The Edinburgh Fringe Festival, is as diverse as it is huge and, with some 70,000 performances of more than 4,000 different shows on over the three weeks, that's some statement.

The Fringe originated in 1947 as a spin-off from the International Festival, but is now Edinburgh's largest August festival by far.

The Fringe is now so big that only the event to sell more tickets is the Olympic Games - but that's every four years, not annually.

The big ticket items tend to be well-known comedians that sell out great halls, but for each of these there's a score of first-timers putting on plays or shows as diverse as naked ballet, destroying cars to music, and performances in dimly-lit cellars where the audience becomes part of the act. Besides all this there's also music, acrobatics, readings and theatre.