Life changing experience

One Sunday night in late 1989 my girlfriend took me to see Theatresports at Belvoir Street Theatre in Surry Hills, Sydney.  I can point to exactly where I was sitting that night because the show changed my life.

I was 22 years old and working as a Trade Marketing Associate for Unilever.  It was my first ‘real’ job after graduating with a Bachelor of Business (BBus) and my life consisted of a week working for people I neither liked nor respected and weekends getting drunk with a gang of friends who had also gone to expensive Sydney private schools.  My girlfriend wasn’t part of that gang.  She didn’t really like any of my friends and she hated the drinking.  I'm still hazy as to why she liked me at all.

I’d resisted seeing the show for months.  Not out of any objection to the theatre but becauseSunday night was when The Eddies played the Woolloomooloo Bay Hotel.  They were a terrifically fun cover band with a tight horn section that was doing happy, danceable versions of Blues staples years before The Commitments repopularised that style of music.  When you’re 22 and hate your day job a massive drunken Sunday night party full of people as desperate as you are to squeeze the last drops of fun from the weekend is an irresistible offer.  Monday morning consequences be damned.

One Sunday she prevailed.  She booked (and presumably paid for both) tickets to see a heat of the Cranston Cup,which remains Australia’s pre-eminent improv comedy competition.  Her friend Julia Zemiro was in the Sydney University team that night with Daniel Cordeaux.  Also on stage that night were Marko Mustac, Ewan Campbell and Andrew Denton.  It was intoxicating.  The audience cheered the teams and booed the judges just as Keith Johnston intended.  It was funny, witty, unashamedly Australian, raw and generous.  It was a million miles from The Eddies’ contrived white boy renditions of 1960’s black American music.  By the time we stood to reprise the deliberately cheesy Theatresports National Anthem I was high.  We hung out in the bar afterwards with Julia and Daniel and it dawned on me: -

These people are my age.  If they can do this wonderful thing then why not me?

I had never before questioned my role as an uncomplicated  consumer of cultural production.  Straight away I enrolled in workshops that started in January. I performed on the Belvoir Street stage for the first time in February.  In March I founded Instant Theatre,the theatre company that strangely morphed into the consulting business I run today.  I left full-time employment in June 1991.  In the following years Instant Theatre performed for the general public in stinking student union bars, grotty pubs and tired little theatres and for corporate types at shining resorts across the world.  I told myself that we only took the corporate gigs to fund the general public shows.  I dreamed of a career in television and wrote some bad scripts for otherpeople’s shows and pitched worse ideas for shows of my own.  After a few years the corporate theatre briefs got more specific and I drew more and more on my BBus.  By 1995 I was calling myself a sales/marketing consultant and I date my current business, Dramatic Change, from then.

Ever since I've fought a persistent drift away from producing content and back towards simply consuming it. I’m in my mid-40’s and ‘why not me?’ is no longer enough reason to monopolise a stage, column inches or even bandwidth. Last year I quit stand-up comedy and the improv that I love may well follow.  I've decided that having the capacity, and even the ability to command an audience’s attention is a necessary but not sufficient reason to produce stuff if I have nothing that to say that needs saying.

A contributor to the Economist’s online blog known as W.W. wrote apiece in early November that argued against the need for more American students to study engineering and the ‘hard sciences’ as market forces have determined that America has enough of these for now. Rather W.W. argues in favour of the humanities: -

I spent last evening reading a fine Pulitzer prize-winning novel by a graduate of a state-university creative-writing program. I appreciate everything math majors do for us. I really do. But, as far as I know, a math major has never made me cry.

