University Blues

I’ve just read a very powerful attack on the Browne report on University funding:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n21/stefan-collini/brownes-gamble

Essentially Collini argues that the press has missed the point by concentrating so hard on the questions of individual student funding. Of course raising tuition fees and loans is an important issue. However, it is more important to realise that Browne has recommended the removal of the majority of the government grant to fund teaching in universities and suggested replacing it with a market system.

All decisions on the teaching and funding of courses will effectively be left to the market to decide. 18 and 19 year olds are going to determine what is taught in Universities, which sounds like a recipe for disaster to me. This will surely lead to courses in playing video games, watching Murder She Wrote and how to cook a meal for four using just a tin of baked beans, some rice and a courgette. And no tin opener.

Students are the very worst people to decide what they should be studying! It’s like asking prisoners how thick they want the bars or how secure they'd prefer locks. Education should be about what people need to know, not just what they think they want to know.

Also, if we have a market forces system, that won’t improve the quality of the universities’ teaching. It will simply improve the quality of their advertising and marketing departments. Universities and colleges already advertise for students, boasting about their better facilities or cooler alumni. This will just get worse. Universities will start ripping out libraries and replacing them with cinemas, and their advertising will get more ambitious. I can just imagine new posters on buses: “Male graduates from Warwick have bigger penises.” Or: “Did you know that David Cameron went to Oxford? What a wanker.”

The bigger question must be: do we need so many students in so many universities? Labour’s aim to get 50% of young people into university was laudable to an extent, but only if the degrees were rigorous and useful. Degrees are now being devalued because the number of graduates has risen so much in the last few years. Jobs that never required a degree in the past are now asking for a 2.1 or above.

This means that poorer and less academic young people are hit with a double-whammy. Either they go to university, getting into a large amount of debt in the process, in order to have a chance in a crowded job market, or they decide not to get a degree and find themselves shut out of low paid roles that would once have been a good first step on the job ladder. It’s hard to see who wins in this inflationary environment.

The only thing that is clear is that the Browne report will do nothing to improve the situation. Elite universities will become more elite, but only in social terms. As Collini says:

“it is a necessary truth about markets that they tend to replicate and even intensify the existing distribution of economic power. ‘Free competition’ between rich and poor consumers means Harrods for the former and Aldi for the latter: that’s what the punters have ‘chosen’.”

Beautifully put.

Universities are a public good, like a health service, a road system or a collective understanding that Simon Cowell is a prick. They should be funded and supported properly, not abandoned to a free market experiment that could quite possibly lead to Cambridge and Oxford charging £40,000 a year and the University of McDonalds offering a six month course in advanced burger-flipping techniques. Applying a market system to the public sector is almost always a failure. Remember the railways. A free market university system will be a similar disaster. Lectures will be cancelled due to a lack of available staff or leaves on the lectern. 

In terms of funding, we don’t need loans or a graduate tax. We already have income tax, which acts as a basic graduate tax already. If you earn more, you pay more. The Government always claims that graduates earn more, so therefore they pay more. Yes, non-graduates pay more too, but that’s just the price to pay for living in a progressive society. I don’t have children so I don’t use schools, nurseries or maternity services. However I have no objection to helping to pay for them.

Sadly this sort of thinking doesn’t appear very popular at the moment, in the rush to save money and slash budgets. I’m just very glad that I went to university before all of these reforms. Students are going to have to make some very difficult decisions in the years ahead. Universities will be very different places. Although they’ll have cool cinemas and amazing bars so the students probably won’t care.

C*ts and B**kers

I heard someone on the radio after the cuts were announced saying: “We’re in this together. We have to think of it like wartime. Get a bit of the Blitz Spirit.” Well, perhaps, but there are some crucial differences. For example, in 1940 we didn’t blow up our own houses and then give bonuses to the Luftwaffe.

Banks are trying to smarten up their act. For example, online transfers are now very fast. I had one the other day from my friend that took less than a minute. So why did it used to take so long? I think they’ve simply removed the “take out the cash and roll around in it for a while, screaming I'm rich, I'm rich, rich beyond my wildest dreams! Mwhahahahahaha!” section of the process.

When you look at the economic chaos they have caused, I don’t think the banks have suffered enough. If we can’t stop their bonuses, then we should try other methods. Every time you take out money from a bank ATM you get offered an "advice slip". That should change to an "apology slip". And it can’t just be a standard apology. Every one has to be different. Handwritten. Banks should be forced to start employing people to come up with ever more elaborate ways of saying how dreadfully sorry they are. If nothing else, it might help boost employment figures. Plus sales of pens.

