Working from home

Both awesome and horrible.

A trade show? A university? A holiday?

I'm on the flight home from three nights, two-and-a-half days at the Edinburgh Festival. Time enough to catch up with lots of friendly, albeit pallid faces and to see a selection of shows. I went up looking for inspiration. I'm not sure yet whether I found any.

I've just finished Joshua Ferris' wonderful novel about life in Chicago advertising, Then We Came to the End. He has a phrase that sums up the Edinburgh experience beautifully: -

Amnesty was a gift, but oblivion was terror.

I'm obviously still trying to understand the entire Festival palaver, hence this procession of strange multiple choice titles.

The only way that Edinburgh ever made sense to me as a participant was as a trade show. Regardless of the industry a successful trade show requires an epic list of necessary factors that still aren't sufficient without the luck you need to meet the buyer you need in amongst the 2400 other sellers.

Wherever you are on the comedy food chain the person who can get you to the next level is undoubtedly somewhere in the city right now. All you have to do is get them to see your show and nail the gig the night they do. This is far harder than you'd think: posters, fliers, reviewers, even audiences all need to align to achieve this. The late night bars echo with acts lamenting that they haven't been reviewed, or that the agent was one of only three punters who turned up that night, or that all of the externals were in place but due to fatigue or illness or whatever the performer just didn't find the funny on stage.

Not everyone agrees with my Trade Show definition. Plenty of acts see the Festival more as a Comedy University ('CU Jummy'?). A chance to perform in as many as a hundred shows and to watch and drink with other comics. These people wear fatigue like a badge of honour. For a month you can make your mistakes openly. Hide in plain sight. For the last few years I was happy taking this 'university' approach but if you never intend to graduate then after a while you're just the kinda creepy older guy still hanging around campus.

The final option is to treat it as a holiday. Band camp for adults. Drop a few thousand quid on a month in Scotland instead of the Seychelles and good luck to you.

Whatever the motivation Edinburgh is wet, cold, tiring, entirely indifferent to your suffering and thus perversely addictive. I'd like to think I've another show in me.

2011 anyone?

Job v. Career v. Hobby

I'm in Edinburgh for a few days to check out the 2010 Festival and catch up with some people who are performing up here. Unless I run into someone on the street who makes me an offer I can't refuse this will be the first Fringe I've been to since 2001 as a non-performer. I'm in need of inspiration not experience.

One interpretation of the festival is that this is when you focus on comedy as your career rather than just as your job. This is the month you perform your amazing, personal, funny-yet-poignant show that'll take you away from the Mirth Control / Jongleurs grind forever. That nice woman from the BBC is going to fall in love with you and change your life forever. Otherwise on Friday week you're back at your job: trying to get the attention of a hundred-strong mass of stag parties in Bristol.

That's the theory anyway. In practice there are too many excruciatingly revelatory hours with too few jokes and a legion of clever-not-funny double-acts and sketch troupes. 2,400 different shows. The aggregate amount of time devoted to writing and rehearsing all of these carefully crafted masterpieces over the last eleven months is mind-blowing. And many of them will be starting the whole process again in a week.

Because that's the third option: performing at the Edinburgh Fringe is your hobby. It's the thing you do that defined you as different from your (non-performing) workmates.

The shortlist for the Fosters Comedy Award (aka 'the Perrier') is published tomorrow. Making that list is genuinely life-changing. Everyone else is going back to a job of some sort on the 31st.

TVland

Apropos of Friday's lament about the TV pitching process: I came across the wonderfully named In the Meeja, Darling.

In the linked post the writer describes a networking event where Jay Hunt, Controller of BBC One (and thus the most powerful woman in British television according the Guardian) spoke about pitching: -

Slightly depressingly, this boiled down to "BBC One aren't going to commission anything that doesn't have a celebrity attached to it already". The example of Richard Hammond's Invisible Worlds was used as an example of a TV format that had been kicking around for ages, but apparently "only worked" once it was tested with someone with Hammond's enthusiasm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The job is not the work.

pp 96-97

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

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

Experiences 2

Thinking further about yesterday's post on new experiences, it's worth pointing out that many TV pitch meetings occur under the aegis of an unspoken but totally understood fiction: -

What is proposed in the meeting has been designed purely to get us all through that first meeting.  Most likely it will bear little resemblance to the end result of any collaboration

Really what is being pitched is the people around the table and everything else is an acceptable lie.  As ever there are wider parallels, I've come to see that part of my job as a consultant is to 'trick' my participants into trying genuinely new things.  That requires a relationship strong enough for the ultimate two word pitch:

"Trust me."

The best exponent of this that I know is an Australian events organiser named David Grant.  David has staged the 'must attend' parties for the IOC and major sponsors at eight Olympics - summer and winter - since Atlanta in 1996.  When you hire DG3 all you know is that you won't get what you expect and certainly not what you got last time.  And you won't be disappointed.

