Things learned in 2011

1. Online co-op gaming is a brilliant way to keep in touch people. Because while calling someone up to chat about random stuff feels like a poor use of time, doing that on Skype while shooting things feels constructive.

2. Sometimes, it may seem like a friendship is so completely fucked up that there’s no way of fixing it. But if you genuinely care about each other and think that it’s worthwhile to try, then it can work out.

3. Conversely, if you keep trying with some over and over, and they keep letting you down in the same way, time and time again, then eventually you have to throw in the towel. Not out of bitterness, not to punish them, not to get even, but simply because it hurts. Because as much as you enjoy their company, it’s not worth being made to feel worthless every few months.

4. It’s nice to be there for friends when they need you. It’s nice to have friends in your life that will be there for you. But that’s not the ultimate expression of friendship, it’s not the be-all and end-all, in fact it’s a relatively minor part of the whole thing. A truly valuable friendship is one where you just like each other. Where you want to spend time with that person for it’s own sake. Because they’re entertaining and interesting, and they find you entertaining and interesting too. It’s great to have friends who are there for you when you really need someone, but they’re barely friends if they can’t find time for you when you don’t. They’re just nice people who tolerate you.

5. Having a full-time job, writing regularly about TV for one website, writing semi-regularly about games for another, running a weekly comedy night and trying to maintain a semblance of a social-life with all that is about the limit of what one person can fit in the average life. Note that updating this blog is missing from that list. I think I understand serial-monogamists better now, because after you’ve been single for over a year, you end up taking so much on that you’re left with no clue how you’d fit a relationship in with that. Despite all this, I am running a two-day comedy festival in June.

6. My ability to cook has now surpassed my mother’s. This in no way means I can actually cook, but it does likely mean I’m doing Christmas dinner this year.

Dean Love : 14 Jan 2012 23:34 |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

A bit more digging in to this Daily Mail / Amanda Knox story

I’m not normally one to defend the Mail, but this story going around that they pre-wrote two versions of the Amanda Knox verdict story, and then published the wrong one, set off some alarm bells.

If you haven’t seen it, the background is here

Writing two stories isn’t so bad, running the wrong one is a horrible mistake to make, especially when it has details and quotes that are obviously made up as they could not possibly have happened.

But.

I can see a reporter writing the two outlines, then leaving it with some work experience kid or junior reporter to stay on the desk all night and just “fix the details” when the actual verdict is reached. We can’t know for sure that the intention was ever to publish the story as it was. Take this bit:

“As Knox realized the enormity of what judge Hellman was saying she sank into her chair sobbing uncontrollably while her family and friends hugged each other in tears.”

This didn’t happen, but maybe it was just a way of writing an instruction to whoever was going to run the final piece to make a note Knox’s and her family’s reaction. Or maybe I’m being generous. We can’t possibly know as none of this ever happened, and they didn’t mean to publish the story anyway. So we can’t prove any sort of intent.

Or can we?

It stands to reason that if a ‘guilty’ story was pre-written with false quotes and observations, then the ‘not guilty’ story as run should also have false quotes and observations, which would be actually verifiable.

And this is where it gets a little wonky.

Here’s the current story in the Mail, that is found here:

It covers the reaction to the verdict as follows:

“Last night, there had been screams in court as the verdict was delivered.
Knox burst into tears and hugged her parents Curt and Edda Mellas – as just feet away the family of Meredith could only look on in amazement.”

But let’s have a look at Google shall we, which still has a search result extract from the original version of the ‘correct’ story that they posted which you might be able to see here:

Apparently:

“Knox, 24, punched the air in delight and screamed yes while her parents Curt and Edda Mellas collapsed in a flood of tears”

So apparently upon hearing the verdict, Amanda Knox must have punched the air, screamed in delight before bursting into tears and jumping on her parents to hug them while they were collapsed on the floor.

The detail of her punching the air doesn’t appear in the current version of the story on the Mail site at all, and it’s a rather odd thing to leave out. If it actually happened. Alas Google doesn’t have last night’s version of the page cached, so we can’t check any other details or quotes, but while it’s less obvious and certainly less funny than them reporting her as being found guilty, I can’t help but feel it’s a much bigger smoking gun in terms of demonstrating the fact that they’d already written and made-up these stories well before they went live last night, and then just fixed them with actual facts earlier this morning.