The argument that we need producers of Art as much as we need builders of bridges and factories and inventors of machines to mitigate the effects of climate change is an old one and always well stated.  As my second degree is in English and Australian Literature I’m hardly unsympathetic to studying the humanities.  One of the few defensible rationales for studying Literature at university is that it makes for a more discerning and perhaps better consumer of Art provided sufficient intellectual rigour is required to pass the course.  Art is the key word here. Anyone can bash out a sentence on a keyboard (viz. this blog).  The only cost of entry to getting on stage ata stand-up comedy open mic night in London is proximity to London.  But it is unlikely it will be Art.  At best it is someone learning a craft and finding a voice and we can only really guess at that person’s motivations.  The early stages of an artist’s career involve remaining interesting to enough of the right people for a long enough time to get the skills to properly articulate an idea in a manner that is both compelling and intellectually rigorous.

Neither Theatresports nor The Eddies pass this test.  Both shows were hugely compelling but as there was no intellectual rigour, no message whatsoever, both were entirely disposable.  With improv comedy, the one form where I have at least a modicum of talent, meaning will always be absent.  For all the skill it takes to do it well, the engagement with an audience, the quick-witted cultural referencing and very occasional moments of sincerity, I doubt that improv will ever change a single opinion.  How can it? It is calibrated to automatically give an audience what it wants already.  As Keith says: -

Don’t be original be obvious.

Could there be a more blatant directive away from Art?  It is as fatuous and limiting a statement as, “The customer is always right.” Yet it is the driving principal behind the thing that drugged me in 1991and has me waking up on the far side of the world twenty years later wondering what I've done with my life.  The writers’ block that chased me out of stand-up comedy pursues me still.  I've hated the last few improv shows I've done.  It’s no longer enough for someone to marvel at my ability to extemporise a film noir opening to a made-up faerie tale.  If I have nothing to say then why am I demanding an audience’s attention?

I will continue to write and perform whenever I have something to say.  The rest of the time I will stop apologising for being a consumer of Art rather than a producer of tat.

Earning attention

At his non-rambling best Merlin Mann is one of my favourite contemporary online writer-thinkers.  Lately he's been energetically promoting the idea that what counts in life is not so much where we spend our time or money but rather where we focus our attention.

Every professional performer has endured the experience of a paying audience getting bored and talking through your act: -

Even after they've given you their time and money you still have to earn your audience's attention

The signals that you've yet to earn that attention are pretty blatant if you know what you're looking for.  My first corporate theatre gig, which was also my first paid work after I quit the marketing department of Coca-Cola, was a morning of team building for some long since subsumed Sydney freight company.  The maiden outing of Alternative Corporate Training Services (aka 'ACTS')* was in mid-December 1991 and the job had been a long time coming.  Our show used improv techniques to teach teamwork to corporate types but we'd really just been hired to make the group laugh for an hour whilst they set up for Christmas lunch in the room next door.  I have three distinct memories of that afternoon: -

1. There was no air conditioning so it was stifling.  It was Sydney in December and our hour was the only thing between the group and a fridge full of icy beer
2. We took the 'stage' (read: walked to the space at the front) to the Emerson, Lake & Palmer version of Fanfare to the Common Man.  The idea was the entrance would be epic but as the venue had no sound desk we'd brought along an old boom-box, which I had to clunk on then hold above my head from the back of the room
3. As we started the MD, who hadn't signed off on our appearance, sat at the foremost table took out a massive mobile phone and ostentatiously placed it in front of him

The signal was as clear as day: you have my attention but only for as long as no one (anyone) from the outside world wants it.  The amateurishness of our entrance, our visible lack of self-belief and even our dumb company name meant we hadn't earned the right to ask him to switch off his phone.  Everyone in the room knew it and our gig went downhill from there.

There's a moment with every audience when you have to 'get them'.  If that point in time passes without you earning the room's attention you will struggle thereafter.  The same rule applies with absolutely every kind of audience; a target market of prescribing doctors, an electorate or an online community.

That day in 1991 we stumbled through the hour by dropping the team building message and playing for laughs, which is all they wanted anyway.  They paid us in cash and we went directly to the Chinese restaurant up the road and spent the entire fee on our own boozy Christmas lunch.  Late that afternoon our pager beeped (we shared the one between us) and a booking agent offered us a gig at a January kick-off event.  At that second, boom-boxless, gig we earned the attention of the room and ACTS-CORPRO-Instant Theatre-Dramatic Change went on from there.

