Mark Watson’s Unusually Enjoyable Book Launch

*** (3 stars)

The basic premise of the event was to follow Mark Watson around town as he read out passages from his new book in vaguely relevant settings, such as an alleyway ‘that smells really badly of piss’.

I have an aversion to walking tours, as the urge to run off and spend the afternoon hiding from the rest of the group, trying to buy cigarettes still remains from school trips. The fact that I stayed with the tour from start to finish shows a high degree of quality. In fact I have only been on one other good walking tour but that was in a jungle and included a story about tomb robbers, cocaine farmers, armies, terrorists and gangland murders in rural Colombia, it would have been impossible to be bad.

Watson was his usual overexcited self throughout, giving the impression that one mouth is just not quite enough for the amount of words he wants to say in each minute, as if he could do with two or three. I am unsure of how organised it all was as he was always having to climb up walls or into building sites to talk to us which made it all exciting and rebellious, even though there was probably a health and safety team that had done a risk assessment of the wall the night before. The walking everywhere began to get a little tiresome, I am sure there were more active members of the audience who would disagree but I am a smoker and Edinburgh has lots of hills. Shows are too lazy though, you just turn up, sit there and get fed the show by some performer or other, and they just stand there feeding the show to you: lazy. It’s okay in the evening, but in the day you can leave feeling as though you have just spent an afternoon watching television in your pants, the book tour was a wholesome and active few hours.

From the couple of pages that were read out to us, the book seemed good enough, but as I was there to review the launch and not the book I didn’t pay too much attention, if you want a book review look somewhere else. I wanted to talk to him about the book at the end, when you could queue up and get signed copies but I spotted someone from work in the crowd and as I had called up and quit my job with half an hour notice that morning I ended up hiding in the classics section before running out of the shop like a coward.

Outside The National Potrait Gallery, 11th August.

Jonah Sugden