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.

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.

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.

Hunting v. Farming

It intrigues me how a quickly potential job that I first file under 'nice to get' becomes a 'must have'; an off-hand remark from a client that gets blithely entered onto my contacts database as a 'maybe' is transformed into a Great White Whale, the capturing of which my livelihood depends.

This is a consequence of my high-cost low-incidence business model; I price aggressively but don't expect to work every day. I didn't purposely adopt this approach, it just aligns with an industry where demand for my stuff is really driven by R&D pipelines, sales team 'time off road' and so on. A parallel might be made with salespeople in an industry like real estate or high-end high tech where a lot of energy is spent pursuing a smallish number of leads in the expectation of a large commission. NBD is thus a matter of hunting (whales) not cultivating a larger number of lower yielding clients.

Fitting then that I've just landed some work in Norway in February.

A feeling of belonging

When I checked into the hotel in Singapore on Tuesday night the first person I saw was a Filipino sales manager due to attend this week's training session. I asked how he was doing and he replied, "Pretty well, considering."

Considering?

Ah, yes.

At dinner he described the grim chaos that had swept through Manila on Saturday, September 26. In passing he mentioned that he'd been rescued off the roof of his house ignoring the blithe corollary that everything he owned was lost in the flood.

The real point of the story was that he had spent all of Sunday, Monday and Tuesday driving his 4WD around the city to collect every member of his sales team he could find and depositing them and their families at the company's offices, situated on the upper floors of a relatively unaffected building. He showed us a text message sent by a rep who didn't know if he'd survive the night. He told us how one employee's 15-year-old daughter had been caught at home alone and had to swim a few hundred metres through swirling water to a neighbour's rooftop. He joked about having to console a new team member who felt personally responsible for the destruction of her company car.

He spoke with tearful pride at the way the boss had ordered him to do anything and unquestioningly pay anything until everyone employed by the company was accounted for and how food, water, blankets and medical care were waiting at the offices for each influx of refugees.

It wasn't work, he said, it was tribal.

The franchise begins...

Sydney

London

The why before the how

Next Monday I'm in Switzerland pitching on a whole-of-region sales training project for a very successful small pharma company. I've done the research and crunched the numbers and written the next-to-last draft of the pitch document yet a single question nags me: -

Why do they want the project?

They're already successful and in no small part this has been driven by a strong if informal HR policy of recruiting experienced salespeople. I could even argue that by taking a successful team off the road they're losing money.

Yesterday I found an article in the latest edition of Monocle (a magazine that keeps surprising me) on European military conscription. Contrary to the 'tough love' blather of the right-wing commentariat, no sane person now sees conscription as a good thing. It is an expensive and dangerous way to staff your military and soldiers have better things to do than play some sort of stern uncle role for a generation of lost youth. One of the few European countries with a coherent justification for universal conscription is in fact Switzerland where the army acts as a transcendent and therefore unifying experience for men who might otherwise identify themselves as 'Swiss-German', 'Swiss-French' or 'Swiss-Italian' instead of simply 'Swiss'.

Maybe this is what's going on with my client.

Although they wouldn't admit it, or possibly even be able to voice it as such, perhaps the key motivator is less about upskilling the sales team and more about creating a transcendent / unifying experience. I could be overthinking things as usual but unless I resolve this in my own mind before Monday the trip is already wasted.

Vision v. expediency

We're chasing print deadlines for the Sydney show. This was the week that we hit the place on the timeline where our hitherto irresistible uncompromising artistic vision crashed into an immovable fact: -

no artwork = no poster = no audience

Losing 'week one' of an eight-week project line is still a week lost. We've been kidding ourselves that we'll make it up somehow but this week's compromise is as inevitable as it was predictable.

Every time a supplier or client or collaborator or whoever tells me to stop quibbling and just be happy with the latest draft I feel a little less like the guy with the artistic vision and a little more like everyone else.

World class

Recently I was asked to run a session for a smallish sales team of mostly older representatives that was experiencing some morale issues. The root cause of these issues was historical and mostly external but they were issues nonetheless so Marketing brought me in do my shtick, which went pretty well.

I had the group for an afternoon and by the time we finished at 5pm it had been a long day, especially for those who’d been up before dawn to catch flights from Belfast or Edinburgh. There was a clear sense that I was the last speaker of the day and after my thank-you-and-good-luck speech everyone got up to leave.

Not so fast.

