Inspired

As my wife works in the news media last night we went along to the Foreign Press Association Media Awards dinner. It was a black tie affair at a Park Lane hotel with the Crown Prince of Spain and everyone's favourite MP Vince Cable as guests of honour.

As it happened we sat at a table with two of the award winners. Miles Amoore's piece Blood Brothers Scarred by War won the Best Feature and was accepted by his brother Jim, the man grievously injured in Afghanistan who is the story's subject. Miles is already back in Kabul. Martin Hickman's piece on Palm Oil won the Best Environmental story. Martin also won the FPA Journalist of the Year award.

Both stories are amazing. Blood Brothers uses a personal angle to speak to a broad political issue. Palm Oil has the potential to change the shopping and eating habits of the developed world.

This is what journalism is meant to be.

Externalities

By virtue of our jobs consultants are outsiders. We parachute into our clients' worlds, deliver the project and then we're encouraged to leave as quickly as possible; billable hours being what they are. Yet whilst we're on a job we work closely enough with individuals to get to know them a little.

My external status often seems to cast me in some sort of father-confessor role, especially when alcohol has been involved. I have been taken into a bewildering array of confidences ranging from infidelity to estranged children to failing physical and mental health. On a more positive note I am also party to countless ambitions to change jobs, careers and countries.

What's going on in your life if you're driven to say such things to near-perfect strangers?

After twenty years I'm convinced that one of the major externalities of white collar industries like pharma is the unhappiness of employees' families. Which is the sentiment being articulated any time anyone says The stress that my job puts on my family is unbearable. Companies are really, really bad at dealing with this issue; in fact most feel they deserve plaudits for merely recognising its existence.

Yet as unemployment rises even more employees will silently bear the burden of personal and family stressors by forcing a grin every time they walk past the boss. If there is an upside to being congenitally unsuited to full-time employment then this it it.

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.

Schadenfreude (n)

i. please derived by someone from another person's misfortune

ii. being a member of a smaller audience in a larger venue than one's own

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.'

Fake it 'til you make it

Last night I compered (MC'd) a lovely stand-up gig in Bedford.

Afterward we acts sat around backstage chatting about our comedy 'careers' and as is often the way the least established of us bemoaned his lack of opportunity. When I asked why he didn't put his name forward to compere he balked; it wasn't something he'd ever done before. There was also a time when he'd never done stand-up but in his mind this was different.

The dirty little secret about compering is that promoters usually see it as a pretty low risk decision, especially a gigs like last night where there are already three or four reliable acts on the bill*. The trick to getting into compering is stick to shows like Bedford and just fake it 'til you make it.

I like that phrase, fake it 'til you make it. It smacks of bravado and backing yourself and grabbing the brass ring. There's also more than a whiff of sharp practice as it has you ignore the fact that whomever is taking you on is unknowingly carrying a risk. But, hey, caveat emptor and all that, huh?

Fake it 'til you make it is how the world works. At least the world of showbiz. Said best it's the wonderful advice that jazz legend George Melly gave his friend Humphrey Lyttelton who was doubting ability to write restaurant criticism: -

By the time they find out you know nothing about it, you will know something about it

* The exception to this rule is the New Act competition where there is likely to be as many as ten comics of vastly varying ability. These are the gigs when a great compere really does make or break the night.

Author's note: fake it 'til you make it is not recommended as career advice for pilots, surgeons, American presidents or Scottish Prime Ministers

Sydney 3

Congratulations to the Sydney cast

Don Lane (1933-2009). A lesson in globalisation

A few weeks ago Don Lane, an American-born Australian television personality, died from Alzheimer's Disease. He was 75.

When I was growing up in Australia Lane was a fixture on late-night commercial TV. With Bert Newton, Ernie Sigley and Graham Kennedy he formed a cadre that made numerous attempts to create a local version of Johnny Carson's Tonight Show. They were successful I suppose but there was always that taint of provincialism, that this was 'only Australia'. This was especially true of Lane because he was so identifiably American. We got him because he hadn't made it in New York, LA or Las Vegas.

Lane arrived in Australia in 1965, about the time that world-class local talents like Clive James, Germaine Greer and Robert Hughes were leaving. The contrast is stark. Where you go when you leave home speaks volumes about your level of ambition.

Or it used to.

James has written at length about how his was the last generation compelled to leave Australia to 'make it' and perhaps he's right. Nowadays the truism is that so long as you don't mind airplane food where you live doesn't matter. Ben Folds can base himself in Adelaide or Ross Noble in rural Victoria.

The likes of Don Lane rarely succeed in modern Australia. The country is just too globalised to accept mediocre foreign talent; an unambiguously good thing as excellence at home means that Australians go overseas ready to participate.

