Edinburgh Fringe 2018
Jamie MacDonald: Blinkered
Jamie MacDonald
Venue: Assembly - Assembly Rooms George Street
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Review
Jamie MacDonald is a ‘weegie’ from Glasgow, his career highlights include stapling his own hand to a bedframe in a mattress factory to failing to compete in the company of arseholes in corporate banking. He’s never used his degree in ancient history and owns an evil anti-guide dog called Hector. Old ladies heckle him his local park for not picking up dog jobbies and beggars refuse to take his donations. What with dodging evangelising street Christians and not playing the benefits bingo game Jamie can still find many upsides to being blind – it’s how he met his wife after she tricked him into snogging a plastic sheep.
This is a gentle 50 minutes of stand up in one of the cosier Assembly Rooms, although Jamie takes great pride in poking fun at a wide variety of deserving targets. An appreciative audience were consistently chuckling as Jamie recounted one blind misadventure after another – quite often the blindness is from sighted people he bumps into. He even throws in a bit of current disability politics, not that controversial as most of the audience were on his side when he related how daft the process is when trying to claim Personal Independence Payments. Jamie is deft at storytelling and great at accents introducing us to macho Brian and gameshow Gavin.
Hopefully Jamie will get even more confident in recounting more of the bizarre situations he finds himself in as he expands into a full hour of stand up. His timing is impeccable and he can afford to relax the pace sometimes so that we can really appreciate all the humour in his tales. Times are tough for disabled people at the moment and champions like Jamie poking fun at the decidedly disability unaware or down-right prejudiced are what we need right now.