My old company, Instant Theatre, worked with David Grant Special Events (as was) in the early nineties and it was the most fun I've ever had in corporate.  My all-time favourite experience was being invited to a meeting and shown a mocked-up film poster entitled 'The Greatest Story Ever Sold' with the text surrounded by a pastiche of every 'Golden Age of Hollywood' cliche; Roman soldiers, vikings, Biblical prophet, a low-flying plane and so on.  He told me the name of the client (a hotel chain) and the conversation went like this:

Me: Great poster, do you need me to write up something for the pitch?
DG: Pitch was this morning.  We won. We start a 4-city roadshow in Brisbane in a fortnight.
Me: Okay.  How's the show going to run?
DG: No idea.  That's why you're here.

After all we were called 'Instant Theatre'.  We spent two weeks in and out of planes and hotels staging original and funny shows for enthusiastic audiences of usually cynical travel agents.  We ate and drank well and it was genuinely sad when it ended.  There are very few corporate experiences that I can say that about.

David had such an amazing reputation that most of the time "Trust me" was all it took for him to get the gig.  He also moved so fast that he had no choice but to spread that trust amongst his suppliers.  You felt privileged to be part of it and you brought your A-game.

The coolest thing about David Grant was that when he came to sell his company in 2009 he didn't go for the juicy buy-out from someone like WPP where he would be paid handsomely for his company, paid more in consultancy fees and more again for sitting on a global board.  Instead he asked two of his long-serving team-members to become partners (hence 'DG3').

He's never sold out.  Literally.

Experiences

Improvisers are taught that there is a moment in every scene when the 'routine' that has worked so far must be broken so that the narrative can progress. Timing is everything; do this too soon (before you've properly established the routine) and you confuse the audience. Leave it too late and you bore them.

'Breaking the routine' is a useful way to think about larger things like business, career and life. In life if you're trying to break a routine you really only have two options: -

1. Repeat an experience that had the desired effect in the past, or,
2. Try something for the first time.

It amazes me the lengths to which we'll go to avoid 'option 2'.  I'm in the process of pitching a TV show at the moment and the hardest task so far has been writing the 'X meets Y' paragraph of the proposal*.  The network has said that they want something genuinely new and different and we reckon that our idea is that.  Experience has taught my creative partner that because we don't have an existing relationship with them the pitch must be framed in the context of a repeat experience.

As much as they say they're looking for 'something new', most people (in televisionland at least) don't want these new experiences to come from new people.  Which is presumably why we see old faces in new formats; we've already been asked if the idea can be altered to make it 'a bit of a celebrity vehicle'.

I feel dirty and all I've done is written three pages of A4.

* The most famous (and best) of these being of course Ridley Scott's three line pitch: 'Jaws in Space', aka Alien

Some of my best friends are...

I've just read John Lanchester's Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No On Can Pay; his diagnosis of the global financial crisis.  Lucid, funny and intelligently constructed for the interested non-expert, it is further evidence in favour of the argument that a good writer should be read regardless of his choice of topic.

He makes a distinction between 'industry' and 'business' at a cultural level: -

An industry is an entity which as its primary purpose makes or does something, and makes money as a byproduct.  The car industry makes cars, the television makes TV programmes, the publishing industry makes books, and with a bit of luck they all make money too, but for the most part the people engaged in them don't regard money as the ultimate purpose and justification of what they do...  Most human enterprises, especially the most meaningful and worthwhile ones, are in that sense industries, focused primarily on doing what they do: healthcare and education are both, from this anthropological perspective, industries.

Or at least that's what they are from the point of view of the people who work in them.  But many of these enterprises are increasingly owned by people who view them not as industries but as businesses: and the purpose of a business is, purely and simply, to make money.

p169-170

The sense of personal definition is hard to overstate as anyone who has watched a merchant banker try and explain what he does for a living to a six year old can attest.

The expensive boarding school where I studied was founded in the early years of the last century by Sydney's merchant class.  Corporate law, banking, stockbroking and commodities trading were promoted as desirable, laudable careers and some of my oldest friends have achieved immense success in these fields. My first degree was a Bachelor of Business and my high school essentially programmed me for some sort of financial career yet for some hitherto inarticulated reason I've always shied away.  Lanchester nails a social phenomenon under which I have long suffered that acts as an explanation of sorts: -

I have people I count as friends who work in the City.  We get on in all the ways in which people get on, but there is sometimes a moment in talking to them when you hit a kind of wall.  It's usually to do with fundamental assumptions based on the primacy of money, and the non-reality of other schemes of value.

p174

I work in two 'industries' (entertainment and pharmaceuticals) that I believe make the world a better place, albeit in vastly different ways.  I have always considered myself to be an unashamed capitalist so I expect to be paid well for my efforts.

But I am wary of a life where achievements are best expressed in dollar terms.