Dean Love : 04 Oct 2011 13:10 |  Tags: Politics |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Why Torchwood: Miracle Day Sucked

So we’re a week on from the finale, we can finally get some distance and reflect on if this season of Torchwood was really that bad. Turns out it was. It’s sad because at the halfway point I was ready to defend it. I watched the first eight episodes over one weekend and so the pacing problems were obviously there but didn’t really hit affect me half as much as people watching it with a week between each episode. But then it went so badly wrong and gave us an ending that betrayed the whole show. Here’s my analysis of exactly why this was bad television.

Character development: there was none. Seriously. Look at every character’s first and last appearances in the show. They’re exactly the same. No-one changed. Maybe, just maybe, Oswald Danes changed a bit, but the show never let us in his head. We never knew what was real and what was fake. His character veered from one place to another every week. Less a character journey, more a character spider-diagram.

Esther Drummond: the exception to the above rule. She changed. She grew up. It was kind of hokey and obvious: nervous researcher slowly becomes confident field-agent, it’s not setting the world alight as a concept. But at least it was there. So of course, she gets shot and killed. Because god-forbid we have more than one strong female character on a Russell T Davies show. She doesn’t even get to die any sort of heroic death. She’s just cast aside. Imagine how much more interesting the next series of Torchwood would be if she was the one that ended up immortal.

The acting: the main characters were all fairly wooden – we know Barrowman and Myles are a little wooden but Mekhi Phifer is generally decent but was the most shocking of the lot in his portrayal of Rex. It didn’t help that the show kept introducing decent actors before killing off their characters a few episodes or even minutes later. The wonderful Nana Visitor gets about three minutes of screen time before getting blown up, and John de Lancie’s character lights up the screen and makes the show actually feel alive for an episode an a half before he’s… blown up.

The ‘Britishness’: producing a British show with US locations and money. Sounds okay in theory, in practice we get US-style seriousness peppered with hammy British ridiculousness from the two leads. On its own one can just about deal with how silly Torchwood can be. That sense of fun seems to be an all-pervading part of British drama, for better or for worse. But dropped into the middle of a US cable show it just feels embarrassing.

The science: no-one dies, but why is no-one dying? It’s the crux of the show, and early on we get a glimpse at what sounds like proper science-fiction. Morphic fields are real and an area of science that we currently don’t fully comprehend, something ripe for exploration. Then they discover the device under Angelo’s bed and it all starts to seem very interesting. Then it turns out no-one is dying because of a giant magic creature that lives in the earth and ate Jack’s blood. Sorry what?

The politics: if you read any reviews of Children of Earth, the scenes in the cabinet office dealing with how the government react to the whole thing, making tough but selfish choices, are highlighted as one of the best parts. On the surface, Miracle Day is perfect for doing something similar. It’s a crisis, how are they going to deal with it? And this time there’s a chance to feature that sort of thing on an international scale with the UK-US connection. And they don’t bother. The classification system gets introduced but we never see the horrendous discussions that must have taken place to bring in that and the camps.

The medicine: some of the best parts of the early episodes are when Dr Juarez is attending the medical conferences, and they discuss the consequences of what’s happening, how medicine has to change and so on. None of this ever reflects on the plot, but it’s moments of interest and speculation that show how good the show could have been. And then one episode she turns up at the conference centre, only to be told they’re over. She looks disappointed, and so were we. Apparently they used them to work out the classification system, but somehow we missed all that.

The irrelevant episodes: there’s an entire flashback episode featuring Jack in 1927, and introducing who we assume will be an important character. Not the best episode, but I could live with it. But then that character is killed off in the next episode, the device he was protecting is talked about for a bit, Jack nicks part of it and it’s never mentioned again. It has no bearing on the plot whatsoever. Which means that the flashback episode was there solely to establish that in 1927 Jack died infront of three people and they watched him come back to life.

The failure of the arc: taking the previous point even further, nothing comes together at all. The camps are introduced, fought against and then accepted later on after a time-jump. The Oswald and Kitzinger stories both go absolutely nowhere at all. The Angelo thing has no point. The morphic field angle is dropped. There’s no effort made to tie it all together. Why not let the fact that Oswald was the first ‘survivor’ matter? Why not have the camps and ovens be a part of the story, perhaps the still living souls of the people burned affect the morphic field or something. Anything. Just have a story arc that actually ties itself together. We don’t even learn the motivations of the people behind it – they want to create a new world but it’s never really explained how they’re going to do that.