* Because we were a theatre group.  Geddit?  No?  Anyone? This was the first of our dumb company names.  After that we went for CORPRO Productions ('Corporate Impro') before getting to Instant Theatre then Dramatic Change

Don't have the skill? Then you'd better have the will

By any measure Friday night's gig was a tough one.  The stage was in the corner of the pub with no room for the rows of chairs to denote 'audience'.  It was a 'free' gig so the punters there for the comedy were mixed in with a majority who were simply out for a drink and a meal at the end of the working week.  The bar, about eight feet from the stage, didn't stop (noisily) serving the entire time we were on stage.

Readers of this Blog will recognise this as a pretty familiar workplace for someone on my step of the comedy ladder.  Every night of the week across the UK there are stand-ups battling away in rooms that are no more set up for comedy than they are for polo.  Implicit in accepting the booking is an understanding the acts will somehow compensate for all these negatives and create a night of great comedy.

How has this been allowed to happen?  Why is it that we comedians turn up to work when the odds of success are so severely stacked against us?  Much can be explained by the attitude of the agencies that are paid to book the acts for these pubs.   Oftentimes the bookers take zero responsibility for the show aside from ensuring that four or five warm bodies are ready to go onstage at about 845pm.  No demands are put on the venue in terms of technical (Is there a stage?  A microphone, even?), logistical (Will you stop serving drinks at the bar whilst the acts are performing?) or marketing (Is this going to be a paying audience? How much are tickets?).  As a performer you literally have no idea how hard your job will be until you arrive at the venue.

Understandably this gives rise to a high degree of cynicism amongst acts on the circuit.  For me this has lately tipped over into a dangerous sort of out-and-out negativity.

Last Friday's gig wasn't an agency booking.  It was booked by the night's compeer; a highly talented comic who is starting a small circuit of regular shows near his home town.  As I said, it was a tough crowd but the opening act won them over.  Okay, he pulled out every trick in his 20+ years on the circuit including ventriloquism and getting the audience to clap along to Beethoven's Ninth ('Ode to Joy') played on a banjo but he got there.

I went on next and lost the room.  The audience traveled that mortifying arc from amusement to bemusement through polite silence and onto unsurreptitious chatting amongst themselves. 

The interval was scheduled for immediately after my set but the compeer did something interesting.  Instead of simply getting a round of applause for me and telling the crowd to get a drink, have a smoke and be back in twenty minutes he stayed on stage and got the audience back where he wanted them before the break.  It took him another quarter of an hour but he stayed up there to recalibrate the room so the punters were more likely to stick around for the rest of the show (remember that the audience hadn't paid to watch us and so had far less stake in seeing the night out).

These two acts stood in stark contrast to my performance.  I've gotten into the dreadful habit of walking into rooms and declaring them 'unplayable'.  Put it down to too many long car journeys with acts who make the same declaration on the way to the gig and who make a show of checking the watch on stage before asking aloud "That was about twenty minutes wasn't it?"

In his new book Linchpin: Are you indispensable? Seth Godin makes the distinction between 'the art' and 'the job'.  He uses 'art' in an especially broad sense: -

The job is what you do when you are told what to do.  The job is showing up at the factory, following instructions, meeting spec, and being managed.

Someone can always do your job a little better or faster or cheaper than you can.

The job might be difficult, it might require skill, but it's a job.

Your art is what you do when no one can tell you exactly how to do it.  Your art is taking personal responsibility, changing the status quo, and changing people.

I call the process of doing your art "the work".  It's possible to have a job and do the work too.  In fact, that's how you become a linchpin.