It's only a matter of time until the Asian filth* phenomenon goes the same way.

* Failed In London, Try Honkers

Art v craft

A group of not-so-prominent players on the UK comedy scene are agitating for comedy to be classed as 'art' so as to attract Arts Council (ie government) funding. Andrew Watts cogently outlines the core arguments against this idea and I agree with pretty much everything he writes.

My own observation is that the people stridently maintaining that comedy is art are usually the ones paying the least attention to its craft. Comedy is all about making people laugh and what they laugh at are well-crafted gags.

Laughter is a necessary condition for comedy to function as a craft although perhaps it isn't sufficient for it to be seen as art, which should require the audience to then think about why they're laughing.

The danger in public funding is that because no one believes you if you just say "This will be really, really funny!" the pitch becomes all about what the audience will supposedly be thinking. This puts the cart waaaaaay before the horse. All too often the end result is a performer blaming his unamused audience for not 'getting it' before diagnosing this response as the punters being too stupid and / or bourgeois for his Art. Why not start with the brutal possibility that the gags weren't good enough?

Good comedy makes people laugh. Great comedy makes people laugh then think. In that order.

Enjoy not knowing

One of my favourite improv exercises is called 'What Happens Next?'. It goes like this: -

An actor stands on stage facing three 'directors'. The actor begins by asking "What happens?". The first director issues an instruction (eg "You pick up the letter sitting on the table"). The actor then plays that through. When she reaches the end of the action she asks "What happens next?" and the next director issues the next instruction, the actor plays that through and we continue in this way until the narrative is complete.

I use this a lot in auditions as a way of establishing which performers will happily give over control to others. In the example I gave above, an untrusting actor will take that first direction ("You pick up the letter sitting on the table") to mean "You pick up the letter sitting on the table, open it, read it, see that it's from a lawyer and react to the fact that you've just inherited a million pounds."

A trusting actor will simply pick up the letter and then ask the question.

Of course this may be the way that the scene progresses but the untrusting actor has taken it upon herself to do the directors' work; making four additional narrative choices when the object of the excercise is for her to make none at all. At a very basic level the actor does not trust her directors; she cannot wait to learn what happens next.

Improv works best when the actors genuinely don't know what's going to happen next. Experience teaches good performers to simply 'enjoy not knowing' because most of us in the audience find ignorance of the future a terrifying thing. Watching actors on a stage embrace that ignorance is a big part of what makes improv magical.

"Enjoy not knowing for a while" was also the best advice I was given when I quit my last job back in 1990. There are times in all our lives when the future is essentially unknowable and these are usually Big Moments; job loss, relationship breakdown, new parenthood and so on. We can choose to either rail against that fact that we don't know what happens next or simply embrace it for a while.

Something will happen. Something always does.

Sydney 2

Early reports from opening night in Sydney are fantastic!

Sydney

The Australian iteration of Scenes from Communal Living opens in Sydney in a few hours time.

This is the moment when I get a genuine sense of the robustness of the show. Is it replicable? Does it work at all away from my direction? If so, how much does it morph and into what? Do I have something that might one day be 'franchisable'?

In other words, do I have the beginnings of a brand?

The price insensitivity of bored lawyers

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a lawyer in possession of a good career must be in want of a creative sideline*

Why is it that lawyers envy actors and writers so much? Rare is the successful lawyer who does not have a not-so-secret desire for artistic credibility of some sort. You don't get this with other professions; doctors, architects and engineers don't seem to openly rue the fact they could've been on the stage or NYT bestseller list.

There is a lot of overlap of the essential qualities for success in both law and the linguistic arts. Julia Cameron of The Artist's Way describes the law as 'a talky, wordy profession' and it's hard to imagine a successful barrister who cannot summon a sense of theatre when required. Moreover, many people who go on to make a name in the creative industries actually studied Law at university. The partner in the law firm went to the same lectures as the award-winning director. Guess which one shines over the dinner table.

Beginners' classes in stand-up comedy and improv everywhere are overrun with bored lawyers wanting something new to talk about on Monday morning. It would be interesting to know the concentration of lawyers participating in this month's NaNoWriMo.

So what's the issue? It's seemingly wrong to deny anyone, even a lawyer, the chance to follow their dream. The problem arises over ability to pay: a bored lawyer is a price insensitive creature.

This is great news for the providers of 'how to' classes in fields like drama, comedy and creative writing as they can increase their asking price. It's extremely bad news for younger and poorer part-timers trying to break into the same creative field if they're priced out of the classroom.

