WHILE Edinburgh girds its loins for the Fringe, a funny thing has been

happening in London. Short BAC and Sides is a season featuring some of

the best comic performers and theatre acts who will appear in Edinburgh

-- including Hattie Hayridge, Ben Keaton, and Paul Davies, John Shuttle-

worth, Sheila Steafel, Helen Lederer, Donna McPhail, Harry Hill, Al

Murray, Stephen Oxley.

In fact, in a season which runs throughout August, BAC (Battersea Arts

Centre) will be playing host to almost 60 different companies in 80

different performances -- the kind of statistic to make the head spin

and inevitably invite comparison with its Scottish counterparts.

Time Out (co-sponsors of the BAC season) recently likened the

atmosphere at the south London arts centre with its three performing

spaces and bars to ''the Assembly Rooms on acid all year round''.

Paul Blackman, its artistic director, quotes this with some pride.

When he inherited BAC the centre was dying on its feet after its initial

golden era when Jude Kelly, West Yorkshire Playhouse's present director,

had hauled the old town hall out of oblivion and made it into a thriving

local resource.

Blackman's emphasis has been rather different, encouraging risk-taking

particularly in the visual theatre area and giving a boost to stand-up

and cabaret acts: very 1990s.

Short BAC and Sides is in its third year. Blackman explains: ''When I

first came here I inherited a situation where BAC was closed for the

summer. People said you couldn't get audiences because everyone had gone

to Edinburgh! All eyes are on the north. Even the London Evening

Standard carries Edinburgh reviews. But what about those people who, for

one reason or another, can't go?''

So, partly for budgetary reasons -- he can't, he says, really afford

to close for so long -- and partly because he sees it as a way of

feeding London audiences in what is a notoriously dull theatre month, he

began to ring round a few chums to offer the venue as a way of

Edinburgh-bound comedy and theatre performers getting their material

into better shape.

The response was phenomenal -- and his instinct rock solid. So much so

that last year Short BAC and Sides achieved the remarkable feat of

previewing in their season five of the six Perrier Award nominees.

Colin Watkeys, who produces Ken Campbell, Claire Dowie, and Starving

Artists, the group from Hawaii whose Mark Pinkosh appeared with Dowie so

successfully last year, speaks glowingly of the idea of Short BAC and

Sides (though laments the increasing safety and lack of experimentation

on the Edinburgh Fringe).

Like Blackman, however, he welcomes the development the season

represents of the increasing crossover between stand-up comedy and

theatre.

''They're not one-person shows -- and they're not just looking for

another gag. They have more structure than that. The old forms don't

work any more. Audiences want to get involved and excited. These are

strong performers. But they need an audience. BAC gives them that -- the

chance to hone their material, change it in front of an audience. You

never really learn until you try it out in front of them. BAC has that

atmosphere of edge; audiences really want them to take risks.''

Blackman, too, is excited by the array of talent queueing up to create

new theatre forms who have come up through the ranks of stand-up and

cabaret -- among them Arthur Smith (who wrote the Gary Lineker show),

Ben Miller (whose Gone with Noakes was one of last year's Perrier Award

nominees and who returns with a new show, Huge), and Kevin Day (this

year in I Was A Teenage Racist).

Londoners therefore have a prime opportunity to second-guess the

Perrier Award judges. Among those to look out for are the

above-mentioned plus new musicals by Tony Hawks (Heartbreak Kid), Steve

Furst and Mike Leigh (The Gary Glitter Story), the world's first ever

Jewish heavy metal band, Guns 'n' Moses with Jim Tavare, Al Murray, and

Dave Cohen, Ra-Ra-Rasputin with Richard Herring (''Boney M meets

pre-revolutionary Russia -- just to set the tone in the first week'') --

not to mention new shows by Lee Evans, Chris Lynham, Harry Hill,

Geraldine McNulty and Red Shift's new version of Death in Venice. Ken

Campbell also tries out his new show, Jamais Vu (before his one-man

trilogy goes to the Traverse after the Festival, and then back to London

-- to the National Theatre -- in October), while Claire Dowie gets going

with Leaking from Every Orifice.