The missed opportunity: Russell T Davies got given ten hours and a huge budget with basically free-reign to do what he wanted. There isn’t a writer in television that wouldn’t jump at a chance to do that. And we get this. Something that can’t even hang together consistently over ten hours. And it’s such a good concept too – people stop dying. And the show even tells us what that would mean and the problems it would create, but doesn’t bother to show us. It should have been brilliant but it wasn’t. Worse than that, it was actively bad. It tore up the TV rule-book on mini-series and character development but instead of being a radical re-invention it just looked like Davies had no clue what he was doing.

I have a fairly high tolerance for bad TV, but Miracle Day was just so irredeemably, objectively awful that it should be university syllabuses as an example of what not to do. Wake me up if Moffat ever takes over this show as well.

Dean Love : 23 Sep 2011 00:36 |  Tags: TV |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

The annual X–Factor rant

If you know me at all in the real world, you’ve probably heard all this before, but for those that haven’t, I figured I’d type this up after seeing Twitter once again light up on Saturday with things on one side of the debate or another.

So here’s how the theory goes: if you like The X-Factor, you don’t like music.

You might think you like music, but you don’t. At this point I’m also going to throw out any claims for watching it ‘ironically’ or ‘for a laugh’. If either of those are true, then you may also like music. But you are also wasting your life. Please stop.

It’s also okay not to like music. I don’t like literature. I read, I enjoy reading, but I read low-brow pap. I read Star Trek tie-in novels and quite enjoyed The DaVinci Code. When I’ve tried to experiment with tougher ‘proper’ authors I’ve found it too tough. If I try really hard I can get something out of the plot and characters, but it’s more effort than it’s worth and I never really appreciate the prose. And that’s okay. I recognise that. Some people will think I’m mad or pity me because I can’t get the immense joy they can out of books but I don’t care. Reading the odd bit of pulp fiction is just something I do for fun but I don’t consider myself someone that likes literature.

Music, on the other hand, I love music. It means a lot to me, I’m passionate about the music I love, because the music I love creates feelings, emotions and mood-spaces within my brain that are otherwise hard to reach. Music affects me, emotionally, intellectually, even physically.

No performance on The X-Factor has ever made anyone feel anything. Except maybe self-disgust. Oh the show can create feelings for sure, but for a show that is ostensibly about music to have to resort to pre-filmed sob-stories about the tough lives these contestants have had just to get some sort of emotional reaction from the audience is, to my mind, ridiculous.

In the X-Factor version of Schindler’s List, it opens with a shot of holocaust survivor Poldek Pfefferberg walking down the street before he relates part of his experience in an interview. We’re then shown how he met Schindler’s Ark author Thomas Keneally who wrote the novel based around his life. The shot then pulls out and Steven Speilberg is stood there, who then proceeds to tell us how the novel inspired him and moved him so much that he just had to make the film we’re about to watch. Because if we don’t know all that, how are we meant to be emotionally effected by the film?

Actual music isn’t going anywhere, of course. There will always be people willing to pick up an acoustic guitar and sing their hearts out wherever and whenever they may be. And there will always be people willing to listen, looking for something to connect to, looking for something that moves them. But it is getting harder for people to find.

While the awful, anodyne, emotionless candyfloss-pop that the likes of The X-Factor give us gets more and more common, to the point that those who do like the show don’t understand. They think they like music. They think they’re like us. They think that when we go to gigs it’s sort of like watching ITV on a Saturday night. They think that when we say we’re going to listen to a band, we’ll put it on in the background while doing something useful. When we explain that we’re going to sit down with headphones on and just listen to a new album they look at us like we’re a bit mental.

And most of all, they’ll never understand why we hate The X-Factor because they simply can’t comprehend caring about music enough to not want to watch it abused and beaten in to a messy pulp by Simon Cowell for two hours every weekend.

Dean Love : 21 Sep 2011 23:10 |  Tags: Music TV |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

On Johann Hari

If you haven’t been following it, Independent columnist Johann Hari has apologised for being a Wikipedia vandal, and for using quotes from books or other journalists in his ‘interviews’.

