When things go wrong for comedians

Bob Slayer in one of his less strange moments as a performer

I was happily dozing off last night when I got woken up at 1.30am by a series of text messages from comedian Bob Slayer.

Cobbled together, this is what he told me:

“I did two gigs with The Greatest Show on Legs / Martin Soan at Dave’s Leicester Comedy Festival tonight: an early show and a late show in Dave’s Curry House.

“It is always weird when you meet people involved with a gig and get on with them, have a laugh, then the gig goes wrong and they don’t want to look you in the eye. And other comics avoid you in case your dose of the unfunnies is catching. If you are sharing a car it can be a painful journey.

“The first gig was really struggling. But then it got to a bit which always goes down well: Martin’s Thriller sketch where we put elastic bands round our heads to distort our faces into zombie masks while we dance to Michael Jackson’s Thriller.

The original routine: Malcolm Hardee (left) & Martin Soan (photograph by Steve Taylor)

“Except that, when Martin cued the music (at which point we are already committed to the Michael Jackson zombie dance) instead of Thriller, the music that came on was Black or White. It was the wrong track on the CD.

“The audience just looked at us, confused, while we did our dance, putting rubber bands on our heads to distort our faces and dancing like zombies to Black or White. They didn’t know it is the wrong track. It just seems very strange to them.

“Afterwards, one of the acts told me he was watching and thinking: Are they making a statement about being black? With elastic bands????

“Fortunately, at the second gig, we got the right track and the gig went beautifully.

“The drive home was lovely.”

White people? You can’t tell them apart

(This was also published by the Huffington Post)

One mantra for racists in Britain used to be:

“They all look the same to me.”

In 1986, I was in a group of people who went to North Korea. The local guide kept getting me muddled-up with another member of the group. We were all white Westerners and he had difficulty telling our faces apart. We all looked the same to him. It was particularly odd in this case because I had a beard and the guy he kept muddling me with had no beard. But he genuinely had trouble telling our faces apart.

So it was interesting at a Royal Institution lecture last night to hear Professor Bruce Hood say:

“Everything you experience is an illusion. There is a real world out there but everything you experience about that world is constructed by your brain.

“Babies up to the age of about one year can easily tell the difference between human faces, but they can also tell the difference between primates. Adults find these sorts of faces very difficult to tell the difference between because, as we experience faces, we get more clued-into them. and we store in our brains a representation – a model – of what a face looks like.”

To demonstrate this, Bruce Hood showed pictures of two similar-looking human faces and two monkeys’ faces. It was easy to tell the two men apart instantly. But we had to search visually to see that the monkeys’ faces were different.

According to Bruce Hood, after about ten months, babies retain the capacity to differentiate between human faces they see but lose the capacity to differentiate between primates’ faces.

Presumably this is because they see lots of different human faces but very few monkeys’ faces and the brain realises it will have to store more nuances of human faces because there will be more interaction with them.

The reason I mentioned being in North Korea is because that country is very isolated. North Koreans see very few Western European faces in the flesh. So, from my very unscientific experience in 1986, I suspect a lot of, if not all, North Koreans think “all Western Europeans look the same ”.

I presume that, the more multi-ethnic a country becomes, the less the sentence “They all look the same to me” is heard.

But what I find interesting is that, when I see primary school aged children in the street, they are starting to all look the same to me.

And policemen.

I think I am getting old.

Or people are slowly being replaced by clones.

Both options are equally worrying.

Apartheid is still alive and thriving in South Africa

A friend of mine works for a multi-national company which divides the world into geographical sales sectors.

The company has made a decision which apparently is not going to work commercially.

It has appointed an Indian as head of its South African sales force.

The problem is that he will not be able to meet the decision makers at the companies within South Africa which traditionally buy the specialised product.

Because the white South African decision makers will not meet an Indian.

As I wrote in a recent blog…

I’ve never met a nice white South African.

In the words of the Top Ten Spitting Image song: They’re all a bunch of arrogant bastards.

I am a racist and, to be honest, there seems to be not a lot I can do about it

The two groups of people I have problems with are Jews and South Africans.

