Colin Munro (1940-2010)

My father’s best friend died on Monday.  Colin ‘Slim’ Munro was the doyen of the ABC’s Rural Department for over 25 years.  He died of a stroke but had already succumbed to a vicious dementia whose timely diagnosis had been stymied by deafness suffered since childhood.

For many years Slim was the voice of Australia All Over, a Sunday morning call-in radio programme that celebrated the spirit of a rural Australia where isolation and hardship was met with laconic humour and reflexive kindness.  The premise was that ordinary people living in often extreme circumstances had wonderful stories to tell if properly encouraged.  On air and in person Slim was a genius of teasing out a tale that seemed commonplace to the teller but was extraordinary to the rest of us.

He was an indefatigable supporter of latterly unfashionable rural charities like the Country Women’s Association and the Stockman’s Hall of Fame.  He was a wonderful after-dinner speaker who was in continual demand throughout the Australian bush.

In Slim’s time the ABC really did see itself as being owned by all Australians.  He certainly felt that way and he affected an amazing ability to remember the name of everyone he’d ever met.  He’d met so many thousands of lovely yet thoroughly ordinary people that his recall wasn’t always immediate.  Watching him ask a procession of perfectly disguised triangulating questions until his memory jogged was to witness a peculiar sort of genius.  Dementia was an especially cruel fate.

Slim and Dad met on their first day at Wagga Agricultural College in 1958.  Their friendship was both immediate and unwavering.  Slim had known five generations of my family.  He’d taken champagne and chicken sandwiches at my great grandmother’s bedside on the day of my parent’s wedding and he’d spoken at the lunch to celebrate my first niece’s baptism.  To be loved by someone loved by so many others is a blessing that my family will always cherish.

I grieve for Slim but my heart breaks for my father.  Never again will he cause his best friend’s face to light up merely by walking into the room.  Our ability to affect another in such a way dies with that person.

The attractions of improv

A new American online literary magazine called The Point has a piece about the improv scene in New York.  The type of show that it describes ('The Harold') is an established 'Chicago-style' format that is well-known in North America but rarely done well in other places.

For the last month I've been taking 'Harold' classes with David Shore, a highly credentialed Canadian teacher-performer.  There are enough genuine variations in what the format demands from what I know already to warrant some formal teaching on the matter.  I've enjoyed myself.  Whether there's a place for the Harold in the crowded London comedy-theatre market is the bigger question.

There are between 12 and 15 of us at any given class and quite a range in experience, ambition and accomplishment.  With twenty-plus years of performing under my belt I'm one of the two 'oldest' in both improv and planetary terms.  The make-up of the group is almost identical to that of the first Theatresports class I took with Lyn Pierse.  Looking around the room is like looking at a mirror image of my younger self.  Even more so than other forms of comedy, improv are overwhelmingly white, middle class and degree educated, although there is now less of a bias against female performers, especially when compared to stand-up.

It's the motivations that haven't changed.  They're the same in New York and London in 2010 as they were for me in Sydney in 1990: -

They came to the city after college to discover themselves, to become individuals. At some point in those first few months they needed work and they got their first gig as a caterer or their first glimpse of real-life corporate culture.  Do you remember that moment?  The surprise at seeing actual cubicles?  The dronelike aspect of people just a few years older than you?  The humiliation of eating at your own desk?  It’s a culture of boredom.  Everyone seems to be wearing a false face.  Spontaneity is almost actively discouraged.  You realize, perhaps for the first time, how easy it is to be meaningless— even to be successful and meaningless.  It is a world most of us want to backpedal away from, but don’t know how.  And then somehow the unicycle of improv comes wobbling by.  Is it any wonder we leap on it?

I can still show you the exact seat I sat in Belvoir St Theatre the first time I went to a Sunday night Theatresports show.  I can tell you exactly who was in the cast and even the content of some of the scenes.  On Monday morning I got up and went off to my marketing job at Unilever but nothing was ever the same again.

Great Merlin Mann piece

Using the analogy of a sandwich shop, Merlin Mann teases out some lovely truths about the relationship between a smaller external supplier and a new client.  

1. The Sandwich Guy can’t do much for you until you’re hungry enough to really want a sandwich.
2. Once you’re hungry enough, you still have to pay money for the sandwich. This won’t not come up.

Couldn't have said it better myself.  In fact I didn't.

On the buses

Spain last week. Germany today. Greece and Poland to go before the year is out. All is well in consultingland; if I'm not on planes I'm most likely not getting paid.

There's a peculiar zen-state that rescues habitual travellers from the procession of petty indignities that is modern air travel. Check in (online), line-up and zone out. Even so, most of us have a particular issue that cuts through the mental stasis to trigger a bout of low-level seething.