The job is not the work.

pp 96-97

What annoys me most about learning this lesson is that I've never needed it with my consulting business.  I've walked into badly designed, badly laid out rooms overfilled with recalcitrant audiences all over the world but I've never declared them 'unplayable'.  The thought has never even occurred to me.  I've reflexively taken a deep breath, smiled broadly and launched into the day-long training room equivalent to 'Ode to Joy' on a banjo.

If you don't have the skill to do your job when things get tough then you'd better have the will.  Last Friday I brought neither and got found out.

David Heinemeier-Hansson

Yesterday I went along to the Regent Street Apple Store to listen to David Heinemeier-Hansson speak.  I'm not a programmer so until yesterday he was someone who existed only on the edge of my radar.  This was the descriptor for the talk: -

David is the developer behind the hugely successful software Ruby on Rails and Basecamp. Join him as he discusses 37signals’ business manifesto, co-written with Jason Fried, Rework: Change the Way You Work Forever.

It was a free talk so that he could spruik his GTD book so what was there to lose?  As with any other free event nothing but my time.

Even an hardened stand-up would label the lecture theatre at the back of the Apple Store 'a tough room'; substandard acoustics and an audience full of nerds accessing the free WiFi but that doesn't begin to explain the underwhelming non-event that followed.  A profound inability to engage with the audience, an absence of stagecraft and a monotony of delivery all gave the impression that the speaker was focused on nothing more than his final PowerPoint slide and the customary yet desultory round of applause.

Leaving aside the props that Heinemeier-Hansson gets for being sickeningly fluent in English, he wasted my time.  The content of the talk was not so much 'how to improve my personal productivity' but rather 'how to behave if I worked at 37signals'.  I was less likely to buy the book at the end of the talk that at the beginning.

When will people realise that all public speaking is performing?

The end of the arc

Lately my stand-up has been underwhelming.  Whilst I haven't actually been 'dying' on stage neither have I left my audience clamouring for more.  Sure, I've only done two gigs since the month-long ash-cloud-extended sojourn in Asia and Australia but there's a deeper problem than lack of stage-time, which is my usual diagnosis for a malaise like this.

Instead it just feels like the end of the arc.

In late 2006 I kept a long-standing personal promise to try stand-up comedy.  I was 39 and rather than aiming for fame'n'fortune I gave myself the more realistic goal of attaining what I called 'journeyman status'.  In 2010 I get paid pretty well.  I get asked back.  I have bit of a reputation as a solid, reliable comic for either 'Opening 20's' or compeering.  If I stopped today I'd leave the industry if not a success then certainly not a failure.

Job done.

The end of an arc like this is a time of extraordinary vulnerability.  When our business began to take off in multiple markets around the world my then partner's enthusiasm demonstrably waned.  The minute the market wanted him he lost interest.

He explained the paradox by describing a dinner party with old friends from medical school.  Because their services are always in demand very few of the doctors he trained with were in any way entrepreneurial; why start your own institution when there are plenty who will bend over backwards to make sure you're happy?  Around the dinner table my partner's decision to start a pharmaceutical consulting firm was regarded as either brave, laughable or contemptible.  Yet within a few years he was a founding partner of a growing business  with strong prospects and an already impressive record in markets as different as the US, Spain, Singapore, India, Taiwan, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia.

Job done.

By then no one was laughing behind their hands at dinner.  But once he reached the end of that narrative arc from risk to assurance he lost enthusiasm.  I was driven by less easily sated demons.  It was this misalignment of motivation more than any disparity in contribution that led to the decoupling of the business a few years later.

If I cannot construct a realistic and satisfying narrative of my future stand-up career then every gig from now on will feel like an unsatisfying postscript because that's all it will be.  The storyteller in me has some work to do.

Exceeding expectations

An easy point of differentiation between stand-up comics and improvisers is their attitude to collaboration.  An interesting question to ask a performer on a long car journey is this: -

Would you rather be recognised as the best act on a mediocre night of comedy or a good contributor without being the stand-out act on a great one?

