Leaflet Us Be

People I know who have seen more than one Festival are all about hating the fliers. 'You'll get sick of them,' they warned. 'You'll start finding them everywhere'. On day three, I saw a guy wearing a white t-shirt that had I don't want your flier written across it in permanent marker. Oh pish-posh, I thought. How else am I supposed to decide which of the thousands of acts are for me? I took fliers from everyone. Fliers for circus freaks; comedy routines; theatre productions of musical baking; contortionists reciting poetry underwater. I even had a bunch of actors make a paper aeroplane of their ad and 'flier' it up to the second-storey window of my flat because I thought they looked interesting.

I am vaguely disappointed in myself for breaking the 'never judge a book by its cover' rule so quickly, but really the only way to tell whether an unknown performance will be good or not is by the quality and aggressiveness of their advertising. I reckon the A5 flier with a gloss sporting a picture of a man inserting his flaccid penis into a pineapple with an expression of cabaret-style surprise on his face that is being distributed by a monkey on stilts suggests a pretty formulaic comedy routine. If a flier is in the shape of a pineapple or a penis and given to you by a guy who looks like he could work the till at your local supermarket, it's probably an OK show. I have seen some stirling shows based on this method of distinction.

My distaste for the whole fliering concept sort of crept up on me like milk going bad in the fridge, but I think it started when I met this guy who was wandering up and down the line at the box office. He was forcing paper into people's hands, saying 'The world is ending, the human race will perish, come and see my show before you perish!' This doomsday prediction was something I might have found endearing had he been an early-morning drunk, but the irony was latent and he was really just some English toff with a theatre education who was jamming his crappy acting down people's throats. I took one. The show costs £6.50. I didn't see it.

I was also given a flier by a customer at work who just mentioned off-the-cuff that he was a performer and I approached him to what he was doing. The ad didn't have any photos on it, and seemed reasonably-priced, and I didn't think twice about whether I should go or not. It was late-night comedy routine, the kind that I never imagined existed before this festival. The kind where you drink and drink and laugh until you feel like your feet will fall off and your legs are going backwards and the combination of the hour, the alcohol and the enthusiasm of the performers is a new sort of magic. I went to the show. And as I climbed into bed at 4am, sick with laughter and beer, I was greeted not by the warm embrace of one of the many beautiful men I had met that day, or even just the neutral comfort of my duvet. My legs stretched out and hit cold, hard, laminated fliers – maybe twenty of them that I had thrown onto my bed at an earlier and more sober point in the day. And I understood why that guy had bothered to make a t-shirt.