The product manager hurriedly announced that there was one final item of business: the agency wanted to make a presentation. That this was greeted with no more than the usual level of passive contempt that salespeople have for advertising agencies was a gesture of remarkable restraint given the fatigue level.

The guy in the nicest suit in the room took the stage and announced that he was excited. Furthermore, in a moment absolutely everyone else in the room was going to be excited too: -

Okay, so who here's on Facebook? Or Twitter? Or maybe MySpace?

Misreading silent disdain for embarrassed ignorance he broke it down: -

What we're talking about is something called 'online networking'. It's the fun and cool way to keep in touch with friends and colleagues.

In a display of spurious ‘adding value’ that rendered me awestruck, the agency had convinced the brand team to invest in their own exclusive version of Facebook. Leaving aside the conceptual flaw in constructing a closed social network in the first place, the dumbness of the idea was apparent even before he’d started taking questions from the floor: -

The use of the site would be 100% voluntary...

You wouldn’t have to go on it at all if you didn’t want to!

Except that information vital to everyone’s job would be posted there...

Marketing can update you without all those boring teleconferences!

It would be a problem-solving forum that would be ‘reps only'...

A great way for you to highlight any problems you’re having so that the rest of the team can weigh in!

Apart from the fact that pretty much anyone in Head Office can log in...

So we can get an up-to-date temperature check of the mood of the team!

And watch you admit that you're no good at your job in real time.

As a way of hoovering some extra cash out of a client it was a work of genius. As a way of annoying a sales team of forty- and fifty-somethings it was truly world class.

The List

We all love lists apparently. There are few things in life more satisfying than pulling out The List and crossing off a particularly onerous chore recently completed. The busier I am the more childish the satisfaction that this gives me.

Merlin Mann of the fantastic 43 Folders describes the danger that comes with not having 'ubiquitous capture' when you rely on To Do lists. The more you depend on The List, especially an electronic one, the greater the need for all tasks to appear on said List.

If The List is unreliable then sooner or later you will get blindsided. Then you stop trusting The List. Then why have one at all?

Like I said, I'm frantic right now and yet according to my List I'm on schedule with projects in at least six time zones. Do I trust it (ie 'me')? Or do I revert to that old producers' maxim: -

Total paranoia is total awareness

Boarding a moving train

One of the first things I posted on this Blog was on 'momentum'.

At the time my struggle was with my own ego; the petulant child in me who wanted to 'punish' a recalcitrant client who took days to reply to my emails by responding in kind. A suicidally immature approach to business that draws more from The Rules than from any sane business text.

One of the few things that we suppliers can control is our speed of response to a request. This is something that really gets noticed, especially when clients are under internal pressure. It's a cheap and essentially painless way to exceed expectations.

Right now every client I have is operating at warp speed. Marketing departments seem to be on perpetual fast forward. Needs are identified in the morning and the supplier decision is sorted by close of business on the same day.

In the coming months the guy who answers his phone and checks his emails is going to be busy.

On the road again

This week I'm running a consultancy workshop in Reading. Next week I'm in Coventry, Helsinki and Wokingham. The week after that I'm Zurich, Singapore, Sydney and Dubbo. Hopefully some of it will be as glamorous as it sounds.

Probably not Wokingham or Dubbo.

Debriefing Edinburgh

I'm processing my commercial / marketing learnings from Edinburgh.

So much of a project's marketing success comes down to proper focusing of finite resources. This is something that I got at least partly wrong this year. A disciplined mix of resources including time, manpower, passion and money is required. Every year too many impecunious acts convince themselves that an abundance of the first three removes the need for the fourth.

I agree with a recent Seth Godin post about 'bootstrappers' (one of his favourite terms).

Unsolicited approaches

Here's a quick tip for anyone starting out in the field of personal banking: if you insist upon an appointment with a new client have a better opening question than: -

Are you busy at the moment?

And best you don't follow that inanity with: -

I've asked for this meeting so that I can give you my business card.

Breaking up is hard to do

An old uni friend from Australia came to see the show last night. Afterwards we spent a few hours catching up on friends and acquaintances. Naturally her husband, who I was at school with (Sydney can seem ridiculously small), came up in conversation. He's been self-employed for years now, mostly in a partnership with a guy that he's now trying to shed.

The stress of decoupling a two-man band is something I went through a few years ago. The guy I call my 'partner' is really no more than the co-developer of our IP all those years ago. Going from Headcount = 2 to two solo operations with an explicit understanding regarding geographical territories was one of the smartest things we ever did.

Ah, the glamour

The stand-up comic's "all expenses paid" hotel room...

