— read write play

further explanation

By: Steve G
14-03-2011
Misc.

As a minor follow-up to my earlier post on women in comedy, ITV’s Comedy Juice managed to break the chaperone rule1 by featuring no less than four women to three men (including the host, Keith Lemon). Leaving aside that the panellists were minor celebrities and TV presenters rather than working comedians, I’ll just note that the episode was advertised as a pregnancy-themed edition.

On the one hand, we could call it a piece of savvy marketing that made the most of the fact that Holly Willoughby, Myleene Klass and Emma Bunton were all expecting children. On the other, I might cynically observe that men doing comedy is just comedy – while women doing comedy is a special event that requires further explanation.

  1. The unspoken chaperone rule of British television dictates that women doing comedy on television must be accompanied by an equal or greater number of men. [↩]
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the chaperone system

By: Steve G
05-02-2011
Politics

I asked a simple question on twitter this morning. Can anyone name a British comedy panel show where female guests have outnumbered male guests? A clutch of replies later, and my expectations were largely confirmed: that women remain in the minority, with a few rare exceptions.

I don’t think cultural attitudes can be wholly measured with a direct headcount, or that comedy or culture can be straightforwardly “improved” simply by including more women in mainstream comedy.1 I’m certainly conscious – and pretty damn personally grateful – for the large number of women who work as writers, producers, directors and more within the comedy industry: the fact that they don’t appear in front of a camera or microphone doesn’t erase their work. I’m also as uninterested in asking whether women can be funny as asking if women are mammals. It remains, though, curious (to put it pretty damn mildly) that women continue to get the shitty end of the stick when it comes to space and time on air in the comedy industry. It is, at best, wildly patronising to continually insist that women in comedy need to be surrounded by men for programmes to work.

Dave Gorman joined the discussion, arguing that we should be looking at the the stand-up circuit first. I agree, to an extent – but looking at TV and radio comedy shows is still useful: it reminds us of prevailing habits (prejudices, even) in commissioning and production which feed the wider industry, and gives us ammunition for looking at the circuit more critically. The TV industry and the comedy circuit are interconnected; one responds to and creates expectations for the other. I don’t buy that it’s necessarily a distraction to talk about TV: we can talk about more than one thing at once, and when those things are deeply intertwined, we probably should.

But, hey, that’s a debate about the kind of debate we should be having – also probably necessary, but not occupying me right now.2 So, my question is this: how long before we see all-female line-ups (live, or on radio and television) that are as commonplace as all-male line-ups? And what kind of cultural shift would that actually represent?

  1. Though it might be an excellent place to start [↩]
  2. As an academic, I immediately add +2 to my meta-commentary roll [↩]
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twitter at the edinburgh fringe

By: Steve G
17-09-2010
Theatre

A few thoughts on twitter and social media at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this year:

For the first time, using Twitter felt like the norm rather than the exception – the festival community had collectively hit a critical mass of performers and audience members who were using it year-round, and tweeting during the festival seemed natural and obvious. Using Twitter to talk about theatre and comedy, to review and recommend, to gossip and bitch – these were all habits that were firmly in place.1

Twitter also became an unofficial clearing house for spare tickets; I’m almost surprised that a hashtag didn’t emerge to make it easier to track last-minute offers. That said, Theatre Ninjas did a great job of networking companies, venues and audiences for ticket deals through their website, Twitter and an iPhone app.

On a more personal note, Twitter’s perma-presence also meant that the distance between audience and show was shorter – and that feedback was faster. Most evenings after the Penny Dreadfuls show, we’d see two or three instant reviews of that night’s performance: mainly (and thankfully) praise, but occasionally (and inevitably) disappointment. The speed of that feedback – and its brevity – could be a double-edged sword, an instant tweak to your evening’s mood.2

It was hard to track the direct influence of an active twitter account: while we were in regular conversation with friends, audience members and other shows, there’s no easy way to measure how this translated into, say, sales.

The same is true of mentions by high-profile twitterati. The day before opening, we were delighted to discover that Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) was listening to the Dreadful’s Brothers Faversham BBC radio series during our tech rehearsal. A few tweets later and he’d – unprompted – recommended our show to his 1.5 million followers. Did that sell tickets? Did it influence the success of our run? I have no real idea. It certainly made me happy; rumours of a Snoopy dance are not wholly unfounded.

But then to try to read the success of social media solely in terms of sales is probably to miss the point. Though we used the @dreadfuls account to retweet links to reviews and appearances on other shows, I don’t think we pursued the hard sell. We didn’t follow the example of other social media marketeers to use the account to run competitions for tickets, or to offer giveaways.3 More often than not, we used the @dreadfuls account to recommend shows that we’d enjoyed, to talk about side-projects (tom:foolery, Gutted, flyerface, Sketchatron) and – above all – to exchange poor jokes. Very poor jokes. And so, if our use of Twitter was successful this fringe, it’s because we were in it for the conversation.

  1. Even if we’ve gone a little cold-turkey since the end of August. [↩]
  2. Spend an hour trying to make people laugh, and then having someone dismiss that effort in under 140 characters can feel like a low blow. [↩]
  3. Though offering our non-existent official t-shirts as prizes would have been fun. [↩]
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Flyerface

By: Steve G
09-08-2010
Misc.

The rules of FlyerFace are simple: fold/tear existing flyers to make at least one new face out of two old ones. One of the nicest things about this game is that it makes you genuinely pleased to get new flyers which – if you’ve ever sat in a fringe venue – sounds almost impossible. The obligatory tumblr is over here; the hashtag on twitter is #flyerface.

Notes:

1. No Collage. We’ll leave the Modernist Cubism to the Cubist Modernists, thankyouverymuch.
2. Advanced practitioners may request actors / comedians to pose with their own flyers. Good luck.
3. If in doubt, Simon Callow. A tremendous actor, and a headshot that’s hard to beat.

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The very occasional blog of Steve Greer. Updated irregularly, but with footnotes.

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