Let’s set aside the Wikipedia thing for a moment. It’s silly and unprofessional but also sort of funny. It kind of makes me like him a bit more as a human-being to be honest. Your mileage may vary on that one.

But the plagiarism thing is another issue entirely. If you’re one of the journalists he nicked stuff from, then you should be very pissed-off. If you’re a journalist, you should be pissed-off on behalf of your fellows that had their stuff stolen. If you’re an editor that employed Hari you should be pissed-off that he misrepresented his work to you. If you were on a panel that gave him an award you should be pissed-off that he basically cheated his way to the prize.

But if you’re a newspaper reader, should you be pissed-off? No. He didn’t cheat you. And what he did was ethically bad and unprofessional, but it wasn’t bad journalism. In fact, it was far better journalism than what many of those throwing stones at him cultivate in their glass houses for a living.

I had a chat with Johann before writing this blog and he told me “An interview isn’t an X-ray of a person’s finest thoughts. It’s a report of an encounter,” before adding of some of his interviewees “I was attempting to represent them more accurately than the limited context of an interview offered. I felt getting across the point they wanted to make was more important than being 100% accurate in the words.”

If you Google that first quote, you’ll see I nicked it from the Independent article I linked earlier. I’m such a bad blogger! But luckily if you Google the second quote you’ll see it doesn’t appear anywhere else on the web at all, and hence it must be legit. Phew!

Except of course, I made the second one up. But if I hadn’t told you, you’d never know. The only person that would know is Johann Hari, as he’d be aware he’d never given me an interview. He’s the only person that can refute my claim that that is an accurate quote. And even if he did, it’s still my word against his. Maybe he said something he regretted and wanted to distance himself from it.

That’s the thing, if you want to cheat in journalism, if you want to make stuff up, then it’s easy. Rather than do that, Hari actually went off and did research to find something his interviewees had actually said and used that instead. That’s plagiarism, which is not okay by a long shot, but as journalism goes it’s actually a pretty good example of accurately representing the subject. It just also makes it a lot easier to get caught.

Two final thoughts: none of Hari’s interviewees complained about being misrepresented in the articles where he ‘cheated’. He did right by them, and so frankly he did right by us, the reader. He didn’t do right by his colleagues from whom he nicked stuff off.

Lastly if you’re reading this thinking “Yes, but it’s not like journalists routinely just make up quotes is it?” the I refer you to this fairly harrowing account of a woman interviewed by the Daily Mail. My favourite bit was her being quote as saying: “But most importantly, I’ve been asked out on more dates in the past three years than in the 20 years I spent in Manchester.”

Her response in the linked article:

“Leaving aside the assertion that had I spent 20 years in Manchester which meant that, using the ages in the article, I would have been 11 when I left my family and moved there (and she’s already stated I grew up in Derbyshire), this was simply not true. It was made up.”

Dean Love : 16 Sep 2011 17:01 |  Tags: Politics |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Show Me The Funny review

I wrote about episode one over here, and now in the spirit of Edinburgh, a preview of my second piece on the show. The real article will go up on the same site I just linked to on Monday, where it will cost twice as much. If it gets enough hits, you’ll be able to see the article on tour in the Autumn, either as an extended version or with a support act.

-

I should admit that the reason I’m reviewing two episodes at once of ITV’s X-Factor-for-stand-up-comics show, is that I spent most of last week half delirious in bed with man-flu, barely able to string together a coherent thought, let alone a coherent sentence. Of course, that was less painful than having to sit through an episode of Show Me The Funny. Boom. Nailed it. Except… well after the atrocious first show I was all set to give the next few episodes a good slagging off, but ended up quite enjoying them.

Yes, episodes two and three of Show Me The Funny were interesting and entertaining. You’ll note I picked two very specific adjectives there. Interesting and entertaining. I didn’t, for example, use the word ‘funny’. Because they’re really, really not.

But we’ll get to that – like the show itself, I’m contractually obliged to spend the first half of this review on the tasks that the teams have to perform. While in the first episode they were doing completely random stuff around Liverpool, these two are more focused. Their audiences are an armed forces regiment, and 12-14 year-old school kids. The tasks are doing a bunch of ‘army stuff’ and creating and teaching a school lesson. The army stuff is basically making them suffer through physical exhaustion for our amusement. Which is fun enough, and it’s nice that the most unfit team eventually win, with everyone else having given up. The school lessons are less entertaining but interesting in a ‘fish-out-of-water’ sort of way.

