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?