So I probably won't do that gig at the zoo...

There is an old showbiz cliche that you should never work with children or animals. They are unpredictable, hard to direct and likely to shit everywhere. Although I've worked with kids a couple of times on TV shows and they were both actually scarily grown up and professional. And had CVs significantly longer than any of the adult actors they were working with. Possibly they were vampires.

Working with children is one thing. Doing stand up comedy for children is something very different. It's a growing genre. James Campbell is mostly responsible for this. His "Comedy Club 4 Kids" has demonstrated that it is possible to perform stand up for even quite young children without patronising them and without completely alienating their parents as well. I've done a few gigs at "4 Kids" and generally found them enjoyable. I've found that by playing to the children but also throwing a few references to the adults you can get the kids laughing with their parents and vice versa. It can be a hard gig, though. I've had a couple of experiences where the children simply stared. Paying attention, but lacking the social training that suggests that you should at least smile if you are enjoying something. In those situations it's usually time to bring out the poo jokes.

So comedy for kids is now relatively well established, and there are clear rules: no swearing, sex or drugs references etc. However, in the last few days I've performed at two gigs that have been somewhere between comedy for kids and comedy for adults. In other words: comedy for teenagers.

The first show was on Friday at a school in Sudbury: the gig had actually been organised by a sixth form drama class as part of their coursework (you never did that in my day, etc.) and the audience was a mix of 15, 16 and 17 year olds and quite a few adults. Due to traffic nightmares I didn't get there until the interval and so missed seeing how the acts had fared in the first half. I enquired as to the rules. The promoter said that we should keep it reasonably clean, but that actually none of the acts had so far so I shouldn't really worry. In the end the gig was fun. I simply did the kind of material I normally would, just without as much swearing as I might use at a rowdy Friday night gig, and without some of the more adult sexual references. I enjoyed myself and the audience seemed to have a good time.

This turned out to be merely a warm up for a far more challenging gig. Yesterday I performed at the New Wolsey Theatre in Ipswich at a special "No Adults Allowed" gig. It was a big room (300+) and nearly sold out, and as the title of the night might suggest, the whole audience were in the age range 12-17, with no adults allowed in the auditorium. The average age was about 14. Too young to do normal "adult" material to, but too old to do family friendly kids material to. All of the acts were backstage wondering what to open with, what to have in reserve. Again the rules weren't entirely clear: swearing was probably frowned on, but not totally banned. And after all, the parents weren't in the room so they wouldn't hear what was going on anyway.

In this situation, the real problem is not about what the management wants, it's about what the audience will understand and respond to. So many jokes that work at a normal gig will sail over the heads of a younger audience. Stuff about relationships, money, politics, history and any popular culture reference to anything made before 2006 will simply be incomprehensible to the vast majority of the crowd. Easy, even hack, jokes about the A-Team or The Godfather will seem like accounts of ancient history to people born after Oasis released their first album.

The stress of the evening was slightly increased by the fact that all 3 acts were present but the compere was stuck in traffic and running increasingly late. I was supposed to be closing the night but at the last minute was drafted in as replacement compere. From thinking that I would have the advantage of seeing how the rest of the comics dealt with the crowd and tailoring my set accordingly, I was suddenly about to go on first without much of an idea as to what to say. I took a deep breath, a few swigs of water and stepped on to the stage, hoping that I'd be able to make a connection with the audience.

Thankfully, the first section of the show went very well. It took me a couple of minutes to get the night going, but eventually the banter began to click. I realised early on that I had very little to talk to them about. The standard questions of "what do you do?" and "are you in a relationship" have no relevance to that age group. Asking "what do you want to do when you grow up?" was simply met by a shrugging "dunno" on the couple of occasions I tried it. But I kept plugging away and the room warmed up. At first I was a bit tentative about content, still not sure how far I could push it. But when I asked a boy on the front row what he liked doing when he wasn't at school, his friend shouted "wank!" and that brought the house down. I remembered that there were no disapproving adults in the room and relaxed - I could play the part of the mischievous older brother, being a bit naughty whilst also keeping them under control. I threw in a few jokes that got a good reaction, got some clapping and cheering going and introduced the first act, who proceeded to have a really good gig. I breathed a sigh of relief. The show was up and running and so far, so good.

After the first interval the audience was now fully stocked with ice creams, lollies, sugary drinks and sweets. I had a brief flashback to my days doing Christmas shows, and it dawned on me that this crowd was going to get more and more hyped up on sugar throughout the evening, unlike an adult audience that tends to get drunker and slower as the night goes on. The beginning of the second section was a bit of a struggle at first, almost as though the crowd had reset, and I had to work hard again to get some energy in the room. I hit a seam of gold though when I asked what people wanted for Christmas. One boy said: "my school to burn down", another just said: "cash" and a third said: "surface to air missiles". I was reminded how twisted children's imaginations can be and launched into some slightly darker material which they lapped up.