Every decent improviser opts for the former; the audience experience (aka 'the night') is all that matters.  Far too many stand-ups measure their performance comparatively against the rest of the bill rather than in the absolute terms of audience appreciation.  When I'm going through a bad patch I fall into the same relativist trap and my post-gig analysis starts sounding like the ravings of a paranoiac: -

Was I the weakest on the bill?  Was there a sense of palpable relief when I said goodnight?  The audience only talked during my set and listening intently to everyone else didn't they?  The other acts were all backslapping each other but did anyone say anything complimentary to me?  In fact when I came off stage I don't think that anyone even looked me in the eye...

And so on.  As such schadenfreude is the default setting for most stand-up comics.  This is why a commonplace on the English scene that Michael McIntyre is a poor comic, hardly better than Jimmy Carr really but at least he's no Joe Pasquale.  This mindset is self-destructive in the most obvious yet insidious way and we each need to guard against it.

Conversely, in consultingland it's been years since I've watched another external consultant or trainer work.  I often share a stage with internal speakers but it's very rare for direct competitors to speak to the same audience on the same day*.  The only indicators I have that I'm any good are that (a) my clients pay me on time and (b) keep asking me back.  I find that it's actually pretty easy to 'exceed expectations' when a client has paid thousands in travel, accommodation and fees and effectively gambled tens of thousands more in taking the sales team off the road for a few days because I'm given a brutally clear sense of what those expectations are.

Part of the frustration in performing comedy on most nights is that the audience has no more than a shaky idea why they're there in the first place.  Expectations usually range from the depressingly downbeat (I just hope no one embarrasses themselves, I couldn't bear to watch that) to the ludicrously optimistic (What do you mean a tenner in a room above a pub doesn't get me Eddie Izzard?) making it hard to judge your performance on anything other than your fellow acts.

None of this improves the mental health of your average stand-up comedian, who was unlikely to be especially sane before he took up the craft.

* The exception to this rule are those showcase events where speakers are allotted stage time in front of an audience of would-be buyers.  It's been years since I've attended one.  My business is totally driven by word-of-mouth recommendation amongst a small number of potential clients so the effort needed to make a showcase work has never justified the return.

Necessity & sufficiency

The only thing I remember from Logic classes in first year Philosophy was 'necessity' and 'sufficiency' in conditional statements.  Of course in the years since then I've somewhat purposefully mutated the terms, adapting them to marketing consulting.  For example: -

For a product launch to be successful it is necessary to have a good product but that alone is not sufficient

This is more than a rhetorical device.  It helps keep a client discussion focused on those factors that have to be in place before starting a project; the genuine deal-breakers.

This is easily applied to staging of comedy night: -

For a comedy night to be successful it is necessary to have a functioning microphone and a decently lit performing space and whilst these alone are not sufficient, without them you're just another guy standing, yelling in the middle of the pub 

 What?  Quit showbiz?

An Australian in a European winter

The comedian in me should be happy; in the last week I've amused onlookers in Zurich and Oslo.

Leather soles + icy ground = indignity.

How much is cool worth?

In the past fortnight I've performed in four improv shows; three in California and last Saturday an eight-hour shift in London's 50-Hour Improvathon. The most commercially successful of these was also unabashedly the least cool.

Tradition dictated that after that show came down we sprinted to the foyer to line up and high-five every audience member as they left the theatre. This was done smilingly without a hint of condescension. As my castmates happily chatted about the show, the cast and life in general it was clear that many, if not most of the punters were returnees. We'd played to a full house so this process took a good fifteen minutes before we could head back upstairs to pack up and change.

This is how you get your 1,000 Fans. By converting monologues into dialogue. By smiling and letting people touch you. By answering questions and asking a couple of your own. By not worrying about being cool.

Cool is the opposite of friendly. Cool is aloof. It's black-windowed limousines, velvet ropes, private rooms and everything else that limits interaction. At a commercial level cool operates on the old one-way producer-to-consumer relationship.

