EVERYTHING MARKED WITH: The Scotsman


Paul Whitelaw August 23rd, 2017 by

Nick Doody has a joke (and I won’t spoil it by doing the whole thing), that says you can’t write ‘swan’ on a pig and shove it out onto the lake. And yet over the past five years we’ve discovered that we have to accept things as they’re labelled, however little sense it makes. It […]


Martin Gray August 9th, 2017 by

When you work at the Scotsman, I guess, you don’t feel you need to impress anyone. I mean sure, the paper is going down the tubes faster than a KY-jellied eel poo at a waterpark but for the moment it’s still the grand dame of Scottish journalism. Or croque monsieur, since Scotsman is the most […]


Claire Smith August 19th, 2015 by

Claire Smith – or ‘The Scotsman’s Clair Smith’, as the Wow24/7 website denomes her – is every bit as good a reviewer as you’d expect a veteran hack to be. (Note to comedians: ‘hack’ is not a pejorative term in journalism.) You might not agree with everything she writes, nor the assumptions on which she […]


Fiona Shepherd August 15th, 2014 by

Fiona Shepherd is rock and pop reviewer for The Scotsman, but they let her write about comedy too because everyone is multitasking at Scotsman Towers these days. Jay Richardson makes sandwiches in the canteen. Joyce Macmillan maintains the drawbridge and the boiling oil. And anyway, comedy was once going to be the new rock n’ […]


Kate Copstick July 17th, 2014 by

What would The Scotsman’s Fringe coverage be without Kate Copstick’s Fringe Diary? Nowhere much. The Scotsman that The Scotsman is written for is something between a grumpy Presbyterian minister and a right-on civil servant; Copstick’s bawdy reportage is the only thing that keeps the national ink from being a killjoy at its own party. If […]


Jay Richardson July 17th, 2014 by

Jay Richardson writes for everyone who matters at the Fringe, and others that don’t particularly. The two things that define him are his constant recourse to reason and his deft turn of phrase. He employs a great economy with words, so that three paragraphs give as accurate a picture of a performance as four or […]


Brian Donaldson July 15th, 2014 by

Brian Donaldson is Comedy editor at The List and reporter at large for The Scotsman. Apart from his Fringe duties he has written for The Times, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, Saga, Sunday Herald, The Herald, Scotland On Sunday, the London Evening Standard and The Record. As you would expect from such a time-served hack, […]


Help us pay the billsCLICK ON THESE F*CK*NG ADVERTS