I went to secondary school – well, OK, grammar school – in East London, near Gants Hill which, at that time, was a very Jewish area. So there were a lot of Jews in my school.

We all had to (allegedly) learn French and one other foreign language. We could choose either Latin or German. Almost all (perhaps actually all) the Jews took Latin. Well, think about it: anything ‘German’ was often associated with family problems… ie relatives and/or friends’ relatives slaughtered in the Holocaust.

Normally, we had three rows of people in Latin lessons. When there was a Jewish holiday, we had half a row. This was not uncommon in other lessons. When there was a Jewish holiday, teachers sometimes gave up any attempt to teach their subject to drastically depleted classes and we had general knowledge quizzes.

We had big classes and four graded streams – A, B, C and D. The Jews were almost entirely in the A stream, with a few stragglers in the B stream.

I have had a prejudice against the Jews ever since.

If I am going to meet someone called John Smith, I have no preconceptions about what he will be like.

If I am going to meet someone called David Goldstein, I automatically assume he will be highly intelligent, well-educated, sophisticated, civilised and interesting to talk to.

There’s very little I can do to shake this pre-judging of someone on purely ethnic, totally baseless grounds.

That may not seem too bad, although it is. It is pure ethnic racism.

But what is worse is that I really do have a blind prejudice against white South Africans. I have met quite a lot and, to quote the 1986 chart-topping Spitting Image song, I’ve never met a nice South African. Not one. Never have. In my experience, the song is entirely true in saying “They’re all a bunch of arrogant bastards.”

I suspect it must be something to do with the past education system or something… They were taught to be self-confident in a world that mostly disliked them and in a society where they used to live a life of self-confident superiority over the majority of their fellow South Africans. The Afrikaans white South Africans are a bit worse than the British-origined ones, but only slightly.

I once interviewed Donald Woods, the liberal, highly-respected and lauded ex-editor of South Africa’s Daily Dispatch newspaper who bravely stood up against the Apartheid regime. He was played in the movie Cry Freedom by Kevin Kline.

The real Donald Woods came across to me as a man with a very strong superiority complex. To me – rightly or wrongly – he too seemed to be an arrogant bastard.

Assuming all white South Africans will be arrogant bastards is pure ethnic racism on my part. It is indefensible; it is a knee-jerk reaction because, in my limited experience, I have met a fair number and they have all been appalling without exception.

On the other hand, almost all the black Nigerians I have met have impressed me by being very highly educated and very sophisticated. We are talking about almost Jewish levels of prejudice within me here.

But on yet another hand, I have a friend – a very caring, middle class, liberal white Englishwoman. She genuinely has several good black friends but she has had major problems with black Nigerian neighbours and, as a result, she has a tendency to be wary of and/or initially dislike black Nigerians. She is aware of the problem, but finds herself unable to do anything about it.

And I have yet another friend – again a very caring, middle class, liberal white Englishwoman – who had a holiday in Israel and came back disliking Israelis (Israelis differentiated from Jews). Her opinion of them is much like my opinion of white South Africans, not helped by the fact they insisted on an internal body search before she boarded the plane on the way OUT of Israel.

Where this gets us all, I have no idea.

Except that anyone who tries to justify their own prejudice is clearly a mental retard.

It seems I am a racist and, to be honest, there seems to be not a lot I can do about it.

Racism and sexism in television and in comedy

On Thursday, I went to Bethnal Green to see the multi-racial comedy sketch group the United Colours of Comedy at the Oxford House venue. Three were very talented.

On Friday, I met a man who almost appeared on Mastermind on BBC1.

The man told me his specialist subject had been ‘Cricket before 1914’. He had gone through all the preliminary applications and tests and got to the final full-scale dry-run tryout. He triumphed, got the highest points and won it. The tryout, that is. A few days later, he received a phone call which told him he would not be on the actual televised Mastermind show because he mumbled. This sounds like a bad TV producer to me: you can direct people so they don’t mumble.