But cool only pays if you've got 100,000 fans each paying $1 for the monologue. This puts you at the traditional end of the Long Tail and good luck to you if you get there. In the book of the same name, Chris Anderson warns that when shooting for 100,000 it's all or nothing. A fanless rock star is just a guy in dark glasses with a day job.

I kick myself for keeping the Scenes from Communal Living cast back for production notes instead of sending them out to chat with strangers who'd come to see the show. By the time we got downstairs only our friends were still hanging around and they were fans already.

Cool doesn't pay as many bills as you'd think.

1,000 fans

Last night's gig involved a six-hour round trip to Lincolnshire on roads that were less trecherous than the British media had warned / wished. Happily I shared the trip with another comic, a newly arrived recruit to the legion of Australian stand-ups based here.

We spent much of the time puzzling over his big challenge: -

What is the quickest means for him to create sufficient demand for his stand-up such that he can provide for his wife and newborn daughter?

His parameters are simple: he sees himself primarily as a storyteller and really isn't interested in TV except to further his live performing. He is a terrific writer and fine comic with a long track record of great shows in Australia. What piqued my interest was his mention of 1000 Fans. This is a new sort of business model ascribed to Kevin Kelly, the logic of which is as follows: -

An artist can make a living from a thousand fans willing to part with a hundred dollars a year

So as well as creating cool stuff we have to usurp the means of distribution (promotion) of our work. The idea also raises something interesting about ambition: -

Is $100,000 p.a. enough?

This is a fascinating question to ask young comics. $100,000 is more money than most comics will ever earn in a year but far less than what they dream of. Like every kid footballer who believes he's the next Christiano Ronaldo, young comics seem to want Russell Brand's life or bust. My new Australian friend is mature enough to see that $100K a year doing the thing he loves as amounts to a successful life. Now all he has to do is find those thousand fans.

Kelly chose his two numbers carefully; 1,0000 is more people than you can possibly know well but not so many that they can't feel that they have a relationship with you, which speaks to the asymmetric (but not didactic) nature of 'fandom'. And $100 a year is neither a throwaway amount nor does imply an obsession.

Cultivating a thousand-strong fanbase means putting the effort into avenues of ongoing two-way dialogues. So setting up your own fan page on Facebook is a wholly illusory step in the right direction. For a stand-up comic the real gain is more likely to come from chatting to the punter who buys you a drink; this is someone showing that they want to give you more, that they want a relationship.

I am a huge fan of The Bugle, the free weekly podcast made by Andy Zaltzman and John Oliver (of The Daily Show). I have no idea how many subscribers they have but right now I'm listening to a 'Best Of' episode featuring 20 minutes of fans' unsolicited remixes of old shows. Because the podcast is free its fans have found other ways to create the dialogue.

So Kelly's metric presents a stark question for a live performer: how many of your Facebook 'fans' would pay $20 a show to see you perform five times a year? You're welcome to include family and friends in that number.

Five lessons (large & small) from 2010

Theatre in London is hard, hard, hard

Achieving decent houses over a long run means attracting a mix of price-sensitive local regulars and brand-sensitive one-off tourists

Confusing art and craft is deadly for anyone involved in a creative pursuit

Comics beware: craft is more about application than inspiration. You may know what you want to say right now but do you know how to say that thing in a way that works for the paying audience who only turned up to laugh?

Improv is a pastime

Treat it as a sideline project and you're free to fly. Treat it like a job and you'll never get a mortgage

Away from the world of finance, business hasn't changed all that much

Clients have much the same needs as two years ago, they're just a little more cost-sensitive and a lot more time-sensitive. They're also more risk-averse so having a prominent and trusted brand helps

Collaborations are fantastic, partnerships are dangerous

This year I've worked with wonderful and creative people on projects that have made me truly proud. At the end of each it's been great to part without making open-ended promises

Willfully unhelpful

This Sunday night is the 60th UK performance of Scenes from Communal Living. We've made a lot of people laugh and I'd like to think that the show will be a useful stepping stone in the careers of our young and talented cast.

