Karen Koren: Picture the comic delights of the Fringe

I HAD another day up in Inverness recently, hanging our comedy exhibition at the Happyness Festival.

It’s the exhibition Fringe-goers can see every year at the Gilded Balloon in August - we hang up to 40 photographs by Steve Ullathorne in the café at Teviot.

Steve has been photographing comedians and Fringe performers for years and for this exhibition we had a lot of new ones taken.

They’ll all transfer to Edinburgh for August and include great photos of Bill Bailey, Dylan Moran, Tim Minchin, Lucy Porter, Fascinating Aida, Tommy Tiernan, Karen Dunbar (hanging upside down – no idea why) and Arthur Smith naked and straddling a chair, like Christine Keeler in the Profumo Affair.

So many other photos that just make you smile – it’s no wonder he was the winner of the BBC London Photography Award.

Before all of that, however, I have to sign off on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe brochure, Go to Norway to open the summer cottage and get some repair work done – on the house not on me! Though sometimes I think I need a lot more than a little repair work.

I am also going to London to discuss the future of our comedy competition So You Think You’re Funny? We have new sponsors who want to nurture young comics by getting them to meet experienced stand-ups for mentoring.

We have to discuss tactics and I’ve got to book comperes for the showcases, the heats and the final. Then I have to book the whole of Late’n’ Live, which I haven’t even looked at yet.

It’s the planning that’s most important. Once it’s all booked there’s not a lot I can do except watch it all work... or crumble.

That will not be the case this year, though.