They've nearly all finished by now, and a number of venues have already opened for at least preview business. 'They' are the folk who actually make the Fringe and all the other festivals happen in Edinburgh in August - the 'tech crews' as they're generally known.

Like 'service' teams everywhere, they're generally unnoticed and unregarded, but without all their work over the past couple of weeks, the city would be merely a pleasant tourist stop-over for those doing 'Europe in a Week', instead of the buzzing cosmopolitan melting pot of arts activity it now is.

Bare halls have been transformed into theatre spaces; lighting rigs hang from airy ceilings, cables stowed along panelled walls, box offices and temporary bars erected and equipped, and shows will soon be turned around in an hour or less. Technicians are more regularly employed than actors, though there's even less career structure, nor I imagine, much in the way of guidance; in spite of much-vaunted 'conservatoire' education for performers, there doesn't seem to have been a 'trickle down' to the lowly level of technicians.

Yet an evening spent in the company of techies is often far more rewarding and stimulating than one spent with actors endlessly analysing their brief hour on stage. For one thing, they're better read; one technician friend was particularly keen on eighteenth century English literature - Addison, Steele and Pope were his bed-time reading.

Another enjoys Rohinton Mistry as well as James Meek (as he says himself, he likes 'em bleak). Not all actors, of course, are self-obsessed, and the intensity of performance can lead to explaining, sometimes endlessly, what ultimately can't easily be explained. Technicians are blessed with no necessity to do so, and a shrewd understanding that others are uninterested in the fine nuances of follow-spotting, or the differences between profile and prelude lamps.

Apparently the earliest stage hands were unemployed sailors, used to the management of ropes and ballasts for 'flying' stage cloths. Perhaps that's where the tradition of the 'can do', phlegmatically philosophical theatre techie arose, drawing their lessons form other areas of life and art, letting others strut and fret their way trough the Fringe, waiting while the parade goes by, knowing they'll be the ones to tidy up afterward.