were musically based around portable instruments – thus the violin, guitar, flute trios, that characterized it in its origins. Eventually, the flute was dropped for a double bass and the bandoneón (squeezebox) introduced; and this then blossomed into the ‘standard’ arrangements of double violins, bandoneóns, and a double bass and piano. It was with this arrangement that the genre found its most world-popular expression in the 1920s, with Carlos Gardel, developing the sung tradition: tango-canción. And so the Golden Age began.But with the 1950s came Ástor Piazzolla, and with him the Tango Nuevo, ‘New Tango’. Tango was, at this point, a very important part of Argentina’s national identity, and Piazzolla messed with it, controversially fusing tango and jazz, sometimes echoing the harmonic sophistication of Bach – one of his early idols. He introduced completely new arrangements to the genre, frequently using the electric guitar but also writing for symphony and string orchestras. His genre-breaking ideas were, I believe the height of Tango’s evolution. And then Neo-Tango has, in the last decade, become very big. It is the lovechild of the Tango Nuevo and the booming age of electronica. If you enjoy the feel of both of these genres, you may love this – coupling subtlety and energy with sophistication and thought, Gotan Project, and their album Lunático, have been very much at the core of this movement. Explore this genre. It’s good. It’s very good.By James Goldspink

by Chris CoolingAir guitar is weird. That is the first thing that you will think on watching this docu-film. All of us are probably guilty of a little air guitar action at some point, whether alone in our rooms or suitably inebriated at a club, but Air Guitar Nation aims to bring us the story of the real pros as they battle first to become American top-dog and eventually world champion. Performances are energetic, genuinely impressive and, above all, highly entertaining. Gimmicks, whether feigning disability only to jump out of their wheel-chair mid-show or performing naked are examples of just how far these virtuoso air guitarists are willing to go to get an edge. Some truly disturbing sights are on offer as men and women who should really know better squeeze into outlandish costumes and rock out on-stage to crowds of up to 5000 cheering people. The effect on the viewer is one of bewildered amazement.

However, at 80 minutes long, film-maker Alexandra Lipsitz correctly concludes that the shows need to be fleshed out with the human side of the story. Chief among this is the rivalry between the eventual champion C-Diddy and perpetual runner-up Björn Türoke. Despite sporting a massive superiority complex, Björn is seemingly beaten by Diddy at every turn, having to try three times to qualify for the world championships-building up sympathy with the viewer in the same vein as Dick Dastardly. After the final the pair shake hands with new-found respect in a way which is actually quite touching. Sadly, not all stories are of such interesting nature. Watching a contestant going to visit his parents is not particularly enthralling and the American qualifying rounds lack excitement, causing the first half-hour to chug somewhat.

When the contestants reach Finland, however, the true nature of air guitar becomes clear. America are new-comers to the competition, which is in its seventh year by the time of 2003 tournament, and are met with some misgivings, partially due to the arrogance both entrants display and partially due to a general mistrust of Americans due to the recent occurrence of the Iraq War. This particular point is emphasised in a montage of war images set to ‘More Than a Feeling’ by Boston, treading a fine line between poignant political comment and cheesy pandering to public opinion.

The film, as a whole, is technically well-put together with title, sub-titles and captions suitably garish and in keeping wit the flamboyant nature of the air guitar genre. Despite the slightly tacked together nature common to most documentaries the viewer builds up an understanding and empathy with the competitors as they let out their inner rock-star personas on stage. However, the fact remains that without the amusing mime which is air guitar the show would not maintain interest for its duration. Insistence by the contest’s founding fathers that air guitar is the only true (read non-commercialised) art form remaining will raise a smile, as will their assertions that said art form can lead to world peace. Is the film worth watching though? If you purely want to marvel at the eccentricity of air guitar performances you’re better trying youtube. If you do watch the film you’ll likely come away with a smile on your face from the amusing performances and sense of sincere hippy-like world peace. As they say in Oulu, ‘Make Air not War’.

‘Flyering’ consists simply of any act which gets a postcard-sized advert into the hands of an unwitting potential customer. However, this simple cross between marketing and causing a public nuisance is so important to a show’s success, at the Edinurgh Fringe in particular, that experienced flyers are required to develop some style to stand out from the crowd, not to mention a thick skin.
 Flyering technique generally lies somewhere between art-form, competitive sport and means of socialising. Often offering more entertainment than the actors they promote, flyerers are a resolute, outgoing bunch. But they still have feelings too, it seems.

Such a character is Miles, the eager public-school student with buckets of enthusiasm, as he picks off members of the public with a flyer, a smile and an unnerving stare. He seems harmless, but in all my time spent on the flyering gauntlet of the Royal Mile I’ve never seen him let a victim escape with less than a written contract that they’ll come and see his show.

Altogether more palatable is Sarah, an optimistic New Zealander I met on the Royal Mile. Whilst we’re working for different venues (and so technically deadly enemies) we’ve been for the occasional drink between shifts, two exhausted souls who have to go out each day and face a public fast becoming unsympathetic to our cause.

It is over a pint, our feet bending back into shape under the table, that Miles springs out of no-where. Two weeks of “Miles, mate. No.” have done little to distinguish me from any other face in the crowd, and it is with glee that he whips a flyer out of his bag and starts reeling off his boiler-plate “no seriously it’s really good it’s literally the best show I’ve seen—”. It is as fanatic as it is unwelcome.

In the mood for some fun, I let him talk for a few seconds before taking out one of my own flyers and blurting out the automatic half-truths and reviews that I have rehearsed three hundred times already that day. He looks worried, but perseveres. Like a flash, Sarah produces her flyer and does her speech. Not knowing where to turn, he looks at me with growing horror as I produce a flyer for my other show and launch into that too. Not one to be out-done, Sarah picks up a flyer from the pile on the table and start to sell that show too. Miles’ voice trails off.

I feel a pang of sympathy as he looks genuinely hurt. I feel moved to apologize for our bit of sport. Shaken, he assures us that it’s really alright, and moves onto the next table. But he didn’t attack me again.