Best of the Fests: Our 2016 highlights

The Festivals have made Scotland's capital buzz this August, with the world's biggest collection of comedy, music, art, theatre, dance and a whole load more besides. We've been out and about across the city and also brought some of the best acts to our new Edinburgh Festivals home in the beautiful grounds of George Heriot's School. Here (in no particular order) are some of our favourite bits...

As usual, Edinburgh became the centre of the comedy universe this August, with thousands of comics descending on the city to try their luck with its audiences, and quite a few of them ending up on our stage. You can check out 4 Extra Stands Up at the Fringe and Fresh from the Fringe online to hear sets from some of the best - but our favourite moment just might have been this interview from Steve Wright in the Afternoon, as Stewart Lee revealed what he really thinks of our venue...

The Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo remains one of the city's biggest attractions, and this year, the team at BBC Scotland used 360-degree filming technology to take viewers right into the heart of the spectacle. You can find out more about how they did it here, and catch the show itself on TV and iPlayer from Monday 29th August.

(Apple iPhone users: the video requires the YouTube app to work correctly. If you have it, open the video directly in YouTube.)

This summer felt like a landmark one for spoken word artists at our Edinburgh site. BBC Scotland's The Social held an unforgettable Poets v Rappers event (highlights on their Facebook page), and American lyrical masters Sage Francis and B. Dolan wowed our audiences with their wordplay. The high point, though, was the thrilling finale of the fifth annual BBC Poetry Slam, which proved to be the most intense competition to date. We've included the performance that won Adele Hampton the title here, but be sure to check out our full set of highlights from the night, too.

One of the highlights of this year's Edinburgh Art Festival was the arrival of the Dazzle Ships project in the city, with Ciara Phillips' Every Woman transforming the former lighthouse ship MV Fingal into a living monument to the contribution of women to the First World War, as well as marking the centenaries of the battles of the Somme and Jutland.

You can find out more about Dazzle Ships in this BBC Arts article, and see five of the biggest hits of this year's Art Festival in this companion piece. There's also more coverage in BBC Two's Edinburgh Nights with Kirsty Wark.

We've got four full shows from the Edinburgh International Book Festival online, featuring the whole of Tim Burgess and Ian Rankin's exploration of their shared love of vinyl, as well as talks featuring Jackie Kay, Nicola Sturgeon, Simon Callow and Marina Warner - but if you want to dip a toe before diving in, take a look at BBC Arts' selection of the best bits.

Lots of new faces have made a big impression on our stages this summer - 15-year-old guitarist Billy Watman stealing the show on Janice Forsyth will live long in the memory - but the grand final of the BBC Radio New Comedy Award was a particularly brilliant showcase of emerging comic talent. This is the set that won the idiosyncratic Jethro Bradley the title, and you can see all the other finalists' performances online, too.

Music was a huge part of our programme this year, from free gigs in the outdoor Castle Tent (take a look at our Facebook gallery of some of the acts that played there) to BBC Radio shows in the big Blue Tent, including In Tune, Travelling Folk, Late Junction and Global Beats, as well as Radio 3's series of concerts from the Queen's Hall.

We're particularly fond of this Rachel Sermanni song from Loose Ends, but we've also put together this article featuring some of our other favourites from the past three weeks.

We were delighted to welcome The One Show back to our garden this summer to bring the Festivals to BBC One's audience. They also got to meet some of the Festivals' hottest acts first hand, and we're pretty sure they won't forget forensic mind-reader Colin Cloud anytime soon.

Marin Alsop, the first woman to conduct the Last Night of the Proms, gave an amazing interview to Deborah Bull ahead of her International Festival concert with the Sao Paulo Symphony Orchestra - watch the whole programme online.

No-one spent more time on our Blue Tent stage this summer than Janice Forsyth, BBC Radio Scotland's queen of culture. Every Monday to Thursday, she welcomed guests from across the Festivals, including Ruby Wax, Rory Bremner, Brain Cox and Annette O'Toole, to her sofas for comedy, music and conversation; you can listen to all of her shows here, and this clip of Natasha Pring's amazing sound effects skills gives a pretty good idea of what to expect.

One of the best things about Edinburgh is how it lets established names try something a bit different. We've had Angus Deayton returning to his sketch show roots, Rula Lenska reinvented as the queen of Eurobeat, and Arthur Smith running city tours - but everyone's been talking about Alan Cumming letting his musical passions run wild in his show ...Sings Sappy Songs. Here's an excerpt to whet your appetite.

We've filmed a wide range of interviews with Festivals stars backstage at our site at George Heriot's School, including Al Murray, Ricky Gervais, Zoe Lyons and Stephen K Amos - you can see some of the best ones here and here.

However, the most memorable might be this one, taken before Asian Network's Big Comedy Night. We were waved over by the production team, who asked us if we wanted to film a clip with host Tommy Sandhu. We said yes, not realising what was going to happen next - if you hear some odd noises, that'll be us trying to keep up with him...