Written by: Madame Magenta
Published: Friday 11th July 2014

Greetings, fans of the esoteric! I'm Madame Magenta: psychic, medium and whyte wytch, and my raisin d'être is helping people.

Throughout the years, I have taken pathetic husks of men and women and transformed them into slightly less pathetic husks, mainly through one-to-one sessions at just fifty quid a pop (sixty with partial nudity, seventy for full nudity - please do enquire through my daughter Lindsay Sharman's website).

But it often seems to me that the people who need my help the most, do not seek it. Indeed, it is the neediest members of our society that often SHUN my services, decrying me as a fraud who feeds on the vulnerable! And yet these sceptics, these cynics, are themselves vulnerable: weak, addiction-prone, sexually incontinent, smelly, wonky of face and of spirit. I am, of course, talking about comedians.

And once a year, these terribly vulnerable individuals pack themselves off to the performance jungle that is the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Off they trot, eyes shining with hope, nerve-endings poking through their paper-thin skin. All to find out if they're lions and tigers, or little mousy-kins to be skewered on a kebab stick and deep-fried in batter.

When they do find themselves at the bottom of the food chain, being chewed on by a critic or their own raging paranoia, what do they turn to? To a belief in a higher power? To a sense of their place in the universe? Of course they bloody don't. They just moan on Twitter and chew fistfuls of Valium.

But I'm here to help them, whether they like it or not. I've picked a completely random selection of comics from the brochure, and used a variety of divination methods to figure out how they would most benefit from their time on the Fringe. So let's get cracking with our first comedian!

#1: Jim Davidson

Divination method used: bibliomancy.

(A quick guide to bibliomancy: The practice of foretelling the future by interpreting a randomly chosen passage from a book.)

Now, I know for a fact that Jim has connections to my home town of Great Yarmouth, and even bought one of the piers at one point. (I assume during a game of strip poker with the mayor. We've all done it.) So, I'll be using the popular 1988 coffee table tome, Swingin Yarmouth: Seaside Sensation!.

So, after a brief trance state, I awoke to find the book had fallen open on my lap at Page 64, and I was attached by a thin rope of saliva to paragraph two. Here's what it said:

Celebrities abound in Yarmouth! Fresh from his fruity turn in 'My Beautiful Laundrette', Daniel Day Lewis can often be spotted on Regent Road... at Louis Tussaud's House of Wax, that is! Stunningly lifelike, the newest waxwork is depicted sorting through his laundry basket, separating his whites from his coloureds.

Well now! That passage is a little ambiguous. Finding the meaning in fortune-telling is often tricky. However, after communing with the universe, I came to a stunning realisation: Jim Davidson has been a character act for over forty years!

Just like Daniel Day Lewis, he is heavily into method acting, and in fact has refused to come out of character for his entire career. But at this year's Edinburgh Festival, on my prompting, 'Jim Davidson' will reveal the man behind the mask!

Bravo, Jim. Bravo.

I'll be helping other comedians, via British Comedy Guide, up until the Fringe. If you need help you should buy my book or come and see my show - 'Madame Magenta: Libros Mystica' - at the Voodoo Rooms in August. Listing