The Edinburgh Festival's most successful event: The Edinburgh Military Tattoo
By Ian Gilmour.

The Festival's most popular event ended on Saturday with every seat sold and record ticket sales topping three million sterling. The 50th anniversary production of the Military Tattoo on the Castle Esplanade brought together some 1,000 performers and 15 pipe bands every night during its three week run.

Producer Brigadier Melville Jameson said: "This year visitors saw wall-to-wall pipes and drums."

Audiences totalling 217,124 saw, and heard, military pipe bands from the Highland and Lowland Division, the Royal Gurkha Rifles and affiliated Scottish regiments throughout the Commonwealth, including regiments from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa - and four from Canada.

Calypsos from the Commonwealth's only military steel band - the Trinidad and Tobago Defence Force Steel Orchestra - brought Caribbean rhythm to the Edinburgh evening. Thirty Zulu dancers from South Africa drew gasps of admiration from the crowd for their fierce tribal routine. So did the spectacular Kapa Haka Maori dance by a New Zealand group from Rotorua and a blending of Aboriginal and Modern by a young Australian dance team.

A breathtaking sight came with a precision drill display using lances by Canada's Mounties (The Royal Canadian Mounted Police). Special buses brought hundreds of visitors to every performance. For most the only Festival event never to have made a loss was also the only show to be seen. Ticket sales were more than double the total box office takings, for the whole of the Fringe.

Each year, more than 90 percent of the seats are sold before the Festival starts, so anyone wishing to be sure of seeing next year's Tattoo from August 3 to August 25 would be well-advised to get in when booking opens, earlier than any other Festival attraction, on December 1.