But the point is that a few months later this failed Mastermind contestant was talking to a lawyer friend he knows in Birmingham. The lawyer had handled the case of another potential Mastermind contestant who had been similarly rejected. She, too, had won her dry-run tryout. She had been very nervous and had been rejected – she was told – because, in her nervousness, she had waved her hands about a lot and been overly ‘twitchy’, which was very visually distracting. However, this failed contestant was black and she believed she had been rejected because of racial discrimination by the BBC. She unsuccessfully searched around  for a lawyer to handle her case. All refused until, eventually, she found this one in Birmingham. The claims and lawyers’ letters dragged on for months and, as my chum later heard it, in order to avoid a public court case, the BBC paid the woman a “substantial” out-of-court settlement.

I don’t believe it was racial discrimination. The real truth, in my experience, is that usually TV companies and producers fall over themselves to try to get non-white faces on screen.

I remember a production meeting for the Birmingham-based ITV children’s series Tiswas in which the then producer Glyn Edwards said he was uncomfortable because every Saturday morning – and this is in a city in the West Midlands, an area with a wide ethnic mix – the studio audience was a sea of totally white faces. I was delegated to get non-white children to apply to be in the audience, which I did by approaching regional and national ethnic newspapers and groups; but it was a fairly slow process.

Later, I worked on the long-forgotten BBC TV series Joker in the Pack in which the absolutely wonderful Marti Caine, at the time in remission from the cancer which later killed her, was dragged round the country to listen to groups of ‘ordinary’ people telling jokes in their workplace and in social groups. At the start of pre-production, I asked the producer if he wanted to specifically approach ethnic groups to get a mix of white/black/Asian faces on screen. He said, “Oh, it’ll happen naturally.”

“No it won’t,” I told him and it didn’t. Halfway through recording the series he suddenly asked for non-white faces on-screen and it was not something that could be arranged quickly, because non-white faces then as now tend not to apply to appear on TV shows; you have to find them and/or publicise in the ethnic media – both of which take time. The potential punters don’t see many non-white faces as TV contestants nor in on-screen audiences, so they don’t automatically apply.

The same thing seems to happen in comedy clubs, certainly in London. The audiences are mostly 100% white faces. Why? Presumably because anyone who goes to comedy clubs sees almost 100% white audiences and that non-racial-mix is self-regenerating.

Small comedy clubs can do little about this although they should perhaps try. On TV shows however, in my experience, producers do actively want non-white faces which reflect the UK population (although they are often too lazy or too tardy to do anything about it). And this can also be a problem where women are concerned. There are, for example, not enough female comedians on TV. But thereby hangs the potemtial problem of being too desperate.

And that brings us to Michael McIntyre’s Comedy Roadshow on BBC1, which records in different cities around the UK and has very few women and very few non-white comics appearing on it. Which is where good intentions have turned into bad practice.

One black female comic bombed so badly during the recording for an edition of Michael McIntyre’s Comedy Roadshow in one city that the producers had to drop her from the televised show but allowed her to perform again in a subsequent recording in a second city so that she could be transmitted in the series. Whether this was because she was black or a woman or both I don’t know. I suspect it was because she was a black woman. But I have also been told two other English female comics who initially bombed during recordings for Michael McIntyre’s Comedy Roadshow were also re-recorded in a second city a second time (one was even booked to record a third time in a third city) to try to capture any acceptably successful comedy performance. This is not something I have heard being done for white male comics.

It says several things to me, one of which is that you can take PC too far – if they can’t be funny the first time, drop ‘em – and the other is that the producers of Michael McIntyre’s Comedy Roadshow have, in the past, been choosing the wrong female comics to appear. There are good female comics working out there.

For another view on what it’s like to be a female comic, read Janey Godley’s blog “A weird thing happened at the gig” about performing at a comedy club in Glasgow last Friday. The Daily Telegraph has quite rightly called Janey “the most outspoken female stand-up in Britain… The most ribald and refreshing comedy talent to have risen from the slums of Glasgow since Billy Connolly”. Inevitably, she has never been asked to appear on Michael McIntyre’s Comedy Roadshow.

Life.

Tell me about it.