When looking at hotels in Adelaide we were shocked to find that they too were bloody expensive for the dates we’d be there – great, we were avoiding the sky high Melbourne F1 GP prices and swapping for sky high prices in Adelaide. But why? Aaaahhh, our dates co-incided with the opening of the Adelaide Festival (and the Adelaide Motorsport Festival, celebrating the city’s Formula 1 heritage – Melbourne had controversially nicked the Grand Prix from Adelaide back in 1996.). Oh well, prices weren’t as extortionate as Melbourne and we got a decent deal through IHG at the Holiday Inn Express in the city centre. Debbie was nagging for us to stay at the Intercontinental and use the free suite upgrade voucher burning a hole in her pocket, but we agreed that we’d be out and about so not make use of the lounge, the hotels were almost next to each other so no location advantage, and so we didn’t really need to spend double the money. There’s no real Platinum Elite upgrades at Holiday Inn Express establishments though – the best we could manage was a move to a King room from the cheapest available (Queen) room that we’d booked – but you do get a ‘free’ breakfast (it was sh*t and utter chaos, but we were amused by the homeless guy coming in each morning, helping himself and filling his cool bag).

We’d established that the PULP were performing a free concert for the Festival’s opening night – brilliant, we loved Jarvis Cocker & Co back in the 90s – and booked a couple of arty theatre things too. And then we arrived in Adelaide and discovered that Fringe was running at the same time, and it was the 2nd biggest in the world after Edinburgh. We hadn’t even thought, but it’s obvious really if we’d compared with Edinburgh that the Festival and Fringe overlap. Festival is the posh big brother – curated, high culture focus, fewer & large-scale productions, more refined; whereas Fringe is the boisterous lefty one, open to the masses, comedy-heavy, packed city-vibe, cheap and open to all. So suddenly our time in Adelaide became very busy indeed!

We only made it to one of the two main Fringe sites – The Garden of Unearthly Delights – where a nice chap talked us through the acts and helped us to get tickets for our first evening…

Firstly Tom Gleeson’s Out of Touch show – he’s an Australian superstar apparently, host of TV shows Hard Quiz and Taskmaster Australia and a 7 time AACTA winner. The subtitle for the show was “Tom Gleeson is completely out of touch and his head is up his arse – come along and take him down a peg”. The bloke was very very funny.

Next up was Dave Hughes, another member of the Australian Comedy Royal Family (and who’d been on Aussie I’m a Celebrity). His flyer claims that he’s Australia’s best stand-up comedian, as good as it gets anywhere on the planet. Modest? Obviously not. Typical Aussie sterotypical bloke? Hell yeah! (not in a good way, but he was quite funny). There’s a rivalry between Tom and Dave – probably as they are Australia’s two best known comedians. We FAR preferred Tom – Dave was the one with his head up his arse!

The following day we got some Brit humour from The Best of The Edinburgh Festival – featuring a Bolton-born Peter Kay wannabe Oliver Bowler, the rather posh and handsome Jimmy McGhie and one of Debbie’s favourites Laura Lexx. All 3 were comedy gold but Laura was by far the most shocking (especially at 2pm on a Saturday afternoon). Debbie is still a little stunned that she used the phrase Trench C**t – a description of the risk you run if wearing chub rub shorts under a skirt in the Adelaide heat! She was leafleting for her solo show in the way out and it took a great deal of restraint for Debbie bot to ask for a selfie and proclaim her love of Laura’s book Klopp Actually, and ask how their imaginary daughter Klipp was (IYKYK!).

And after a healthy dose of unexpected and unplanned Fringe shows it was time for the Festival opening and PULP. We had got to see/hear their sound check earlier in the day, when Jarvis said “we are done, let’s go before we get 3rd degree burns”. It was indeed a bloody hot day, still 34 degrees when we went through the gates at 5pm, and half the crowd probably had sunstroke by the time Pulp came on stage at 8.30pm. Straight into it, no messing, with ‘Sorted For E’s & Wizz’ to open and ‘Disco 2000’ as the 2nd song. The crowd sang along enthusiastically “your name is Deborah, Deborah, it never suited ya”. Jarvis was on top form and delivered a fabulous 1 hour 45 minute concert to 10,000 people in an Adelaide park.

For our final day it was the pre-booked Adelaide Festival culture – let’s pretend that we are arty types. The weather was lousy, but had not yet developed into the forecast ‘once in a decade biblical rain event’, and we made our way on the free city tram to the Botanic Gardens to see the first in a triptych of fairy tales (A Concise Compendium of Wonder) by the Slingsby Theatre Co at the purpose-built The Wandering Hall of Possibility. Our performance was The Childhood of The World, based on Hansel & Gretel – quite mesmerising and beautifully performed.

We’d eaten nothing but fast/snack food for days so Princess Deborah wanted a properly nice late lunch that day and booked Olive, a mediterranean fusion restaurant that stayed open all afternoon, surprisingly rare in Adelaide even during Fringe. The food was exceptional and we ordered far too much – beef tartare (for Steve only!), fried feta with honey, fig carpaccio with burrata, lamb shoulder, swordfish, patatas bravas, a beautiful Clare Valley Aglianico – and we rolled back to our hotel for a snooze before the evening’s dose of culture.

Performed at Adelaide’s premier venue – the Festival Theatre – The Cherry Orchard was Australian director Simon Stone’s re-imagination of Chekhov’s last play, re-set in modern day Seoul and performed in Korean (thankfully with English surtitles). We were really pushing the arty & intellectual boundaries! And our head for heights too – we had front row centre seats in the Grand Circle, right up in the Gods, with a very low wall separating us from the floor several stories below and certain death if we fell. Health & Safety is obviously not a big thing in Oz. We both agreed it was an incredible production and really quite mesmerising, but opinions differed on how easy it was to follow given that it was difficult to see who was speaking whilst reading the surtitles. Steve was sulking a little though as he’d seen the Fringe programme and could’ve seen ‘HR The Musical’ or ‘Ladyboys of Bangkok’ instead. Heathen!

A very full 2.5 days of entertainment and culture was really enjoyable, but what about Adelaide itself? A lovely little city centre, totally surrounded by parkland, with beautiful buildings, not many skyscrapers, wide boulevards, a trendy market and vibrant food scene, and a pretty valley/river setting, We had a really nice time in Adelaide but that was mainly because of the events happening rather than the city itself. However – there are 4 major wine regions within an hour of Adelaide, so that alone probably makes it worth visiting. And we were off to one of them – the Barossa Valley…..