And then to the stand-up. I criticised the show hugely in the first episode for not showing more of the actual routines. In that episode they were performing to a bunch of Liverpool women, who may be a bit scary, but are essentially regular people, just like the rest of us. We, the viewing public, should have found those routines funny.

But when you’re performing to a bunch of soldiers that have been drinking since 6pm… well you need a different approach. Because what is funny to a bunch of aggressive people on their eighth pint isn’t going to be funny to your average sober guy watching it on TV on a Monday night. That goes even more-so for the school-kids. The point of the show is for the comics to read the room and the crowd and write material that will suit that gig. And that generally won’t line up with the desires of the audience at home. So I get why we’re not being shown more of the sets. Because even in short clips, nine comics performing filthy jokes to a room of pissed-up people isn’t funny. You have to be there. And drunk.

So ironically we have a show called Show Me The Funny that isn’t funny. Not because the comics are rubbish, but because the format is genuinely not designed to be. But it’s interesting in that it demonstrates the process, it shows how material is developed, how different sort of rooms react to different things and so on. Seeing the army gig get increasingly raucous and scary as the night went on was genuinely interesting. As a documentary on the process of comedy, it’s quite good. It’d probably be even better if ITV acknowledged that’s what it is and edited it around that concept.

So what happens? Some people do well, others do badly, Rudi is more scared of school-kids than the army, and Prince Abdi and Cole Parker get sent home for not being very funny. And I get quite annoyed because a second person gets sent home for “not showing us who you are” when the entire concept of the show is to adapt and write new material to cater to a specific environment. I’m fairly sure all the comics have a good solid opening routine that sets up who they are and where they’re coming from, but they’re not allowed to use it.

Kate Copstick is also happy to describe Cole Parker as “shit” based on only having seen him do three five-minute bits of new material. Which gets me thinking that the whole concept of the show is backwards: they should have given the acts a normal gig, doing their best five minute routine at a comedy club, in week 1, then progressed to the more out-there gigs where they do new stuff. It’s a hugely unbalanced contest, because some comics can just write more quickly than others. Some are really good at riffing with a room and some aren’t. But equally, the slower writers often produce better material, and the ones that can’t riff can craft and refine exquisitely scripted routines over time. Which is fine, because it’s just a reality show and it’s never going to be balanced. But to describe someone as a “shit” comic in front of a huge TV audience when you haven’t even see their actual act is grossly unfair. I’d say it’s a horrible reputation for him to be straddled with, but frankly I think I’m the only person still watching this and I’d probably still book him.

Meanwhile, Rudi Lickwood is still somehow in the competition, despite being told-off in week 2 for doing old material when he’s meant to be doing new stuff, and then bottling it in week 3 and leaving the stage after only doing three of his five minutes. He’s another great comic that’s just entirely unsuited to this competition, but at least the others are trying.

Next week they’re doing a medical conference. This makes me happy, as it’s the first time they’re playing to a, shall we say, ‘sophisticated’ audience. Hopefully it’ll finally be a chance for the talented gag-writers to shine. Maybe there will even be some actual jokes.

Dean Love : 03 Aug 2011 21:15 |  Tags: Comedy TV |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Yes to AV: Vote for change

I don’t normally get overtly behind any particular politics on this blog, preferring instead just to snipe from the sidelines and call out any hypocrisy I spot. But today’s referendum vote is something I actually care about and so I’m going to have one last shot at convincing anyone reading this to vote ‘yes’ today.

What I’m not going to do, is explain why AV is better or First Past the Post (FPtP) is worse. I encourage you to look at some of the many explanations elsewhere on the net. The one with the kittens is particularly good.

Chances are that once you get a full understanding of how things work, your response will be “well AV seems slightly fairer but it’s so tiny it’s hardly going to make any difference is it?”

And you’ll be right.

It’s impossible to know for sure, but there’s a good chance that having AV wouldn’t have changed the result of any recent election. Nick Clegg called AV ‘a miserable little compromise’, a statement he’s now backed away from. Which is a shame, as he was right. AV does bugger all to reform anything in any meaningful way. It’s only minutely fairer and minutely more representative than FPtP. So why vote ‘yes’, hell, why vote at all?