The management consultant's version of the same.

A fully clad emperor

Last night was my first stand-up gig since Edinburgh. I was booked to open (ie do a 20-minute set) at a bar in Plymouth. The headliner was the excellent Steve Hall of 'We Are Klang' fame. On top of our fees we were both put up in a (cheap) local hotel for the night.

All for the entertainment of eleven punters.

It was patently obvious this was the way it was the moment I stepped into the bar. The sound of the clinking glassware being cleaned by the three barmen. The musty smell of a bar that was busier the night before. The eagerness with which our free drinks were provided.

Staff and acts conferred and immediately agreed on a catalogue of reasons for the lack of trade: people had been out in the sun all day, the England-Croatia match, the fact that the uni wasn't back for another few weeks. It would've been impolite to point out facts like the bar being tucked away from any foot trade or that the single sign advertising the comedy was in the Gents toilet upstairs in the bar itself. No, it was easier to brainstorm a bunch of external factors and blame them.

Why be the guy who denies the next couple of comics the chance of a paid gig and the glamour of a night away from home on the Devonshire Riviera?

Competitive pitches

I've been asked to pitch on a whole-of-Europe roll-out of a new selling system at the end of the month.

It looks to be a huge project and possibly one at the outer limits of my capacity as a smaller supplier. On closer examination something isn't right; the briefing document is suspiciously short and reading it leaves me with more questions than answers. I'm left wondering one of two things: -

• The client doesn't know what they want from the project so allowing me to read between the lines and interpret the brief in a way that I think will best serve the client's long-term needs;

• The brief was written with an existing supplier in mind (who already knows how to read between those lines) and I'm just making up the numbers on the day of the pitch

The first interpretation is highly motivational whereas the second leaves me sulking. I'm giving myself until next Tuesday to get a better sense of the politics before diving into draft project design, building the presentation, booking flights, organising print design and all the rest.

I am also alive to the possibility that being so used to having my reputation precede me has left me short of match fitness where competitive pitches are concerned and I'm already looking for excuses.

Back in the saddle

Last night we restarted Scenes from Communal Living at the Etcetera Theatre in Camden. A small house saw a terrific show performed by a cast of three 'veterans' of the Edinburgh and previous Camden runs and three 'Scenes virgins'. Everyone surprised each other and so everyone shone.

It felt like coming home.

On the other side of the world Marko is halfway through casting the Australian run (opening at the Fusebox Theatre in Marrickville on November 3). We spoke at length this morning so far his experiences parallel mine from February and March. This consistency means that once I take the learnings from Edinburgh into account I may yet have something replicable.

This week I have to be in Plymouth for a stand-up comedy gig and Zurich for pharmaceutical consulting work 24 hours later. Only in my world would this be considered normal.

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.

In violent agreement

Coming to the end of a stupidly brief visit to work with a Canadian team that has been a client since 2002. In the intervening years their thinking about our processes had ossified, different parts of the organisation had come to believe that they and they alone were the true adherents to our original thinking. Sometimes our stuff generates a quasi-religious excitement that whilst gratifying in the short term is a little hard to manage over time.

My brief was to 'reboot' the process without leaving anyone feeling that the efforts of the last seven years had been misspent. We got through the messy he-said-she-said phase quickly enough and re-established a sense of common purpose.

Observing that people are 'in violent agreement with each other' is a useful phrase and I recommend it to all.

I'd forgotten it was summer...

23C in London today. A month in Scotland has made such a thing seem unnatural.

Done

25 improv shows. 23 cricket shows. 28 stand-up gigs.

Done.

One last learning

If you get caught in a rainstorm (you will) simply walk into the nearest pub (an easy task in Edinburgh) and ask if someone has handed in a black umbrella.

Don't worry, everyone does it.

When you no longer need the brolly it's only right that you leave it in the next pub you visit.

New blood

Illness meant that the 'Scenes' cast was in danger of being undermanned yesterday so I pressganged Albert Howell, an old Canadian mate and a seriously good improviser into the show.

It's a cliche known to every sports fan: the special player who makes it look easy, who seems to somehow have more time and space than everyone else on the field. The really special ones have enough time and space to make the people around them look good.

If improvisors aren't being surprised by what is being said to them on stage they go a little dead inside. They start anticipating, which means they stop living in the moment. An audience can somehow sense that they're now not watching wonderfully spontaneous creativity but rather a sort of badly underwritten sketch show. Even if the laughs keep coming they're nowhere near as heartfelt.

