"Three stars but it read like a Five." Well, that's it. I'm joining the star brigade. When the Edinburgh Fringe kicks off I'll be reviewing as many shows as I can while retaining my sanity and will be giving each of them a star-rating out of five as all major comedy coverage now does.
The reason is fiendishly simple. In a brain-meltingly busy period where I make a virtue of giving shows more space than they would have in the print press people might come to my site but simply not have time to read an entire in-depth review. They can get a flavour by looking at the stars. And if they have time they can also read the whole thing or come back to read it later. Secondly, star ratings – positive ones anyway – get stuck on posters which will bring people to the site. Which is nice.
But star ratings are a difficult, thorny business that please nobody unless they are five out of five (I won't address Time Out's attempt at six-star ratings here). I've been to so many shows over the years that have been too good for a three but not good enough for a four – four, for me, means that they are not just good, they are almost perfect. I often think if only we did star ratings out of 50 I could give a show 35. Instead I tend to decide what it gets out of five by deciding that if it's a 3.6 it gets rounded up, if it's a 3.4 it gets rounded down. Brutal, but there has to be a dividing line somewhere. That's why one should go on and read the whole review to get a better flavour rather than simply glance at the guillotine savagery of the star count.
Of course, as I wrote, unless you give a show five stars there is no pleasing people. The opening quote to this piece, often heard over morning coffee around the Pleasance Courtyard in August, highlights one of the problems of reviewing and adding stars. They don't always tally with parts of the review, or, of course, what the performer/PR thinks of their own show. Maybe you caught it on an off-night. Maybe you dozed off just before the big pay-off. Did the audience fall off their seats in mass hysterics? Then surely it's a five star review. Not necessarily. Originality, taste, etc can come into it. A happy audience can be (a bit) wrong. It is not just about laughs. I once judged a stand-up competition and the judge next to me – not a critic – simply put a tick by each performer's name whenever there was a laugh. The one with the most ticks was his winner. If only my life as a critic was that simple.
Last year there was talk of "star-inflation," with too many upstart start-up websites giving too many shows five stars – which sometimes looked like they were just doing it to get on posters. Beyond The Joke won't be doing that, oh, no. I consider a three star review to be a good review. It says that the show has artistic merits and it is definitely enjoyable. But I imagine it could spoil a performer's breakfast almost as much as a one star review. And, of course, really bad reviews make great copy. Stewart Lee always sticks a bad line alongside a good line on his posters. And I think it was the late comedian Jason Wood who received a solitary star from The Scotsman and put on his posters the words "A star".
But you won't get performers sticking "three stars" on their posters, hence some critics' reluctance to award them – though that won't of course, stop some creative comedians from taking the occasional glowing sentence out of context and slapping it all over their publicity material. As with an arms race, performers are getting better at finding quotes and critics are getting better at writing reviews so that there aren't accidental quotes to be mined. I recently gave a comedian some advice on Twitter, saying "do good work…my invoice is in the post" – he suggested that he might even fillet that and put "Good…voice" on his poster. I hope he was joking.