The thing about things that are only minutely fairer than other things, is that they’re still fairer than the other thing. If I gave you the choice between being punched in the face 100 times, and being punched in the face 99 times, you’d choose the latter every time.

It’s a tiny, tiny step on the road to a better politics. There’s a few overwhelming sentiment from the media and the public these days when it comes to politics. Disdain. Apathy. Anger. Annoyance. Everyone on every side of the debate seems to hate politicians. Thinks that they’re out for just themselves, that they don’t represent them. From the student to the teacher to the factory worker to the doctor to the fascist to the anarchist to the hippy to the office worker… no-one actually respects politicians any more. The only ones that even like them are the rich city types and the bankers. And even then, it’s not respect but rather a patronising sort of appreciation.

AV is something the Tories are against. It’s something half of Labour are against. This is something that the vast majority of the people that have ruled us for the past fifty years do not want and we, the British public, have a chance to take it. That to me, is fucking awesome. That to me, is a good enough argument to vote ‘Yes’ right there. I’m genuinely baffled by people that have gone on and on about how much they hate politicians and politics and how they’re all the same and they’re all corrupt, and then happily inform me that they’re voting ‘No’.

I was going to say “it’s like a beaten wife crawling back to her husband and doing whatever he tells her to” but it’s not. Because in that scenario, she inevitably ‘still loves him’. No-one loves the Tories or Labour, but we want to go along with them because… I honestly don’t know. It’s one thing in a general election, because there really is ‘no other option’ – it’s group of twats A, or group of twats B. But here, for once, we actually get to choose the option neither of them want.

It’s unfortunate that Obama already bagged the slogan ‘Vote for Change’ because that’s what the Yes To AV camp needed. Voting ‘Yes’ is a vote for change. It’s a vote to reject the status quo. It won’t make much practical difference, but it sends a message: ‘enough of this shit, you don’t always get to have your way’.

It’s only a first step. Actual reform will take a long, long time. But it can happen. And if you don’t vote Yes, you give the politicians the statistics they need to deny us that change for another 20 years at least. Do not let that happen.

Sidebar:

I know some people actually want reform, they want a proper, proportional representation system. I’m in that group. But some people think the way to get that is by voting ‘No’. These people are delusional enough to believe that the media and the politicians will actually give equal weight to the idea that someone voted ‘No’ because they wanted greater reform than was offered, as they’ll give to the idea that they voted ‘No’ as they didn’t want any reform.

I won’t pass further judgement, other than to say that most of the small parties also want a proportional system as it benefits them directly, so they should know what they’re talking about.

Here are the ones that are backing the Yes campaign, as they think it’s the best way to get that reform in the future: Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru, SNP, Greens, UKIP, English Democrats, Christian People’s Alliance.

And the ones backing the No campaign as they think that will get them the best chance of proportional representation in the future: BNP, Respect.

Your call

Dean Love : 05 May 2011 02:55 |  Tags: Politics |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Funny Women

Dean has been waiting to get home all day to play Portal 2, but it’s decrypting right now, which gives him a chance to rant briefly about something fucking awful

The Funny Woman comedy competition started taking entries today. And is charging £15 for the privilege.

Now. Pay-to-play is bad. It happens a lot in the US, but over here any attempts to bring it in have been swiftly rebuffed. I’m not going to go in to details, as I’d recommend Pear Shaped’s wonderful illustrated guide as background reading that explains exactly why it’s bad for the comic, the punter, and the industry as a whole. But when I first read about the entry charge for Funny Women I wasn’t too bothered. £15 wasn’t a huge amount, it’d maybe filter out the people that aren’t really serious about a comedy career and just want five minutes on stage to try it, it’ll help pay for a decent prize fund, and it’ll let them keep ticket prices low. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t like it, I could just see the argument in favour. I appreciate the competition does a lot to showcase quality female stand-ups in a world where they’re very much discriminated against, so if it’s necessary to charge a small fee to entrants to keep the competition going, I wasn’t going to get all that mad about it.

Some more details emerged today, that, frankly, threw a whole new light on the situation.

