There’s nothing so dead as a festival that’s just finished, but this year’s Hay Fest has passed on leaving some great memories of sun-soaked days, contented punters, gallons of laughter, spectacle, revelation and vision revived. Scattered among the keystone interviews and discussions – Tutu, Bennett, Fry, Paxman – was the usual plethora of smaller events, niche books, anorak authors, and the downright wacky, like Blaize, Immodesty – as she appears in the index – who put on a short but powerful display of Burlesque on Saturday night.

Immodesty Blaize’s (by the way, wonderful) show offered a nostalgic hint of the old, disaster-prone Hay, which was sort of endearing for old Hay aficionados. She was intro’d by Julian Clarey, who didn’t stay long, thank God. I’d seen him before – in the front row at the Ludlow Assembly Rooms, within arm’s length of the purple sequinned cod-piece he was wearing – and found the rambling portrayal of his gay sex life at least as boring as that of any heterosexual. And he doesn’t talk about much else.

Immodesty’s burlesque, on the other hand, verged on, even strayed into the realms of true art. It was striptease, with less strip and more tease, although I am not especially familiar with the cruder, old Soho version of this kind of show. With a support team of two pairs of remarkable legs, and a feathered head dress that would have stopped Sitting Bull in his moccasins, Immodesty curved, cavorted, strode around the stage emanating sexual control and ended by straddling a large, rampant rocking horse in as lavish and, frankly, arousing display of Art-Strip as you could have wished for.

It was a pity that Clary hadn’t done a little research, so he could have prepared us with the stimulating knowledge that, for instance, the stages of the majority of burlesque shows in Hamburg, Berlin, Paris and Budapest, which for the first half of the last century were the strongholds of the genre, were peopled with British women. And how Immodesty is leading a world revival of the art.

Instead, as Immodesty strode off at the end of her performance with a gentle quiver in her fleshier parts, Clary reappeared accompanied by a small, grumpy woman with a head of tight-curled tresses who was called Stephanie Theobald. Clary started to chat to her about her new novel, but her mouth was so full of chewing-gum that her answers, and later her readings were fairly incomprehensible, especially competing with the amplified bass of Alex Valentine’s band in the next tent (in a piece of old-time Hay juxtaposition.) As a result I can’t tell you much about the new book, A Partial Indulgence, although I see the Guardian described it as a ‘weird, gothic’ novel of the art trade.

More interesting was the reappearance of Immodesty, now more conventionally, elegantly dressed, to talk about her new novel, Tease. This is too much, you might have thought – burlesque performers really shouldn’t write novels, but of course, as is so often the case with people who appear at Hay, there are other layers to Immodesty. Starting life as Kelly Fletcher, from Hitchin, Herts, schooled at a convent and university, she was working as a producer/director of TV commercials while she developed her interest and skills as a Burlesque artiste. She spoke with intelligence, wit and perceptiveness, when you could hear her over Alex Valentine’s bass-player. I shall buy Tease; I might even read it and review it for you.

There’ll be more from Hay…..

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