Chloe Petts  is returning to the Edinburgh Fringe with her new stand-up show If You Can’t Say Anything Nice, at Pleasance Courtyard, at 8.15pm from tonight. Here she shares what she can't get enough of at the festival, her most embarrassing Edinburgh experience and the worst thing about the Fringe. Apart from the cost of accommodation, obviously…

Fringe Binge

My favourite part of the Edinburgh Fringe is simultaneously living the life of a retiree AND a student at the same time. I never party harder at night than at the festival but also never spend more time going on daytime walks and afternoon cinema trips. I love that the month is unpredictable and you always have lots of space to follow your nose.

We spend three months building up to the festival maniacally working on our shows, having stress dreams the like we haven’t seen since revising for our GCSEs in our teens. When we get there, only having to work one hour a day feels like the reward for enduring nightmares of Chortle reviewer Steve Bennett giving you minus five stars for trying to deliver a show whilst all your teeth are falling out.

I’m particularly excited to be a lady of leisure that’s keeping strange hours this year as it’s the Women’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand so you’ll be able to find me in the beer garden of The Pear ​Tree screaming at Switzerland vs the Philippines trying not to get shanked in my England shirt.

Fringe Cringe

When I first started comedy I was doing a triple-hander show with two other comedians in the basement of an Italian restaurant. 

We’d had a month of varying success and failure but late into the ru,n a stag do came into our 1pm show and it was very clear the groom had not been to sleep. He eventually took his repose during my set, only waking up to run to the toilet to be sick. He didn’t quite make it and I later found vomit just outside the performance space. 

Fortunately,  though, it turns out that stag do is my perfect audience. Ripping into him in front of his remaining mates as he, I suppose, lay cheek to porcelain in the bathrooms is apparently when I’m at my best. I’d rather they would have enjoyed the jokes I’d spent countless hours writing out neatly though.

Fringe Whinge

Cowgate is the locale of some of the most heinous human behaviour ever observed. From trying to skirt round groups of people walking five abreast whilst running late for my show (too many daytime cinema trips) to watching crowds of Friday and Saturday night visitors sick themselves into oblivion, if I never had to walk along Cowgate again, it would be too soon.