At Sternberg Clarke, we’ve rather arrogantly declared that October is Comedy Month and we’ve been celebrating comedy by giving away tickets, reviewing shows and generally talking about what we find funny. It’s all part of the launch of The Next Big Thing Competition that we’re holding with Event Magazine, and an attempt to generate more interest in comedy in the event industry. Hopefully we’ll attract a few aspiring new comics along the way too. Read more »
Last weekend was a little more scrabbly for us than usual, the reason being that many of our acts are plying their trade at the UK’s most famous festival.
We’re all about to go through the squirming, fidgeting, flop sweating, hair flattening and all round excruciating process of having our photographs taken for our new website. Certain members of staff seem to have gone through the 5 stages of grief; Denial (“People don’t need to know what we look like, we don’t need them”), Anger (“It’s your fault for starting this stupid company!”) , Bargaining (“Perhaps we could have caricatures instead?”), Depression (“I’m going to have my eyes half shut and a double chin”) and finally Resignation (“Everyone can see my face when I’m walking around anyway.”)
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.
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.
For me, the only thing more intimately linked with the Christmas period than Morecombe & Wise is Programs Posthumously Celebrating Morecombe & Wise. Once you hit Christmas Day, dinner’s finished and the presents are open, there’s nothing left to look forward to other than the spectacle of a mid-to-low level celeb explaining exactly why it is so funny that these two men are making breakfast in unison to the strains of ‘The Stripper’ – apparently it’s the timing, or perhaps giving us some social historical context; reminding us that “news presenters just used to stick to the news, y’know?”
Haymarket © 1957 – 2012