Obviously introducing new blood in the cast reintroduces the element of surprise. If the new performer is as good as Albert then wonderful things will happen.

Last show of the Edinburgh run is at 325pm this afternoon. We start back at Camden next week.

Lessons large & small

This Edinburgh has led me to the following conclusions: -

• Improv comedy has a way to go to be seen as a credible alternative to stand-up, musical and sketch comedy

• Younger performers cannot be relied upon to manage their own scarce resources of energy and focus

• Double-acts need both personal chemistry and decent writing. No excess of either excuses an absence of the other

• The sooner you accept that there's always a cooler party / bar than where you are the happier you'll be

• Very few performers can deliver on stage drunk or even tipsy. I am not one of them

• The best way to destroy a pair of suede shoes is to wilfully ignore the fact that an Edinburgh Fringe is a month of fliering in the rain
  

Opportunities for learning

I haven't been able to post for a few days because I've been too angry.

Wednesday's Scenes from Communal Living was so bad I was nearly speechless with rage. The poor audience sat through a procession of tasteless, pointless autopilot 'comedy' that was unfunny in every possible way. Career-damagingly bad.

Of course it was the first show of the run that industry friends of mine from Australia and Canada had come along to watch. This Edinburgh was supposed to be my showcase for improv's possibilities but this was nothing more than an eloquent demonstration of its limitations.

Post-show notes were nasty, brutish and short and I walked away disconsolate.

I found out later that for once the cast took my notes to heart. When I arrived at Thursday's pre-show meeting the cast was already in the room, focused and ready to warm up. That day's show was a good one. Yesterday was the same with equally pleasing results.

Maybe the penny dropped. Maybe my young cast has realised that when you perform on autopilot bad things happen. It's Day 24 of the Edinburgh Fringe but as tiring as that may be, the audience members are seeing the show for the first time.

Tunnel vision

Five performing days left in Edinburgh.

For most inmates of this strange and wonderful assylum that means only another five days before rest and normalcy and the struggle to right the bank balance and write next year's show.

I'm faced with a different dilemma. For months I've been psychologically throwing any task associated with my consultancy work (aka 'my grown-up job') over the wall that is August and this time next week I'm delivering a daylong workshop in Toronto.

Buy the ticket. Take the ride

As expected

By Saturday night it was obvious to all that England were going to regain the Ashes by winning the final match of the series at the Oval.

I suppose you'd call it poetry that we were on stage doing Watts and McCure Know the Score to a packed house when Michael Hussey's wicket fell and the synchronicity made for a genuine Edinburgh moment. Andrew Watts then made me sit on stage and read out the Australian scorecard to the absolute delight of the crowd.

As long as they're laughing, huh?

This will be funny but not fun...

Doing a comedy show about the Ashes is not as good an idea as it was a week ago...

Ripples

A consultancy thought for today.

This morning I was speaking to my business partner in New Zealand. He looks after our Asia-Pac clients and he's finding life extremely quiet so it was nice to be able to run through my list of projects, both potential and ongoing. Not because it gives me a sense of superiority but because of the way that the pharma industry ripples outwards from North America and Europe.

I predict that he'll be busy in about twelve months.

Hear me out

I spent much of today in Slough of The Office fame, a town boasting possibly the most onomatopoeic place name in Britain.

The occasion was my first consulting job in a few weeks; half a day in a room with seven high-ranking sales and marketing personnel to discuss an upcoming product launch. As I've observed previously getting all the right people in the room in a pre-launch setting is much like aligning planets so I took a day out from the Fringe madness to run the workshop.

Really all I did was swap the task of convincing one lot of perfect strangers that I'm funny for the task of convincing another lot that I'm smart. It still starts with suspension of disbelief.

If they hear you out you're most of the way there.

The world is divided into two types of people...

Those who cry off work claiming swine flu and those who turn up.

Halfway

We are now halfway through the 2009 Edinburgh Fringe so Scenes from Communal Living has a day off today. I am still performing in two other shows later but as Scenes is the production in which I've invested the most even on hiatus it's the one that demands most of my attention.

A few days ago I described my frustration at the lack of focus from some of my cast. I'm starting to worry that my actors are splitting into two factions; one still focused on giving the audience a great show worth the ticket price but another that now can't see past personal agendas.

I need to be a little careful here as everyone is performing for free. It's unlikely that we'll put enough bums on seats for the profit-share arrangement to kick in. And as well as performing everyone is fliering for at least an hour a day. Whilst undoubtedly exhausting this the deal we agreed to beforehand.

