Would you rather?

Yesterday's comment about Steven Fry got me thinking: -

Would I rather read something by a really good writer on a subject about which he or she is passionate or a badly written piece about a passion of mine?

Standing at the intersection

This week is all about the iPad.

As an Apple loyalist I guess I'll own one sooner or later but for now it's fun watching the commentariat contorting to either damn the thing or else worship unquestioningly at the altar of Steve Jobs (the Economist cover is fantastic). Stephen Fry is an unashamed Apple fan and as a good writer passionate about his subject is always worth reading I recommend his paean to the iPad. I especially liked Fry's improvement on a Jobs quote from the launch: -

Apple stands at the intersection of Technology, the Liberal Arts and Commerce

The idea of the intersection is intriguing to a small-shop consultant like me. I arrived at self-employment by stepping off the road that everyone else was on and the only niche that I can genuinely inhabit must derive from the sum total of my experiences.

What is self-branding if not an exercise in standing proud at the intersection of your own talents, skills and experiences and convincing the world it's worth paying to spend some time with you?

Congrats

The Hackney Empire New Act competition is the most prestigious of its ilk. Last night it was won by my friend Rob Broderick and his Irish improv hip-hop group Aband'o'man.

A name, as they say, to watch.

The 1% doctrine

There is some logic to the idea that it is better to overreact to a situation than to underreact. However, overreaction is not an incontestable virtue per se. Action often feels better than passivity but that misses the point; if you're trying to solve my problem then what I need is an appropriate response. There can be as much downside in doing too much as too little.

Much of the world is wired to overreaction. US tort law is an obvious driver here. American politics has long been skewed by lawyers and their lobbyists forcing the view that overreaction is a necessary virtue on the commercial culture of that country (and thence the world). I once sat in a meeting in a US corporate HQ where the in-house lawyer demanded that the company avoid recommending a specific course of action to a customer (aka 'sales') as that amounted to exposure to law suits. The VP of Sales blithely responded that if that were the case then 900 people just lost their jobs.

The most destructive iteration of this was Dick Cheney's 1% Doctrine that justified US adventurism in the Middle East because a threat to American lives assessed at a liklihood of 1% was to be treated with the same seriousness of a 99% threat. This flawed logic led to the Iraq War amongst other policy disasters.

Risk should be avoided but not at any cost.

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.

Stories

Every trainer should understand that narratives are important. Everyone should.

This is the Commencement Speech that Robert Krulwich gave at Caltech in 2008. It's part of the fantastic Radiolab science podcast series from WNYC / NPR.

Scenes from Communal Living: wrap-up

As it's highly unlikely that Scenes from Communal Living will reappear in 2010, what follows is an assessment of the experiences of last year.

The year broke broadly into four interrelated projects: -

1. The initial Camden run (18 shows over three weeks)
2. Edinburgh (25 shows back-to-back)
3. Sydney (10 shows over a fortnight)
4. The return to Camden (16 shows on consecutive Sundays)

Initial Camden Run

An almost unqualified success. The cast were focused and committed to the rehearsal and performance schedule. The investment in PR ensured a decent level of press coverage. Friends and family made the effort to support the show, some on multiple occasions. The shows themselves were high energy and great fun and by the end of the run we were turning away punters.

This straight-shot multinight run approach may be the best chance that a show like Scenes has in terms of both creative quality and promotability.

Edinburgh

Hard but a 25-show run was always going to be. It was essentially the same cast as the Camden run, many of whom were distracted by other projects. This in turn ate into the rehearsal schedule and also left me with little or no post-show time to correct bad habits once we got started. As fatigue set in things got genuinely unpleasant off stage so it became harder and harder for anything good to emerge on stage. Houses were at the bottom of expectations. It was always going to be hard to achieve decent share-of-mind in the ultimate crowded marketplace, especially as I arrived with no real appreciation of how little love the Festival has for improv.

I don't regret taking the show to Edinburgh but in retrospect there's much I'd do differently: demand more commitment from the cast, perhaps even recast the show entirely and definitely do less than the full month. Also I was guilty of schoolboy howlers like not giving the best quotes from London critics sufficient prominence on the flier.