Detail number one: there is no prize fund. The winning prize is a management deal and tour, a DVD of your gig and a website. Taken one by one: if you win you’re supposedly the best new female comic in the country, so the management deal and tour should actually be profitable for the people providing it; making a DVD is a piece of piss and anyone with a digital camera and Windows Movie Maker can do it; and for the website, they don’t say which website you win, but it’s probably not a good one like bbc.co.uk or even a decent has-been like MySpace (more seriously, even getting a website done professionally shouldn’t cost more than a hundred quid or so). Basically, the whole thing can be done in-house so there’s no real expense on the prize fund. So where is the money going?

Detail number two: tickets for the shows cost around £10-£12. Now let’s all stop and have a chuckle at the fact that this means going to see a Funny Women heat costs £12, and for an extra £3 you can get up and do five minutes. Done? Okay, so that’s £12 then. For that you, as a punter, get to see a whole bunch of unpaid acts, with the whole thing held together by a paid professional MC. Some quick maths: assuming a conservative 50 tickets sold at £12, that’s £600 on the door. Now these MCs are pros, they’re good, but from what I’ve seen of the names so far, they’re not exactly £600 good.

A punter can, of course, for £12 can go see a full line up of three or four professional acts at the weekend. Said punter can get the same line-up mid-week for half of that. Our mythical punter, for a sixth of that price, can come to Reckless Comedy in Leamington Spa on a Monday night and also see a bunch of unpaid acts with a paid, professional headliner. Basically, if you’re charging £12 for a gig full of unpaid open spots and one professional, you’re already running something of a racket. I can only assume the logic goes that if you’re going to rip-off the punters, you should probably rip-off the acts by charging them to play too.

I’d say that if this really is all above board, just let us know exactly where the money is all going. Show your working. I’d love to know.

So that’s me wearing my promoter hat and explaining why that bit pisses me off, but from the perspective of just a regular comedy fan it’s really, really frustrating me.

“Women aren’t generally that funny” – I hear that a lot from friends that consider themselves comedy fans, from friends I know don’t have a sexist bone in their body, from female and male friends. It annoys me but I understand where it comes from: they went to a comedy night, there was one women on, she wasn’t as good as the men, and so a prejudice is formed. Why that happens is an entire other blog entry, but the only way to convince them otherwise is to take them to see some really funny female comics.

Cut to the Funny Women competition. They charge you £15, and guarantee you the chance to perform in a heat. Stop and think about that: anyone willing to pay can get stage time. There’s no filtering based on experience, or requests for references. So sure, you’ll get a lot of good female open spots that hate the idea of paying but see it as a necessary evil to enter such a high profile competition. But then you also get people that have never done comedy before, perhaps don’t even know that there are plenty of gigs out there that will give a new act a shot and not charge them for the privilege. Maybe they’ve always secretly wanted to be a comic, or maybe they just see £15 as a reasonable figure for a fun new experience and night out. Either way, as with so many things in life, you’re rarely that good your first time.

So here we have a promoter charging an audience £12 to come and see one professional act, and a bunch of people whose only guaranteed comedy credentials are that they had £15 in their wallet. Some of them will be good. Some of them will be shit. The majority of them will be so-so. At £12, a punter expects more than 3 or 4 good acts out of 12. They’ll feel ripped off. And they’ll leave the gig, perhaps a bit annoyed. But they won’t be thinking “wow, that promoter is rubbish, remind me never to go see shows that they put on again”. They’ll be thinking “wow, women comics are shit, remind me not to go see female comics again.”

Which is undermining the whole supposed point of Funny Women as an organisation.

Postscript: If you are about to turn your comedy competition in to a pay-to-play setup, and you want a sympathetic reaction, it’s probably best not to write an article called Turn Your Passion in to Profit a few months before. Just saying.

If anyone is reading this and thinking “yes, but it’s so hard to get stage time any other way” then e-mail me and I might be able to help you out.

Dean Love : 19 Apr 2011 21:03 |  Tags: Comedy |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

How to ruin a brilliant idea

Or: Why you should think it through

The Camden Crawl is an ace idea. Yes, it’s one of those two-day arts and music festivals lots of places have, where lots of different venues put on lots of different shows. But what it does differently is get one of the core components of a festival right: you pay once, £40 for a day ticket, and you see as much as you want. It takes all the pressure off, you feel like you’re part of a proper festival and not an unconnected series of events. Bloody brilliant.

