Greetings from Edinburgh. We are into the final week of the festival and people are hot, tired and overstimulated. Myself included.

I just passed this poster for an event I saw back at the start of August. It’s way back at the start of my notebook, before my hip started squeaking with sciatica and my eyes permanently filled with sand.

It was … fine. I didn’t hate it. The autism chat was shoehorned awkwardly into the last five minutes - pacing is one of the things I mention in my three star review.

At least her squished segment was mildly funny, about how an autistic person’s literal brain struggles to make sense of idioms such as needle in a haystack. But it was nothing new and it sat heavily at the end of an unrelated show.

Looking at the poster, now featuring more stars than Celebrity Come Dancing, I wondered if we had seen the same show. The Daily Mail - four stars - found it “illuminating and entertaining.” Really? Most of it was about helicopter parenting and the perimenopause, two subjects rarely out of the paper’s Femail section.

Daily Business Magazine was particularly enchanted by her “warm, infectious humour” and gave her five stars.

She has stage presence and effectively heats up the crowd but that does not justify five stars. I feel spreadsheets are more Daily Business Magazine’s thing.

Here’s another underwhelming 50 minutes in a fetid cave. The poster led me to expect a slick 60 minutes bouncing with insight and ideas. In fact the best laughs of the afternoon were when she admitted to looking like a Republican senator’s wife and then described the venue as smelling like a corpse’s vagina. Two strong insights but hardly deserving the chucking of stars like confetti.

Also the venue, which definitely smelled as described above, has the least comfortable seats in the city and must take some responsibility for a painful flare-up of my long dormant sciatica.

Was the pain in my actual arse souring my critical faculties? Possibly. I mean, Jesus would not want me for a sunbeam at the best of times. But I expect more from a writer with The Late Show and Conan on her CV. The best insights about America I’ve heard this August came from Kieran Hodgson and he’s from Shawlands by way of Yorkshire.

Plus his pretty excellent show also included a running gag about train stations in the north of England. He layers on jokes like he was painting in oils. Others have barely moved on from crayons.

Why do critics - or, as I call them, “critics”, give adequate shows a handful of stars? This is a multi-causal problem with as many elements as a Kieran Hodgson set.

Let me break them down in the style of the Ted Talk comedy show.

It stars with the decline in cultural journalism. This is a big one. Broadsheets in particular have slashed their arts coverage. What they still have is, in too many cases, spectacularly badly paid. This means that there are just not enough critics who see a wide range of work all year and can put what they see in Edinburgh in context. The ones who are hanging on there are doing a grand job but they can only review as many shows as their paper will print or put online. And, if they are based outwith Scotland, stay as long as their expenses allow.

Supplementing grown-up newspaper criticism we now have some brave publications that struggle on as giveaways. These pay even more spectacularly badly than papers. They have some excellent and dedicated critics, many of whom are my friends and colleagues. But they are wildly overstretched, zipping from show to show, writing reviews on the hoof to try to make bank.

And then we have a raft of online publications including the one where I have found a berth, acrossthearts.co.uk. A few of these pay contributors, many don’t. What they do offer their contributors is tickets.

These platforms are a gateway for what used to be called, in the olden days of football fanzines, fans with typewriters. Instead of dedicated supporters these websites have partisan reviewers who, for the most part, pick the shows they think they will like in genres with which they are familiar. They then get a free ticket, and not in the cheap seats. It’s amazing how not handing over your own hard-earned blunts the critical faculties. And while some bring a breadth and depth of knowledge and insight, others have maybe been to see Moulin Rouge and the King’s Panto and that’s it.

This does not lead to measured, thoughtful reviewing. It leads to star inflation and gush.

There is a thrill of seeing your words photocopied and glued to a poster. But chasing that is where gush comes from. A review that consists of a rehashed press release topped and tailed with superlative slurry may be devoid of critical value but it gets the promotional photocopiers whirring. It builds sweetheart relationships with the PRs who gatekeep tickets and invites. It may lead to better invites, to opening nights in other cities and flesh-pressing opportunities.

(Related but petty - when I actually write something that would look great on a poster and it is ignored.)

Then there’s press night-itis. Reviewers often see the show on opening night, in a theatre abuzz with friends, family and industry supporters. The cast are fresh out of previews and primed to go. The audience is also awash with adrenaline. This can be intoxicating and lead an inexperienced critic to gloss over a show’s flaws, get all excited and over-rate a show. Hey I’ve done it myself, at Make It Happen, I should have marked this down a star for having unnecessary songs.

Hey, we are all human. To truly judge a show we should all go to a Thursday matinee on the third week of the run.

Related to the above, a show may be exciting, or look amazing, or be deeply moving. Seeing something like this in a busy theatre is why we do this and it never gets old. But if it’s a rehash of something very similar that the same company did last year, or a rip-off of someone else’s show, or has honking out-of-date politics, that should be reflected in the review.

The first time you see a man with a beard in a spangly frock singing a big show tune, it will obviously blow your tiny mind. But this is not new and has to be reviewed in the context of other divas with facial hair who specialise in torch songs. Context is crucial.

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Thanks for coming to my Ted talk. I wish I saw a way out of this big old mess because the situation as it stands is not helping anyone. Audiences see a poster festooned with stars and think it’s advertising a show that is worth their time and money. Critics who produce calm, measured reviews are drowned out by less rigorous, more easily quotable voices.

In the end it’s counterproductive. Normal people are not impressed when they go to see a superstarred show and discover the venue smells like a dead person’s unmentionables and the show is a big old so what.

I have actually seen some astounding shows this August. Here are some favourites: Lost Lear at the Traverse, The Insider at Pleasance Dome, Pekku at Zoo Southside. We all need more clothes peg bird-based drama in our lives.