34 of those 60 shows were at the same little theatre in Camden. At 4pm yesterday (Friday) I received a curt email saying that as the theatre was closing for Christmas immediately after our show we had to bump out our entire production that same night. That left me with the last hour of the business week to arrange transport for the set. We were their biggest customer in 2009 and the relationship ended with what amounted to a notice of eviction.

Once I'd made the necessary arrangements I did something that I rarely do: I rang to complain. I was duly referred to the relevant clause in the contract signed back in June and that was that.

No best wishes. No thank you. No pleasantries whatsoever.

I wasn't surprised. There was always a sense that the people who ran the theater had absolutely no enthusiasm for our project. Maybe they don't like improv or comedy or maybe they just didn't like me as a person. Their approach was always willfully unhelpful. Sunday night may not be the final staging of Scenes from Communal Living in London but it's certainly the last one at that theatre.

Here's hoping that our last show is good enough to wash this taste from my mouth.

Almost as good as being there

Another night, another stand-up gig in a brand new comedy 'club' miles from London.

It's worth pointing out that a British comedy 'club' is unlikely to be a purpose-built room with stage, microphone, dedicated spotlight and chairs all pointed in the same direction. It isn't even necessarily a bar that stages comedy every night of the week; a club is usually best thought of as 'an occasional night of comedy'.

That was certainly the case last night at the far end of the M4. To kick off the 'comedy club' idea the venue had linked up with the entirely laudable Help for Heroes charity so the room was full-to-overflowing with 300 or so punters. So far so good. Except that the stage was positioned directly opposite two massive pillars which effectively split the audience. It was only lit by swirling, multicoloured disco lighting.

The landlord's sense that his bar wasn't exactly screaming 'comedy' was what doubtless led to him screening captioned clips of televised stand-up on the absolutely massive video wall above the bar. So the audience had a choice between listening to my routine delivered live from the disco stage or reading (admittedly better) Adam Hills' jokes off the massive screen.

And so ends my stand-up year.

Walking the talk

A strange confluence of unplanned (but hardly unsurprising) absences led me to actually joining the Scenes from Communal Living cast for our penultimate show last Sunday. The goal was to 'not suck' and I achieved that much.

And now I know for sure why my cast so loves the show.

Free kicks

On Saturday night in Abergavenny in the beautiful Welsh valleys I did one of the most difficult gigs I've done in ages. Every comic knows the sinking feeling one gets when the poster on the venue door advertises Tonight! Free Comedy!

Is it banal to point out that for comedy to succeed the audience must be engaged? Most comics write material that pre-supposes that at some level the audience wants to engage in what's being said from the stage. We'd like that engagement to result in laughter but we acknowledge and accept silence and heckling as workable alternatives to be converted into laughter if we're good enough.

The first mistake the promoter of the Abergavenny gig made was to not charge the audience to watch the show. Even so he got nervous that the crowd was still too small so he had the brainwave of shutting the pub's other bars to force the crowd back to where we were performing. A horde of chatty Welsh drinkers looking for nothing more than a refill piled into the room where, despite it being no more than four metres from the stage itself, the bar kept serving.

All of this happened after the show had started meaning that the (excellent) MC had no opportunity to engage the newcomers and attempt to lay down some ground rules. The acts were left on the horns of a dilemma -

Do you play to the seated few whose attention has been earned already or do you sacrifice that attention to go after the many that arrived late and who may or may not hang around?

Each act tried a different approach but nothing worked. We did our time and salved our egos afterward by declaring the room unplayable.

Supporting from afar

Although the London run of Scenes from Communal Living has another five Sundays to run already it feels a little valedictory. Whilst the shows themselves are as strong as ever the houses are painfully small and I feel for my cast. Any dreams of breaking even financially are long gone.

