Saturday Night saw the return of that trundling juggernaut of bad taste The Eurovision Song Contest in which we sneer and laugh at those tasteless foreigners for their musical choices whilst surpressing the niggling truth that the UK will never be able to secure the votes of the other entrants thanks to our increasingly frosty relationship with… pretty much everyone.
Every day we have phone calls and emails littered with vague, near-meaningless terms in regards to events. Motivational buzz-words like ‘synergy’ and ‘blue sky’ have become punchlines in their own right. But in the booking of Entertainment, there are a number of specific terms and phrases that repeatedly crop up whose meanings are slippery.
We’ve all, at some point, quoted W.C.Fields’ famous piece of showbiz advice: “Never work with Children or Animals” but in practice it’s a rule we frequently disregard. It never did the Chimney Sweeping Industry any harm after all. But in the carefully managed and controlled world of entertainment (and by extension events) there is no room for small dribbling, leg humping, mewing, biting bundles of unpredictability… or animals.
Do you remember the first time you heard your favourite song? Chances are, it wasn’t at an Event. Chances are it was on the car radio on he way home from a party, blaring out of the jukebox in some grimy bar, thrust into your ears by a significant other or any host of other ways… but probably not at a product launch or an awards ceremony, then. At corporate events, we tend to reach for the familiar. We go for covers bands, we go for tribute acts, we go for jazz standards, big name comedians, talent show winners, look-a-likes, impressionists… we even have ‘In the Style of Artists’ that draw portraits in the style of the artistic greats from previous generations – in this industry, we’re probably not going to uncover the new Banksy but we’ll sure as hell find someone that can draw like him once he’s popular.
If you’ve ever been onto our website, you’ll have been greeted by the little trumpet a bowler hat and a garish lime green colour scheme. Much as we’ll miss the little trumpet, it’s on the way out. We’re in the process of creating an all new webiste with all new instruments peeking from the bottom corner of the screen when you go to click on contact… or perhaps not. But the process of putting together the new site has turned up an interesting topic.
Thanks to our Wedding coordinator Alice being struck down by some illness or other on Sunday, I was drafted in to represent Sternberg Clarke at the UKAWP’s Wedding Sanctuary bridal show at Somerset House. There’s a reason we hired a someone to do these sorts of things; Alice is just better at them – not that I didn’t enjoy spending time with the always pleasant wedding planners and the soon-to-be-brides in attendance, I even got a chance to meet Andy from men’s wedding blog Staggered – it’s just that Wedding entertainment requires a different approach from Corporate Events. My thoughts have turned to weddings recently, partly because I spent Sunday in the company of people whose big day was looming in the near future, also because our own Hayley Hannam has recently caught a nasty case of ‘One Hand Heavier Than The Other’-Syndrome. Weddings make up a huge part of our business and no doubt the same is true of many readers of event magazine.
We can learn a lot about a person from their music taste, or at least, we like to think we can. It’s the same as looking at someones bookshelf or browsing their movie collection; when there’s nothing else to go on, these little hints allow us to play a game of cultural detective, cleverly piecing together clues to form an image of a person we don’t yet know. A predisposition towards Social Realist cinema coupled with a vast collection of punk and ska? We have ourselves a class warrior. Pulp Novels and 30′s Jazz? That’d be the guy in the picture up there. Often it’s wide of the mark by some distance, but it’s fun to do anyway.
Ah, Valentines Day. The patron saint of letter writing, St Valentine, but as the old saying goes, You can’t sell letters in a Card Shop. It’s possible I made that up. Naturally people’s attentions are fixed on matters of the (oversized, plush, novelty) heart; no doubt the readers of Event magazine are about to throw some sort pink and red party in the next few hours and you’ve probably guessed that I’m going to try to take the subject of Valentines Day and contort it into a blog about that old favourite subject of mine Entertainment…
Being in the entertainment business, or at least the business of entertaining, we often get the opportunity to slip on our high waisted trousers, put on a low cut black T-shirt and audition some new acts. Everyone in the office enjoys an audition and thankfully we get a lot of very talented people coming through our doors to show us their acts. So there are actually relatively few opportunities to make snide comments and snigger at the hapless audition-ees that you might see on a talent show. And even if we did get a Ken Lee or an Onka Judge, it’s unlikely anyone here would cut them down in quite the manner a TV judge would.
Michael McIntyre and Frankie Boyle are two comedians who have suffered a great deal of criticism from the media and their peers throughout 2010 for their differing levels of offensiveness; as performers, they couldn’t be more different – the former a purveyor of the kind of mild, light hearted observational comedy that no doubt everyone was exposed to over Christmas, his DVD having sold by the boatload – and the latter an acid tongued bearded button pusher who seems to take more pleasure in gasps of shock than genuine laughs from his audience. Fellow comedians seem to be lining up to take pot shots at one or the other. McIntyre for being all smoothed edges and no substance, Boyle for being all edge… and yet still no substance. “Offensiveness for Offensiveness’ sake” it’s often called. It’s strange how offensiveness or the lack of it can create the same amount of vitriol in certain commentators. Over the weekend Ricky Gervais received mixed reviews for his hosting of the Golden Globes having made a few off colour remarks about Charlie Sheen and Tom Cruise among others – but if he’d played it safe he would have received similar treatment.
Haymarket © 1957 – 2012