Now one thing about it is, it runs a whole bunch of varied arty fringe stuff during the day. Theatre, comedy, dance, quizzes, all that stuff. But come 7pm this ends and the focus shifts over to music, and it’s also when the big-names acts are on. That’s fine, it’s a system that works, and in isolation it’s brilliant.

But someone spotted a gap in the market, and so this year The Comedy Crawl launches. It offers a whole bunch of brilliant comedy in the same area over seven venues from 7pm until midnight for a one-off fee. £20 gets you 5 hours of comedy, rather than the 2 hours you’d get for the same money from Jongleurs. And you can pick and choose your gigs. Again, in isolation, this is bloody brilliant.

The problem is, they’re two different events. Now were they competing events, that would make sense. But they’re quite hapilly cross-promoting each other and seem pretty friendly. Still, no problem, one can choose from an evening of great comedy, or a more expensive full day of great comedy and music.

Well maybe I just want the moon on a stick.

But I don’t live in London, and while it’s not far away, the money and time cost of the journey mean I want to get the most of out any trip. And as you probably know, I like me some comedy. I’d love to spend all day hanging around Camden watching live comedy in loads of different places. That’d be brilliant. It’d be like Edinburgh except a bit more conceited and a lot less expensive.

The problem is, to do that, it looks like I have to buy myself a Camden Crawl ticket, spend the day watching their comedy, then buy myself a Comedy Crawl ticket, and spend the evening watching their comedy, while basically throwing away the whole latter half of the Camden Crawl ticket. And that’s being optimistic, as with all the ‘big names’ of music on later in the evening, I’m sure a lot more than half the ticket price goes towards paying acts on during the night rather than their less famous friends on during the day.

I’d happily pay the full Camden Crawl ticket price, not see any bands, and just watch comedy all day. But I resent the idea that I’d have to pay £20 more than everyone else just to do that.

And it’s basically put me off going to either. By trying to do something extra for comedy fans, they’ve basically ruined it for comedy fans.

My solution? I’d have stuck a fiver on the Comedy Crawl ticket price and given that to the Camden Crawl folk in exchange for a Comedy Crawl wristband granting access to any Camden Crawl venue prior to 7pm. Then maybe have the Camden Crawl folk offer a combined ticket at a £5 premium over their price that gives access to the Comedy Crawl venues too.

Basically, I’d have thought it through from the perspective of someone who likes live comedy more than live music. But then I suppose there aren’t that many of them in and around Camden with it’s six million comedy clubs are there?

Dean Love : 29 Mar 2011 18:47 |  Tags: Comedy Festival Music |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

30–day Song Challenge – Day 1: Your Favourite Song

So this meme has been doing the rounds on Facebook, and while I don’t normally do this sort of thing, I figure I should as a) I’ve been slacking off on writing far too much of late, and b) I still need to better at writing about music.

Still, it’s taken about a month to finally get started, am slightly confused at who thought having “your favourite song” as the first one would be an easy one to start with. It’s like asking you to pick your favourite child. Or most hot woman. It varies based on mood, and I’d always feel guilty picking one song over all the rest.

So I cheated and looked at the most played song on my iPod, and it’s this:

Frank Turner – Love Ire & Song

It’s actually sort of appropriate as that one song, while I wouldn’t say it’s my ‘favourite’ per se, sums up a lot of what I love about music. Musically, it starts with a solo singer-songwriter on guitar playing a nice little folky melody, before bringing in the piano, then the drums, and the bass, and the electric guitar, until it’s a full on sing-along rock track. My musical tastes do generally swing between those two extremes: solo singer-songwriters to full on guitar-based rock. To get them both in one song is handy.

I also love the sheer usefulness of that when the song is performed live. When Frank Turner plays with a band, he’ll always do a solo section in the middle, where the band leave, and then you have the awkward pause as they come back on for the rest of the set. Not with this song! Now they slowly sneak back on throughout the track and it all flows together seamlessly. For some reason, I really like that.

Finally, the lyrics. It’s an angry song, but one about hope. It’s about trying to make a difference in the face of adversity, as what’s the worst that can happen if you try? It mixes a certain cynicism that I can certainly relate to with an optimism that I aspire to. It says that you can still be a cantankerous old bastard and try and make a difference without being a hypocrite. It appeals to two different sides of my personality, and offers a way to unify them. Which is handy.

Dean Love : 27 Mar 2011 19:41 |  Tags: Comedy Video |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem