One of the pleasures of the Edinburgh Fringe is that it is a great leveller. Prince or pauper, star or pleb, if you want to see a certain act you have to squeeze into the shoebox venues like everyone else. In the old days the best place for spotting big names in the audience was the Assembly Rooms in George Street. A highlight of my Fringe-going life was seeing red-haired soccer dynamo Gordon Strachan in a cramped room chuckling quietly to himself.

This year The Pleasance was the place to be. I got very excited when I saw Jennifer Saunders and Adrian Edmondson striding across the courtyard to see their daughter Beattie in the sketch show Lady Garden, accompanied by Ben Elton. I suppose that means the performers could legitimately put the words "3 Stars" on their posters, whatever the reviewers say.

Another very good spot was power couple Jaime Winstone and Alfie Allen and a gang of bright young things at one in the morning, presumably heading off to a much better party somewhere else. But for me the most brilliantly incongruous sighting was at an Andrew Lawrence gig. On the right of the stage, in the middle of the middle row underneath a baseball cap was Kevin Spacey. Quite what attracted the Old Vic boss to the sick and twisted humour of Lawrence I don't know, but Lawrence himself joked that most of the audience were there because they were unable to get tickets for Irishman Ed Byrne's show.

Maybe Spacey went to the Pleasance thinking it was his Usual Suspects co-star Gabriel Byrne doing a gig and when he found out it wasn't he opted for Lawrence instead. He seemed to like what he saw though, leading a standing ovation. Thank goodness for that – Lawrence threatened that if he didn't get a standing ovation he would go to the toilet live onstage.