Glasgow gives Cumming the bum’s rush

People is in Edinburgh this week, enjoying all the culture, rain, beige food, drama, rain and rain that the Edinburgh Festival has to offer. Here one topic dominates all else - Alan Cumming’s bottom.

The Scots actor is appearing in a production of The Bacchae at the Kings Theatre. Promotional posters show him flouncing in a floaty red dress, his behind bared for all to see.

Edinburgh is a famously genteel city, unlike uncouth Glasgow. Surprising, then, that Cumming’s bottom has been airbrushed out of posters for the show’s pending transfer to that city’s Theatre Royal. Cumming, who describes himself as “pansexual”, is reportedly reeling at the barefaced cheek of it. Or, rather, the lack thereof. After the Glasgow run, The Bacchae transfers to the Lyric in Hammersmith. Is London brave enough for the bum? Or will another prominent opening be marred by a cover-up?

— The large comedian Phil Jupitus is performing public readings of Dickens in the Assembly Rooms. This week he found himself adopting particularly grandiose tones. “Sorry,” he said, eventually. “I’ve just realised that reading Dickens like this makes me sound like Russell Brand.” Few would mistake them.

— Paddy Ashdown gave a talk on Saturday at the International Book Festival (sponsored by The Times). Also present were Sir Menzies Campbell and Lord Steel. That’s three Liberal leaders out of the past four. Did nobody invite Charles Kennedy? Or did he run into train trouble en route?

— Stepping away from Edinburgh for a moment, we are excited to hear that the Radio 4 documentary The Clinton Years includes an anecdote about Bill squaring up to his political fixer, Dick Morris, and being pulled away, pre-punch, by Hillary. This sounds almost as funny as Peter Mandelson trying to hit Alastair Campbell. Although obviously not quite.

— The comedian Marcus Brigstocke, host of Early Edition, a satirical news show, tells us that he has been discussing foot-and-mouth from the Udderbelly, a venue shaped like a giant upended purple cow. “I don’t know if this is a diary story as such,” he writes. On balance, we feel that it is.

— John Smeaton, the Jack Bauer of Glasgow airport, will be at the Fringe on August 23, in Janey Godley’s Chat Show at the Green Room. “Finally my family think what I’m doing is respectable,” says Godley, “because I’m going to meet a man who kicked someone at the airport.”

Postscript

Kim Cattrall. At 17 she was cast as a naked woman held hostage by terrorists in Rosebud, a film directed by the Hollywood great Otto Preminger. “It was painful,” recalls Erik, Preminger’s son, in a forthcoming biography of his father. “After making Kim do the shot over and over, Otto said to her, ‘Darling, you remind me of Marilyn Monroe - not in looks, of course, but in lack of talent’.”

Finally, we can only plead, in the strongest possible terms, that as many people as possible join the wondrous Facebook group “If 100,000 people join, my wife will let me name my second child Spiderpig”. Trying to name your offspring after a Homer Simpson gag is surely what the internet was invented for.

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