Anthony Miller
Monday 29th August 2011 10:52pm [Edited]
Chavdon
26 posts
Quote: The Man in the Bowler Hat @ August 9 2011, 1:40 PM BST
DON'T DO PAY TO PLAY. Here's a great explanation of why from someone far more eloquent than I. http://www.pearshapedcomedy.com/CRAPP.htm
Also, with the number of gigs that there are that are free why would anyone pay to play?
Comedy bin gigs vary from very good to playing to 10 other acts. They are bringer gigs but they are free.
Laughtershock, can be a bit variable in terms of audience numbers but is not a "bringer" or a P2P.
Try also, Comedy Virgins (bringer), Comedy Slappers (bringer), TNT (bringer), 5 minutes of fame (bringer), Pear Shaped (not P2P or bringer) or any one of hundreds of others.
I don't particularly like "bringer" gigs but the majority of London open mic gigs are and I'm prepared to bring a friend, I'm not prepared to pay for the pleasure of entertaining other people though.
Thanks for the plug. The CRAPP page came out of a series of campaigns by myself and other promoters and acts to confront promoters who use open spots as sub-minimum wage labour. The campaigns run over the years have been mildly successful.
Obviously not in eliminating pay to play and bringers (that would be impossible as if there's money to be made out of any dodgy activity someone will find arguments to morally justify it) but they certainly have been successful in preventing bringer and pay to play style booking policies from crossing from the open mike circuit to the professional circuit. There are no gigs in London that I am aware of where both the acts (or their "mates") pay in cash to play. This is not an accident. And not for want of professional promoters trying.
At least 3 professional promoters have been forced into booking policy u-turns by the CRAPP campaign. And it was heartening to see the Funny Women organisation's experiments with pay to play exploding so dramatically in their faces without any help from us.
Critics of the CRAPP have accused me of trying to "police" the comedy circuit. However, this is a ludicrous accusation - it is not possible for any individual to police the whole of the comedy circuit ....but that does not mean that the circuit cannot be in some ways self-policing. For example jokes theft is widely condemned as a recognised form of stealing other people's labour. Pay-to-play and bringer scams are simply the promotional equivalent of the same thing. They are ways of stealing labour. The aim of the campaign and page was and is to create a stigma for these practices and put on one page the arguments we were bored with repeating on average every 18 months when the situation moved from the absurd to the farcically unsustainable. Promoters of these schemes have all the time in the world to think up new nonsense to try and legitimise them with so we thought, as we are in comedy, it would be fun to have at least one page with which to try and drain at least a small proportion of the ocean of vapid drivel.
The other function of the page is to try to define what is and what is not a promotional scam in order to focus the legitimate discontent caused on those responsible for causing it ....instead of what used to happen ...huge unfocused public rows in which innocent people got hurt due to unwarranted guilt-by-association nonsense and so forth.
As to the Comedy Bin I believe they have dropped their "must bring a mate" policy at many of their venues now following the inevitable backlash... but this is hearsay. I no longer gig for them since someone with a voice pattern approximate to their proprietor rang up the Fitzroy Tavern claiming to be an investigative reporter from BBC investigating my "corrupt practices" who wouldn't give their name and then suddenly hung up. Of course it's difficult to know who the caller really was because when we dialed 1471 the number was withheld. But anyway I believe Jay has backed down on his bringer scheme which he waited until he was booking 7 venues to try to implement by force but I may be wrong. But that's what I heard.
When I started out such nonsense did not exist as there was not the technology to do it. Instead there was other nonsense to deal with. Would I bring mates if I was starting today? Probably not. However, I would point out that many of these gigs you can probably just get on at if you turn up anyway so ...erm ...I'd do that. You can get on at lot of these type of gigs by just turning up as the drop out and no show rates for open spots are high ...which is why we end up with very long waiting times for a spot. At Pear Shaped we usually have one or two spots going for anyone turning up on spec if you get there at 7:30 and if we can't get you on we can let you know by 8:30. However, if you want a proper gig email Brian. He does try to get back to everybody but the quantity of admin is such that this is not always possible ...in which case email again. The address is on the website.
So anyway bring people to bringers if you must but don't complain in 5 years when clubs like mine don't exist because someone has persuaded the brewery that my old fashioned methods of selling tickets to people who might actually want them are silly compared to the new exiting methods of herding unwilling open spots "mates" into small rooms for cash. I have to negotiate with my landlord too and no promoter is an island. I don't want to put anyone off bringing mates if they genuinely want to but you should think of the wider long term consequences of allowing yourselves to be leaned on to bring mates. Eventually if it became standard practice the non-bringer clubs like mine would have to go bringer too to compete which is one reason we ran the campaign. Call me old fashioned but I dislike being undercut in this way.
If you are interested in closing the gaps in NMW law that allow such schemes to operate it doesn't hurt to write to your MP or to the Low Pay Commission. Probably a pointless exercise but if you don't speak no one will ever hear. Of course closing legal loopholes wouldn't stop anyone running them because NMW law and so forth are near impossible to enforce but the stigma associated with being accused of breaching NMW rules its self has reduced the number of people prepared to go there...