Nice work..

To the person who commented on my Latitude blog post, 'nice work if you can get it', yes, it's fantastic work. And not just because I'm writing this on Sunday morning on the train to one of the most beautiful cities in the world, Edinburgh. I'm working in Scotland for the next fortnight. We are recording a raft of comedies, Front Row, Loose Ends and some readings from The Pleasance as part of the Edinburgh Fringe.

Every show is 'full' so about 5000 people will get a chance to watch the recordings; they sold out very fast, but if you happen to be up there and would like to come to a recording we do create a standby queue. As the tickets are free people don't always turn up or don't use all the tickets they requested so we can very often fit you in. Full details are on the Edinburgh Fringe web site or come and find us in the Pleasance courtyard. I'll be there with Lea Lauvray and Gill Carter who are managing the shows with me and we will be sporting incredibly bright pink tee-shirts with BBC Radio 4 splashed across them with an amusing quote from R4 star and Fringe doyenne Arthur Smith and hopefully not looking too bedraggled. Because we are in a fully functioning city the planning is less extreme than for a music festival in a field however, of course, it will still rain. But the venues are usually boiling hot so you steam dry quite quickly.

Radio 4 has been broadcasting from the Fringe for about 15 years if not more. It is important for us, as home of Radio Comedy, the place where some of the biggest names in British comedy started out, to be there both as participant and audience. Programmes such as Today, Front Row, Saturday Review and others look across the breadth of events and report back on this truly extraordinary cultural event.

Planning which shows will be available to broadcast, creating new ones especially for the Festival, programming them so that each has just enough rehearsal time, the outside broadcast team have time to do the technical turnaround and we can get audiences in and out, sorting out the precise venues and the tickets with the Pleasance and the Edinburgh Fringe Box Office (endless forms and proof checking) and then making sure that each programme does not end up booking the same talent and completing the Health and Safety procedures all starts in early January and finishes just before we come up here.

Between the recordings I go and see a lot of comedy. In previous years I have seen about 60 odd shows. I liken it to a squirrel harvesting for the winter. The comedy producers and I will find ourselves referring back to this year's performances till next August. The performers have worked incredibly hard to get their show into shape and for many this is as good as they are going to get for the next year or so, they are in peak condition and so this is the time to see them. It wasn't always like that.

This is my 31st consecutive year at the Festival - I started stage managing and lighting shows and then directing them as a Manchester University drama student in the days when students could afford to come to the Fringe and you could sleep on the floor of your venue - and in the olden days you knew some performers were still in rehearsal mode for the first ten days or so. You can't do that anymore. It is a showcase, a jolly expensive one at that, and the acts need to hit the ground running to get good early reviews, ensure sell out shows, happy audiences who can be paying upwards of £8 a ticket, as well as charm the broadcasters and woo the judges of what was the Perrier Award, then the if.commedie award and is now the Edinburgh Comedy Award.

And this year that's me - as I've been asked to be on the judging panel. I arrive in Edinburgh at about 1.30 and by ten tonight I will have seen my first five shows. We make the final decisions as to the winners in a fortnight so lots and lots and lots of shows to see first.

• The Edinburgh Fringe web site.
• The BBC's Edinburgh page, with links to all of this year's festival activity.
• The image is from a montage of archive footage from Edinburgh Festivals of the past, on the BBC's Edinburgh web site.