As ever it's all a question of each individual's motivation for being in Edinburgh. No one makes money and almost no one gets famous so why are we all here? To me the 'correct' answers are to further one's craft, to experience what it's like to perform in a month-long run and to improve one's profile as much as possible. The 'incorrect' answers are all about fun and sociability and bragging rights; for one month a year you're as much a Festival performer as Reg Hunter or Adam Hills. Only of course you aren't.

Alas, I have a couple of cast members who seem to be stuck in this second mindset and if something isn't fun they sulk. Fliering is never fun and I do my best to thank everyone every day for their efforts on that front.

But doing a bad show is no fun either and I've been openly accused of being negative for pointing out bad work in my oh-so brief post-show notes. Our reviews so far have been mixed and I can't argue with the more damning assessments any more than I can wholeheartedly embrace the more encouraging ones.

I need a break from my cast as much as they need a break from me. Tomorrow I have a day trip to London for a consultancy thing. It's a long time since I've regarded the prospect of flying into Heathrow with this much enthusiasm.

So ya wanna be a star?

Talent is so obviously 'cost of entry'. Less apparent is the need for 'emotional intelligence'.

A better day

Every review of an improv highlights the variability of the artform. In the better (kinder?) ones it's mentioned towards the end, in harsher ones it's called 'inconsistency' and raised in the opening sentence. This is the nature of improv and has to be embraced.

I'm doing my damndest to free my cast from the pattern of following every great show with a weak one. This means focusing on the consistency deficit within each show. So every moment with the cast is precious.

Today was a strange show in that we went on 20 minutes late (unheard of at a Festival) because of an issue with a punter in a wheelchair. The actors might have been thrown but weren't.

I'm still too pessimistic to declare the pattern broken but the signs are good.

Frustration

Being a non-performing director at a festival is a very different thing to the same role in a London season and some days it's easy to understand why there are so many solo performers at the Fringe.

The downside of going it alone is of course that you prepare alone, flier alone and spend a miserable 23 hours locked in your own head after a show tanks.

The upside is that your cast (aka 'you') turn up when they're meant to, focused and ready to engage in the task that brought you to Edinburgh in the first place; the show.

Suffice to say, I am learning. Every day I am learning.

The things we tell ourselves

The Edinburgh Fringe has been likened to a prison that just one person escapes from a year. That person is the winner of the Edinburgh Comedy Award (previously known as the Perrier Award and still referred to as such by everyone).

The rest of us inmates bounce around telling each other a series of palatable half-truths. My favourites so far have been: -

• Houses are down across the Festival this year because of the recession
  
• Free shows are doing better than paid shows this year because of the recession
• Houses are up but end-of-show contribution are down because of the recession

And of course: -

• A review is just one opinion

Relentless

The Edinburgh Fringe Festival is relentless. There are no days off and the second that one show comes down you're already thinking about the next one.

I love it!

Second guessing

The Festival is a marathon not a sprint. Already I've met bruised and beaten acts who are questioning why they're in Edinburgh.

In a 2006 interview for a Fringe podcast, veteran comic and The Now Show regular Mitch Benn identifies the three separate audiences at the festival and describes the frustration of trying to please them simultaneously.

The audiences in question are of course: -

1. Critics and reviewers; who need to seem decisive and knowledgeable
2. Agents and producers of TV and radio; who are looking for the Next Big Thing
3. Punters; who just want to be entertained

Obviously these needs run in parallel and the only possible response to this supposed dilemma is to follow the advice of that old fool Polonius. Do what you came up here to do.

No such thing as bad publicity

Before I left for Edinburgh on Tuesday I did a 15-minute radio interview for TalkSPORT to promote the cricket show. I almost never listen to commercial radio so was totally unaware of the programme in question. I had no sense whatsoever of their editorial viewpoint which regularly veers off sport to a default stance of extreme reactionary politics (Lock 'em up or send 'em 'ome. Better yet, 'ang 'em).

At yesterday's show a punter said that he had come to see us after hearing me on his favourite radio show, whose politics he agreed with wholeheartedly. As he represented a full third of the audience I decided to just get on with having fun at Andrew's expense.

Stress

Arrived in Edinburgh yesterday to be greeted by a very happy cast, an extremely focused stage manager and a total absence of promotional material. 24 hours later and I'm predicting that the continuing lack of promotional material will result in a decrease in the overall happiness of the cast.

I am assured that everyone is doing his or her best.

