Fringe Binge 2017 Show #47 - Katy Brand - I Could've Been An Astronaut; Pleasance Courtyard, 1820, 15-Aug-17

I actually have a ticket for this show towards the end of the Festival, but as I had a two-hour or so gap and didn't want to just sit in a bar on my own I picked up a ticket for this performance. And it was ... all right.

Ms. Brand is an engaging and personable individual. The show was themed around her love for space and astronomy, despite having attended a strange Catholic school where maths was all but ignored. Yet from an early age she was obsessed with space - the first part of the show was largely based around the future predictions contained in a couple of books she had rediscovered in a box when moving house. Published in the mid-70s these books made all sorts of gee-whizz hopelessly-optimistic predictions about where we would be and how much of the solar system we'd be buzzing around in by, errr, now (I have a couple of such books too from when we cleared out my parents' house). The set then moved on to various other topics, including roping in a video appearance from the ubiquitous Brian Cox, talking about a fragment of a meteorite she had been given (I'm convinced it's just a pebble but what do I know?), her love for the old London Planetarium (which I visited back in '83 or '84 but is sadly long gone), the possibility of parallel universes (where she could actually be an astronaut) and ultimately how she's enrolled in a two-year on-line A-level maths and is aiming to tweet progress, and hear from others about their dreams and aspirations, using the hashtag #katydoesmaths.

All very entertaining and interesting but for some reason it just didn't work for me. Ms. Brand is a good performer and storyteller but it just didn't gel. Yes, I laughed in places but for some reason I wasn't really engaged - it might have been Fringe fatigue or my mind was already thinking about the next shows and whether I could squeeze in dinner sometime so I probably wasn't really concentrating. Which is a shame. Don't know why, I just wasn't that excited about what she had to say. Very much a case of "it's not you, it's me" I suspect.