At such times my thoughts get a little poisonous where my 'non-arty' friends are concerned. All of them love the idea of what I do but very few make the actual effort to support a show.

There's a passage in the novel Past Imperfect by Julian Fellowes, who also wrote Snobs and the screenplay for Gosford Park, that captures this beautifully: -

As if one is likely to sit down and send off three thousand postcards when a personal appearance is scheduled. Obviously, they understand this will never happen. The message is really: 'We are not sufficiently interested in what you do to be aware of it if you don't make us aware. You understand that it does not impinge on our world, so you will please forgive us in future for missing whatever you are involved in.'

Caring v Not-caring

Last night I performed with the fabulous (and fabulously named) Grand Theft Impro guys at a pub in London. I've directed over fifty improv shows in 2009 but performed in just three. This was the first one that I properly enjoyed, probably because I struck that vital balance between caring and not-caring that performing requires.

And I mean 'performing' in every sense of the word.

Just rewards

At a dinner party at a waterfront house in Sydney last week I was reminded that it isn't just us Headcount=1 types who live in bubbles.

I sat across from a merchant banker who found it passing strange that I watch little television and listen to even less radio. I get my information about the world from a combination of magazines, the occaisional newspaper and online news sites, podcasts and a selection of blogs. My dining companion had used YouTube precisely once. Here were two relatively succesful white fortysomething men with quite profoundly opposing media consumption patterns.

He grandiously despaired for the future of old style music companies like EMI in the face of that online file sharing that all those crazy kids are into. Eventually we established that technological change was inevitable and that EMI had no more right to exist than Monty Burns' Trans-Atlantic Zeppelin.

His hand-wringing shifted to The Artists. How musicians would get their rightful rewards? File sharing was organised theft and even entities like the Apple Store ripped off The Artists by driving down prices.

Unsurprisingly he'd not come across the idea that a successful musician's income has shifted away from a reliance on record sales in favour of live performance. This too was unfair as The Artist's annual income was now limited to the number of performances that he or she could physically deliver in a year.

Given that much of the working world follows this exact model I couldn't see the problem. You get your bookings, you turn up, do the job and you get paid. If you're good you get booked for more jobs and maybe paid more to do them.

Of course the clue was in the word 'Artist'; he was as sentimental about musicians getting special treatment as he was about EMI. He hadn't heard that Radiohead released their latest album In Rainbows online with a pay-what-you-want pricing plan. Then again he hadn't heard of Radiohead. And he felt it was demeaning that A Major Artist like Bruce Springsteen might still 'need' to play gigs to get his due. The fact that I saw one of two Springsteen shows last year at the Emirates Stadium in North London where over 40,000 fans paid £100 each night didn't alert him to the fact that there's plenty of cash about if enough people think you're good enough.

He saw Artists where I see craftsmen. The good performers I know focus on the craft and leave it to others to grandly declare the work to be Art or not. They're happy to make a decent middle class income doing something they love.

Why should a halfway decent musician or comic make much more than a good plumber or architect or self-employed management consultant? I accept that there are a few game-changing exceptions to this rule but frankly most so-called Artists are journeymen like the rest of us.

If merchant bankers can be overpaid then why not rock stars?

Parallels

Last night I sat in on a rehearsal for the Sydney iteration of Scenes from Communal Living. It was only the third rehearsal but the parallels between their work and my London cast at the same point on the production timeline were uncanny. There was the same early reticence to work with unfamiliar people, the same two-steps-forward-one-step-back development of actors who absolutely nailed the audition but also the same wonderful commitment to break new ground.

The portents for the show itself couldn't be better.

Praising with faint damnation

The cricket show finally got reviewed, albeit on the very last day of the Festival when it could do us no good (or harm I suppose). The reviewer wasn't really much of a fan, ending her piece thusly: -

"This show will only appeal to die hard cricket fans. Or Australians."

In a month of trying Andrew Watts and I could not have written a better Mission Statement for the show.