The Wolf

My favourite moment in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction is the scene where Jules and Vincent (two hitmen played by John Travolta and Samuel L Jackson) are panicking after accidentally shooting the black kid in the back of the moving car. In true hierarchical fashion they push the problem up the chain of command, calling their boss Marcellus and demanding that he deal with it: -

MARCELLUS

You ain't got no problems, Jules. I'm on the motherfucker. Go back in there, chill them niggers out and wait for The Wolf, who should be comin' directly.

JULES

You sendin' The Wolf?

MARCELLUS

Feel better?

JULES

Shit Negro, that's all you had to say.

Enter Winston Wolfe (Harvey Keitel) the fixer who charms those who need charming, brooks no dissent from those who need ordering around and so resolves the gory problem with absolute efficiency before riding off into the sunset with the beautiful Raquel.

In the script Tarantino capitalises 'The Wolf' to create the brand. Keitel's character has absolute high status whenever he is on screen and he deserves it because he gets the job done. He is Red Adair and Robert Towne and Guus Hiddink. He is the guy you go to when the stakes are so high that money has ceased to be a factor.

Every consultant on the planet should want to be The Wolf. The Wolf is recession-proof. The Wolf gets to pick and choose his jobs. The Wolf rides in, gets the job done with absolute efficiency, gets out and gets paid.

Know thy audience

Last night Andrew Watts and I did a London preview of our show about Test Cricket.

I find the idea of previewing an Edinburgh show in London counterintuitive. The American showbiz tradition has it that you do your out-of-town tryouts before taking a show to Broadway. This acts as a sort of extended dress rehearsal, a last chance to iron out the kinks before the final assault on ubercritical New York.

Yet in Britain every July this logic is reversed as the metropolis is flooded with underrehearsed shows frantically preparing for a provincial debut.

Andrew and I staged the cricket show as the 'second half' of a regular comedy night where we both perform regularly. Because the promoters really know what they're doing the room was jam-packed.

This was a mixed blessing for a show as specific as Watts & McCure Know the Score. Given the breadth of variety of shows on at the festival Edinburgh audiences are self-selecting. A hour listening to an Englishman and an Australian bang on about cricket certainly isn't everyone's cup of tea but if it is then we're the show for you. If not then there's about another fifty shows on synchronously with ours.

Last night's audience wasn't given that choice. They had paid their money to watch stand-up comedy and that offer was changed halfway through the night. The 10% of punters who love cricket thought that this was great. The 90% who either hated or in some cases had never even heard of the game were understandably underwhelmed.

Without discussing it beforehand on stage we each reverted to quite a lot of more general (ie non-cricket) material and I think most of the audience went away happy. So the show was a success but as a preview I fear that we learnt precious little as to whether the cricket-specific stuff works.

At least the 10% said they loved us.

Critics

After a long drive to and from a gig in Stroud, late last night I found myself reading comedy reviews. An observation: -

Stand-up comics are judged on their strongest joke, improvisers on their weakest scene

Just one of those nights...

Last night I did my first stand-up gig in a while and it was one of those nights.

Free entry is never a good start as audiences often don't value what they haven't paid for and there was a 50-50 split of younger punters who seemed to be there for the comedy and four older drunks who didn't quite know where they were in the first place.

As I was on towards the end of the night I watched act after act attempt to engage the drunks in conversation in the vain hope that they'd focus on the stage or at least shut up so that everyone else could listen. However, any attention given to them was fuel on the flames and they just got louder and more disruptive until everyone just stopped caring; comics, compere, punters and drunks alike. By the time I got to stage they were just gleefully yelling out random nonsense. I opened by mentioning that I'm Australian and was greeted with the opening verse of Rolf Harris' Two Little Boys.

Perhaps the strangest heckle I've ever had. Alas, not sung as well as this.

Damn

Our Ashes show opens in Edinburgh ten days time and I've had a timely reminder that pre-writing jokes for something like this is fraught with danger.

Those Ian Bell gags just aren't flowing quite as easily.

Onwards, outwards

On Friday I reached an 'in principle agreement' to stage a version of Scenes from Communal Living in Sydney with an Australian cast in December. My thinking is to see if the idea is replicable and possibly even franchiseable. I'll co-produce the show with Marko Mustac, an old friend who is also one of the best producers of improv in Australia and who will also be its director.

What's the point in living and working 'globally' if I don't leverage that experience to create something interesting?

I am businessman

As I mentioned, Katy and I spent last week with my parents in Provence. We spent six days on a barge eating and drinking our way down the Rhone from Provence to Aigues-Mortes, an experience that was as good as it sounds.