For me it's the increasing practice of deplaning passengers away from the terminal onto buses. I know this is essentially an irrational grievance; tarmac disembarkation greatly increases an airport's capacity which is a good thing. My annoyance stems from an barely irrepressible need to move far faster than the slowest of my fellow passengers. Upon arrival I want my autonomy back as soon as possible.

Nowhere does this seething strike me so often or so markedly than at Heathrow's Terminal Five, built at a cost of £4.3 billion for the exclusive use of British Airways, surely the World's Most Underwhelming Airline.

BA makes a habit of making unsustainable promises that often bear no relationship to the real world. Predictions of 'a rapid approach to Heathrow' are inevitably revised to account for 15-20 minutes on a holding pattern circling London. Time lost on departure is never 'made up thanks to favourable tail winds'. And 'having you at your terminal' is of course BA-speak for 'pulling up next to some slippery metal stairs opposite a seatless bus on some windswept corner of the airport'.

All with the Richard Rogers-designed building shining like a beacon in the distance.

The dangers of easy money

Instapaper pointed me to an except from Anthony Bourdain's new book Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook.  The piece is a very funny and obviously heartfelt attempt to discourage all but the genuinely obsessive from attempting a career as a chef: -

Nobody will tell you this, but I will: If you're thirty-two years old and considering a career in professional kitchens?  If you're wondering if, perhaps, you are too old? Let me answer that question for you: Yes.  You are too old.

 By the time you get out of school—at thirty-four, even if you’re fucking Escoffier—you will have precious few useful years left to you in the grind of real-world working kitchens.  That’s if you’re lucky enough to even get a job.

At thirty-four, you will immediately be “Grandpa” or “Grandma” to the other—inevitably much, much younger, faster-moving, more physically fit—cooks in residence.

To a someone who took up stand-up just before his fortieth birthday there are obvious parallels (the key word is 'grind').  The older you are the more you've gotta want it because so much of life is more appealing than another night of long car journeys and indifferent audiences for very little money.

I also love the way that Bourdain describes his industry's attitude to chefs who took the 'safe' option of a hotel kitchen or country club: -

If it matters to you, watch groups of chefs at food and wine festivals—or wherever industry people congregate and drink together after work.  Observe their behaviors—as if spying on animals in the wild. Notice the hotel and country club chefs approach the pack.  Immediately, the eyes of the pack will glaze over a little bit at the point of introduction.  The hotel or country club species will be marginalized, shunted to the outside of the alpha animals.  With jobs and lives that are widely viewed as being cushier and more secure, they enjoy less prestige—and less respect.

The analogue here is with 'hotel chef' and 'corporate comedy'.

Of late I've caught up with some of the wonderfully talented alumnus of Scenes from Communal Living.  In the eleven months since our last UK show they've almost all gone on to the 'next stage'; winning awards and competitions, getting both agents and amazing reviews of their sell-out shows.

At least two of them have started fielding offers for corporate gigs; Christmas parties mainly and the occasional after-dinner slot at a sales conference.  This is the top of an extremely slippery slope.  The money will seem mind-blowing at first, especially coming on top of all that travel to cool and exotic places but it doesn't take long before a reputation for being a corporate comic means that you 'enjoy less prestige—and less respect.'

And if your peers don't rate you then those fickle, easily influenced people who commission television won't even know you're alive.


Corporate money now = no TV deal later.

A gathering storm

This week saw a nasty escalation of the mid-project blues that often hits me during an extended and complicated job. I fully accept that a client has a right to feel nervous, especially if we haven't worked together before. No small part of my job is to ease those concerns.

Alas, the escalation came from another, albeit not entirely unexpected, quarter. As part of the task of integrating my ideas with existing elements of the client's culture I was emailed a 'background' PowerPoint presentation, which I opened at 5am last Thursday. There, in all its barely adulterated glory was a sequence of my slides.

My ideas are a big part of my livelihood and they'd been lifted without a hint of acknowledgement or attribution. Seemingly this has been going on for about three years.  The prospect of the coming fight exhausts me. Try as I might I cannot figure a way to resolve this mess without the plagiarist losing face.

The sad irony is that the client is a pharmaceutical company; one industry that exists only on account of vigorous intellectual property law.

Joke

Over dinner with a supplier last night in Barcelona we talked about the way Australians are perceived in London.   I'd like to think that generally we're respected but there's also the cliche of us being ex-colonial chancers blagging our way across Europe.

He told me a lovely Spanish joke: -

Q: Why is Aerolinas Argentinas the world's best film school?

A: Because a cable runner who gets on a flight in Buenos Aires is a director by the time he reaches Spain

And here I was thinking that it was just us Aussies.

A good meeting

Had a meeting yesterday with a consulting client to follow up on a session I ran in August.

As part of that programme I'd introduced a couple of new terms to help them get to grips with a specific strategic issue.  Yesterday my terminology was used acutely and properly yet in an entirely unselfconscious manner.

Happily, someone else reminded the group of the provenance of the terms.