* With apologies

Gaming the cosmos

My To Do List for November is suspiciously short at the moment, something that's never a good sign in a Headcount = 1 world. In fact it's so short that I've decided to spend the week pushing on with some of those creative projects that have been on the back-burner for eleven months.

The pattern is so obvious that I feel like a fool: due to factors I can perhaps explain but not ameliorate my consulting business goes into a brief hiatus every northern autumn. In the past this has reduced me to an intolerant and therefore intolerable puddle of doubt but this year I'm forewarned and thus forearmed. So I'm going to trust that the business cycle will pick up in a month and devote my surplus time and energy to those Second Act projects (note the date of this!) that have lain fallow.

Of course I do this with the sly belief that when the world wants something done it gives the task to someone who is busy already. Experience has taught me that if I commit to (as yet) unpaid projects with the intensity I take to paid ones then paying clients will come knocking.

Does the cosmos care if I'm gaming it?

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.

An extremely trite observation

Any city where residential property prices are a regular topic conversation is most likely a pretty good place to live.

Craving certainty

When visiting the family farm I spent a few hours driving around the place with my brother-in-law. He's a thirtysomething guy who spent his twenties on the other side of the farm gate working as a grain trader. He is a smart, hardworking and independently-minded guy who is always open to new ideas but one who also craves certainty in an uncertain world.

He has access to experienced counsel from my father and his own parents but the combination of relative inexperience, an impulse for independence and a conflicting need for greater certainty is still a potentially deadly one.

Farming* is infamously fickle. My brother-in-law has to deal with a raft of totally uncontrollable variables: the weather, bushfires and other environmental factors; as well as stock, fuel and fertiliser prices, which are in turn influenced by macroeconomic factors such as interest and exchange rates. Conversely, he has a high degree of long-term control over capital investment in water supply, fencing and herd genetics and total short-term control over what cattle he buys and sells and where on the farm they'll graze.

From time to time he makes bad calls but always admits as much. Still, owning up to your mistakes is necessary for small business success but it isn't sufficient.

Recently he's happened on a system called Holistic Farm Management and he spent most of our farm tour expounding its virtues as a way of reducing the manifold uncertainty he's facing. With his permission I put on my 'consultants' hat' and quizzed him about the system.

As I understand it Holistic Farm Management is the idea that protecting the long-term health of your pasture is a higher priority than maximising the short-term value of your herd. The implication is that a farmer takes a whole-of-farm approach to pasture management and regulates stock numbers accordingly. The corollary being that the day-to-day market price for beef is mostly ignored.

The system is espoused by a local guru who alternates between saying that Holistic Farm Management is simply long-standing common sense (my father's position) and that it's an agricultural revolution waiting to happen (what my brother-in-law wants to hear). The spiel also includes a pitch for grasslands to be recognised (and rewarded) as carbon sinks in the global warming debate and a quasi-historical analysis of the carrying capacity of the Serengeti.

My layman's assessment of Holistic Farm Management is that it is a worthwhile philosophy overlaid with a dangerously rigid system based on arbitrary inputs (ie self-rating your paddocks to decide on carrying capacity) and insisting on either slavish adherence to a potentially misbegotten annual workplan or an unwieldy global reassessment that renders learnings from past experience elusive at best and at worst totally invalid.

As a guru in a vastly different field I won't comment on the rhetoric but I am critical of the choice of target market: younger farmers like my brother-in-law who just want to drink the Kool-Aid. Any Kool-Aid.

* Or perhaps I should refer to it 'ranching' as these days the business is almost 100% beef cattle

Home

After my work in Singapore I 'dropped down' to Australia, my logic being that as I was only a further eight hours flying time away I was practically in the neighbourhood. After overnighting in Sydney I took a smaller plane to Dubbo, the regional city with the closest airport to the farm where I grew up.

My father collected me and we drove another 45 minutes to the farm itself. As we came down the dirt road from the farm gate to the house we spotted three adult grey kangaroos. They bounced alongside us for minute or so before veering off across the paddocks, effortlessly clearing fences and lifting my heart as they went.

The scene was familiar but I'm happy to say it wasn't commonplace.

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?

Comparisons

Last night I ran a workshop with the Sydney cast of 'Scenes'. I only had 90 minutes with everyone there; a ridiculously brief period, especially as 'helping out with the show' was my raison d'être for being in Australia in the first place.

It was their fourth rehearsal. My comparison with the London gang at the same stage is this: -

Sydney's weakest performer is stronger than London's weakest performer but London's strongest performer is much, much stronger than the Sydney equivalent

Given the nature of the overall show I'd rather have London's challenges. Then again, I am always going to be biased towards the cast I chose myself.