Le Phonecien had eight other guests; a Frenchwoman, two American couples and three Ukrainian men (I know this sounds like a bizarre retake on the Gilligans Island premise). Our three Ukrainian shipmates were friendly, interested and interesting but they had almost no English between them. Not to be bowed by this they were quick to point out that no one else spoke any Ukrainian or Russian whatsoever.

Roman and Andrei declared that they businessmen, meaning that they were self-employed. Naturally I braved the exhausting labyrinth of half-grasped meaning to see what sort of connection could be established between my world and theirs.

I learned that there is still plenty money to be made in post-Soviet Ukraine if you're smart enough (read: brutal enough) to win the battle for ex-government assets like hotels, factories, farms and mines.

Conversely, the idea that I made my living helping companies solve problems was so incomprehensible to them that I came across as basically effeminate. Far more interesting was my father, a farmer in Australia who also had a resort property in Far North Queensland. Here were proper assets. Tangible things. Things worthy of the conversations of men.

I'm just glad I didn't lead with 'theatre producer'.

Production timelines

There's a moment when you stop building the boat and concentrate on repairing it in the hope that it at least floats when launch-day comes along

Frustration

Last December I declared that 2009 would be my Year of Playing Nicely with Others, something that doesn't always come easily to a long-term freelancer like me.

This Friday is the improv show's only London preview before Edinburgh. It will be the first time the (expanded) cast has ever performed together so I arranged for two rehearsals this week. Finding synchronous diary time for a director and seven performers the fortnight before Edinburgh was always going to be tough and I should have realised that it was too good to be true.

One actor texted me 90 minutes before last night's rehearsal to say he was double-booked. Another button-holed me five minutes before the rehearsal to say that he was unavailable tomorrow night. Both actors went to great pains to tell me how committed they were to my project yet each presented me with a fait accompli.

What really annoys me is that I was forced to rewire my quite carefully considered rehearsal plans at short notice.

Because many actors are sensitive to anything they perceive as criticism a lot of directorial comment (aka 'notes') can only be successfully delivered away from a performance environment. The pre-show tone must be 100% motivational and a harsh post-show assessment can be unfair, especially if directed at one individual who has no opportunity to work on the 'note' ahead of the next show.

Rehearsal time is a director's most precious commodity. I am nervous.

Lingua Franca

My parents have been visiting us from Australia and we spent last week in Provence.

(Tough, I know)

What we didn't know ahead of time was that the Festival d'Avignon runs for all of July. It is the oldest and largest francophone arts festival in Europe and certainly a decent rival to Edinburgh in August with the same tension between the formal event and the Fringe (Le Off). The same festival buzz was palpable; random posters plastered on every available surface and streets jammed with flierers begging us to see their show. All very exciting.

Except that obviously and frustratingly everything was in French.

So when I went along to see La Compagnie Du Capitaine perform Soiree Impro I was intrigued as to how much I'd understand.

Within minutes it was obvious which actors were genuinely funny and which were merely clever. The better performers were the same ones as in every cast; committing to character, overaccepting every offer and physicalising the story at every opportunity. The witty wordplay was lost on me but there were more than enough moments where I laughed aloud to justify the cost of the ticket. The 'alpha improviser' (there's one in every cast) was as good as any I've seen in a long time.

I don't speak French but I do speak improv.

Care factor zero

At school the retort we used to indicate that we weren't troubled by something was care factor zero. Every school and every age must have one. Catherine Tate's schoolgirl catchphrase Am I bovvered? springs to mind.

The reality of self-employment means accepting care factor zero. Aside from close family and friends no one out there is willing you to succeed. Not that they want you to fail; they really just don't care. The deal you've struck is that the world will celebrate your successes but failure will render you invisible. It doesn't matter that you got sick or your kid got sick or that you overextended yourself financially or overcommitted yourself or whatever.

All the world will see is that you failed and by the time you stutter through your excuses as to why, its gaze has moved on.

On that cheerful note I'm off to the South of France for a week...

Barriers to Entry

Another day, another out-of-town stand-up gig for Mirth Control and thus another four plus hours in a car with a perfect stranger. And so another strange, roundabout conversation about the merits of the Edinburgh Free Fringe.

