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Every August thousands of people arrive in Edinburgh, Scotland's capital city, to sample the delights of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The Edinburgh Festival is the largest arts festival in the world and takes places from the beginning of August until the end of August. The Festival incorporates comedy shows, theatre productions, music, and dance. Alongside the Fringe Festival, there are also book festivals and international film festivals and this all makes for a wonderful jamboree of entertainment.

Indeed, one of the biggest challenges that faces the festival goer is how to choose the shows to see. The choice can be so huge that it becomes intimidating. Faced with this conundrum, there are several approaches that can be taken. These include:

Filter by type of show:

Fans of physical dance may decide to ignore the comedy, plays, and music, and narrow down their choice to dance shows. However, with there being so many comedy and theatre shows, this approach is only a starting point if you like those artistic genres.

Read the reviews:

Sometimes reading a review can provide a good feel for whether a show is good and whether the content is likely to be up your street. However, a word of caution needs to be expressed, namely that reviews are very subjective and I have often seen shows that have been mediocre at best that have got five star reviews, and shows that were great that subsequently were panned by the critics. Nevertheless, plumping for a show that has been feted in this way may reduce the randomness of picking picking the first show that you see advertised. The List magazine and the Scotsman newspaper are a couple of good sources for reviews and may be more likely to give a fair representation of the shows than the review cut-outs that the show's promoters put up outside their venues.

In this modern Internet age, you can also read what other members of the public have thought of shows. A good site for this is the Edinburgh Fringe website, www.edfringe.com. I've also been in a very good pizza place in the Grassmarket area, called Mamma's, that had a blackboard on which people had stated whether they had liked or disliked shows!

Choose based on location and time:

Every year, I get together with some friends, from a soccer team, for our annual Festival show. With a fairly large group of people, it's difficult to do all the planning in advance, so we agree to meet at a particular time at a particular venue. The venue is the Pleasance Courtyard and

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