Sydney

This was really Marko's baby and everything I know is via second-hand reports (including an absolutely stunning review). Marko took a different approach to casting in that he chased a couple of 'alpha performers' then allowed them a lot of input in terms of casting and rehearsal scheduling. This seemed to disrupt his production timeline but the show's overall creative quality was seemingly unaffected. We made the decision to paper the house for the Opening Night in the expectation that this would create 'buzz' and we'd recoup the lost sales in word-of-mouth. This didn't really happen and we left money on the table by giving tickets to punters who would otherwise have paid.

My advice to Scenes from Communal Living's next 3rd-party director is to have faith in your ability to extract great performances from run-of-the-mill performers rather than chase reputations, especially as the Sydney 'alphas' ultimately didn't outshine the rest of the cast. The success of the straight-shot multinight approach was certainly vindicated.

Return to Camden

We expanded the cast and creative quality returned to pre-Edinburgh heights. I had taken a regular weekly slot because I was intrigued by the challenge of carving out an ongoing space in the London comedy landscape. My hubris was aptly punished, especially as I relied on some low-level media contacts, Facebook and fliering as my sole promotional tools. We were old news to both the London print media and those punters who had supported it earlier in the year. Tickets were unnecessarily expensive for a Sunday night show.

In London a 50-or so seat theatre is a promoter's black hole: there's no way that anything less than a consistent run of 90% houses will break even after PR costs have been factored in. The theatre was unwilling to offer much of a discount and I glibly refused to see that as I was going to lose money anyway I might as well have set a loss-making ticket price from the outset and got bigger houses. I also wonder whether the specific nature of the show (scenes always set flat-share arrangements) was a negative for improv fans who will happily turn up every week to watch the same actors work in a more demonstrably open format.

2009 taught me a lot. I'm a little sad about the 2010 hiatus but needs must.

A thought for the day

It is useless to try and reason a man out of something he wasn't reasoned into

Johnathan Swift

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

Due diligence

If 2009 was The Year of Playing Nicely with Others then 2010 is shaping up as The Year of Due Diligence.

I am looking down the barrel at a couple of hugely expensive undertakings that will test to the limit my usually comfortable financial buffer. As this buffer shrinks my psychic need for due diligence expands.

Whereas I am normally happy with my travel agent's best price on, say, a flight to the US, now I need to be 100% sure that there isn't a better deal out there somewhere. In practice this means additional hours online and on the phone. Those hours have to come from somewhere and so I'm calling a twelve-month halt to all but the least time-consuming of my creative pursuits.

Of course I'm aware that most of these efforts will be in vain and that the travel agent will have had the best deal all along.

I'm reminded of a marketing research project I undertook for a major Australian supermarket chain about twenty years ago. I conducted well over a hundred in-depth interviews with women who shopped at the budget chain to understand how we could improve their grocery-buying experience. The short answer was that we couldn't. Our client's stores were dusty and cramped and not that much cheaper than their more salubrious competitors but that was the point. Shopping there felt like work. It felt like work because it was work. Shopping there let these women feel that they were doing their bit for the family. If they couldn't be earning money then the least they could do was to spend it begrudgingly.

Effort = Contribution

Like I said, the need is essentially psychic. But when the bills are large and unavoidable then due diligence is all that's left.

'Tis the season for expats to get sentimental

The limitations of the form

The final Scenes from Communal Living was a massive success. We had a full theatre and the huge cast (9 performers) put on a wild and crazy show that left everyone on an absolute high.

As is the way with these things the late night drinking turned into an unabashed mutual admiration session. And as is my way I spent most of the time dispensing unsolicited career advice. Mostly I told anyone who would listen to get free of improv as soon as possible.

Don't get me wrong: I love improv. In 1989 I was taken (dragged) to Belvoir Street Theatre in Sydney to see Theatresports and my life changed forever. Twenty years on it is the only form of comedy I know I do well.

Improv comedy makes you clever and quick. It sharpens your comic timing and gives you an innate sense of exactly what the audience wants to see and hear. It teaches you to tell stories with beginnings, middles and endings. Great improv is a joy to watch and an even greater joy to perform.

But by its nature it is not written down and therein lies the rub if you want a career that includes the lucrative avenues of radio, TV and film. With a few especially formulaic exceptions like panel shows and Whose Line is it Anyway? the electronic media needs to see a script before it can produce comedy. Sets, props, costumes, sound effects, music and CGI cannot be specced, costed or sourced without a pre-agreed script.