My interlocutor, another comic obviously, was trying to reconcile two contradictory positions: -

1. Much of the beauty and excitement of Edinburgh is that it is entirely an 'open access' event. Unlike other 'curated' arts festivals, if you pays your money you're in the Edfringe programme
   
2. The Free Fringe allows unsuitable acts on stage and both devalues the punters' experience and dilutes the audience numbers that rightfully should be paying to see 'proper acts'. It must be stopped

You can't have it both ways and you never could. Even before the likes of Alex Petty and Peter Buckley-Hill formalised the 'free' concept there were only ever two factors stopping an act, no matter how dreadful, from appearing at the Fringe: money and fear of public failure. As all comics have long since overcome the fear of humiliation money was the only barrier to performing at the Festival. Proper (read: committed) comics will drop £4,000-5,000 to 'do Edinburgh' and they feel that this figure weeded out all but the most deluded.

The real grievance against the Free Fringe is that it allows the dilettante stage time. A counterargument might be that the lowering of the financial barrier to entry enlivens the entire experience by opening it up to a new collection of poorer delusionists.

Hey, if you don't like it you can always walk out.

A rule for writing, performing and life

Courtesy of Seth Godin: -

Avoid obvious mistakes, don't follow obvious successes.

Production

Many years ago I was involved in a discussion about the qualities needed to be a good theatre producer. I said that whilst the job obviously entails intimate dealings with 'creative people', the essence of being a producer is not of itself especially creative. It is essentially an organisational role best summed up as: -

Living in a constant state of low-level paranoia

A minor epiphany

I can't direct what hasn't been written.

Collaboration + Leverage = Momentum

Two truisms: -

• A project is just a sequence of tasks that have to be done by someone
  

• Projects crave momentum yet collaboration means that real progress occurs at the pace of the slowest contributor
  

When working as a supplier in a purely commercial context (ie consulting) I happily take on as many tasks as I can. By so doing I take implicit responsibility for the momentum of the project thus giving me a greater chance of seeing the thing through to completion.

Theatre is a collaborative process and that's generally agreed to be one of its intrinsic rewards. But if you're an impatient type like me it's also a primary shortcoming. This week I've been reminded of a valuable lesson: -

It is hard to remain responsible for a collaborative project if you offload all contingent tasks to others

A successful project manager allocates at least a few tasks to herself. That way she maintains at least a little leverage when the inevitable 'deadline looming' conversations emerge. It's the difference between emailing or calling a colleague and saying: -

You said you'd have completed Task A by Date C. Where is it?

And: -

We agreed that you'd do Task A and I'd do Task B by Date C. Now, I've completed Task B...

The latter has at least a chance of sounding reasonable whereas the former just sounds like you're ordering the staff about. And that doesn't even work with the staff.

Authenticity

Last night I went to watch a friend perform at a London hip-hop event that showcased works-in-progress from artists working in that culture. The idea behind the night is to give hip-hop performers (rappers, dancers, poets, etc) the chance to develop stage pieces that may one day have a bigger future in front of less sympathetic crowds.

After each piece there was a Q&A and the audience gave focused and positive feedback. The night is run by Jonzi D who has created an environment based on his belief that hip-hop is an authentic dialogue between performer and audience.

It was a quite wonderful experience until the very last act; two sexily-dressed women in the All Saints mold. Incredibly they lip-synched to their song, a vacuous rap about not much at all. They certainly looked great and their dancing was superb but even a newcomer like me could see that they just didn't fit.

Authenticity: we know it when we see it.

In Copenhagen 2

Stop Press: the session started at 10:00 and the first mention of the weekend was 10:09.

In Copenhagen

I am in Denmark to run a workshop for a pharma client that is launching a new product. The launch is vitally important (aren't they all?). So important that they've gone to the trouble and expense of inviting me over from London to run the day-long session.

Except that I've just been told that now my workshop won't be starting until 10am.

That's not a problem is it?

Of course not.

So I'm down in the hotel lobby having a coffee and watching lovely Copenhagen cycle past in the sunshine. And wondering how much usable time I'll get before everyone's thoughts turn irrevocably to the weekend.

On the road again

I've just noticed that of late my posts have focused more on my comedy than my consultancy.

Given the state of the world economy I must say how nice it is to work in pharma, a sector that is proving to be better than recession-proof. Not only are my clients still launching products with the same regularity as ever but because of the GFC even more is riding on the success of those launches.

This week I'm in Zurich and Copenhagen working with separate clients who gave me identical briefs: -

This time we can't afford to not 'get it right the first time'*

Higher internal stakes are always welcome news for external consultants like me.

* Apologies for the mangling double-negative but that's essentially what each client said in the meeting