By the time this pretty obvious bombshell dropped on me I was about five years into my comedy career in Sydney. I was regularly performing, making money and constantly being told that improv was as legitimate a comedic form as stand-up or sketch comedy. This was true only until TV and radio came knocking. When they did I had no capacity to actually write comedy and opportunity passed me by. I was pigeonholed as 'just an improviser' forever after until I moved to the UK and reinvented myself as a stand-up.

Many of my (ex-)cast are already on the radar of British TV and radio. On stage they shine but I hope they realise that won't be enough.

In some strange way Scenes from Communal Living is my little dedication to the comedy I love most. My advice to all improvisers is to remember that it's the one form of comedy that you should only ever do for love.

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.

Institutionalised freelancing

Pretty much everything written about self-employment and freelancing (including these notes) operates on an implicit assumption that working for oneself is a brave and noble calling: to strike out on one's own is to reject the status quo and follow in the footsteps of giants like Henry Ford, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

Last night I caught up with a very successful London barrister. By definition he is self-employed, albeit in a partnership within his chambers. There's nothing remarkable about this as every barrister in Great Britain is a freelancer and yet his working world is governed by the same unstated laws as mine: -

The client needs the job done more than she needs you to do it. To be unavailable for whatever reason is to elevate a competitor at your own expense

This is how the British Bar has operated for hundreds of years. There is nothing brave or noble about it, it's just what the world looks like if you want to be a barrister.

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.

A thought for the day

No city is so mundane that it cannot be enjoyed for a weekend. No airport is so wonderful that it does not pall after 90 minutes.

A servant of two masters

I've mentioned previously that I sit on the board of a West London charity that has provided numeracy, literacy and IT education to adults in the area for over 25 years. More recently we've started offering Information, Advice & Guidance (IAG) and Jobsearch services. Given our success as providers of job skills it seemed like a natural fit: -

Not only will we get your ready for work, we'll take you to the next step and actually help you find that job

We were (strongly) encouraged to expand in this way by the various funding bodies that pay our bills and for a while we thought we congratulated ourselves on achieving a happy balance between education and IAG. Alas, charitable funding is as much beset by the vagaries of fashion as any sector I've ever encountered and IAG is the flavour of the moment.

The focus-on-the-individual ethos that served us so well as an educational provider since 1983 is far less suited to the throughput-driven IAG sector. Especially as IAG funding comes with a much more rigorous benchmark than we're used to: does the client have a job?

To maintain funding for our educational operation we've been forced to link courses directly to IAG. Whereas previously our IT training was open to anyone who walked through our door, nowadays it must be attached to the job market. So our ability to help, say, a mother who doesn't need paid work but rather just wants the IT skills to email her family in Somalia, has diminished to almost zero.

Our passionate, hardworking staff are servants of two masters. As indicated by sick leave and absenteeism amongst our volunteers, the stress levels are now worryingly high. We'll keep fighting to maintain our ability to serve our real customers, the people who walk through the door but too often this puts us in conflict with those who write the cheques.

I worry for our future.

Swerving

I find that the biggest limitation of working alone is the isolation. Not so much the social stuff as I work in the creative sector of one of the world's great cities so conversation with other self-employed types is pretty much always available. Rather, my challenge is with intellectual isolation. Put simply: -

How do I put myself in the path of new ideas?

In his book Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, Steven Johnson explores the importance of the 'swerve' as a key driver in the formation of creative cities. This is the phenomenon whereby you discover something unexpected whilst looking for something else. Swerving costs you nothing except time. It used to be called 'serendipity': -

Serendipity (n). an aptitude for making desirable discoveries by accident

My problem is that because I don't leave home to go to work I'm far less likely to encounter the unexpected. Working from home means I don't get to swerve.

It's hard to use the internet to put yourself in the path of new ideas, especially if you like your ideas to be well-written. We are each a prisoner of our own Bookmarks. This is why the 'old media' guides to the internet are still popular; they present a swerving opportunity. Otherwise we're likely to use the internet to confirm, not challenge our thinking.

Nick Cohen, writing in Standpoint Magazine, puts it thus: -

On the net, as in the rest of life, team-building does not lead to sceptical questioning but to the reinforcement of their existing opinions and loyalties

My advice is to balance internet usage with subscriptions to magazines that pay their contributors enough to attract first rate minds who can really write. Not only will you regularly be put in the path of new ideas but once a week you'll get the best possible fillip to the isolation of working from home: the thud of something exciting dropping through the mail slot.