It was at the beginning of the third and final section that things got a bit weird. I again commented on how many sweets and ice creams seemed to have appeared in the crowd, and the kids, bolstered by sucrose and E numbers, and possibly feeling properly relaxed at last, started shouting out what snacks they had bought whilst I commented on whether I thought they were any good or not. It was quite fun, and I said something like: "this has just turned into a game of let's shout out any food, hasn't it?"

Then someone threw a sweet.

It landed next to me on the stage. I'm pretty sure it was a friendly gesture. There was no hostility in the room and I think someone simply got a bit over-excited and wanted to share their sweets with me. I looked down and said: "Right. Someone appears to have thrown a sweet at me."

Then someone else threw a sweet. I said: "Er..."

Then someone else threw a sweet.

Then someone threw an ice cream.

Then everyone threw something.

Within seconds, I felt like a pop group at the Reading Festival. Sweets, bottles, ice creams and choc ices rained down on me from the auditorium. What had started as a nice gesture had become a hysterical competition. With no adults to tell them not to, the kids just copied each other and threw stuff. Some girls threw their shoes. A boy near the front threw his hat. Another boy even threw his coat.

It was quite a surreal experience. It wasn't like I was being booed off. They were just over-excited and being silly. I decided to stand my ground and simply act surprised. Luckily none of the sweets hit me - someone caught me with a glancing blow with a Calyppo but that was the extent of the damage. After a few seconds of madness the stage was littered with day-glo debris. I picked up a couple of wrapped sweets and a Mars bar and put them in my pocket. Then I calmly said: "Literally stop now."

The barrage petered out. There was an odd, giddy atmosphere in the room. I knew my job as the compere was to bring on the next act to a warmed up but not riled up, audience, so I had to take some time to sort it out. I needed to keep it light, and not act like a nervous supply teacher. After all, what could I actually do? If one person throws something, you can get security to chuck them out. If everyone throws something, you just need to calm them down.

I cleared the stage as quickly as I could, kicking the debris to the back or sides and throwing back the various bits of clothing that had been lobbed, all the while berating the audience for being stupid. There was one more brief flurry of sweets when I started to explain that they really shouldn't be throwing stuff, and for a split second I did begin to worry that I wouldn't be able to control them and I would be like a supply teacher and have to call for help. But I was a supply teacher with two secret weapons: a microphone and the ability to swear. A couple of well placed "fuck"s got them laughing again and slowly the audience began to settle down.

I told a couple of stories, explained once again that throwing stuff really wasn't cool, and finished with one final joke before introducing the closing act. She came on wearing a hard hat she'd found backstage, which made me smile. She then proceeded to do a reference to the Chilean miners, which went straight over the audience's heads, proving that current affairs is another area that is hard to make jokes about for teenagers. But they didn't throw anything during her set and she went on to have a good gig.

As I left the stage I felt elated that I'd managed to deal with the situation well enough that we could continue with the gig and I didn't have to call on security. At the end of the show I thanked the audience for coming and said they'd been lovely all night, except for a couple of minutes when they'd been dicks, which I think was a fair assessment. The gig had turned out to be challenging in a slightly different way than I was expecting, but in the end I was pleased with how it had all gone, and the promoters and theatre staff seemed happy. Job done.

I'm looking forward to playing to adults again though.

Not even a double entendre on "bust"...

It has often been said that comedy does well in a downturn. Alternative Comedy started in the dark days of the late 70s/early 80s, and in our current economic crisis, stand up comedy has never been more popular. Michael McIntyre’s Roadshow, Live at the Apollo and many many panel shows dominate the TV schedules, and comedians seem to be filling more arenas around the country than rock stars these days. The rest of the country may be in recession, but comedy is booming.

However, if the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that if you have a boom, you’re going to have a bust. Why should comedy be any different?

The signs are already there. The open mic circuit is bursting at the seams with new, young comics desperate to get their chance in the spotlight. Unscrupulous promoters, the Bernie Madoffs of this world, exploit naïve newbies with pyramid scheme-like deals – bring a friend nights, pay to play deals. And yet still the new comics emerge from more and more stand up comedy courses, rushing into the lower levels of the circuit in an unregulated torrent, like debt-burdened graduates flooding in the job market just as employment opportunities dry up. It’s a supply and demand disaster waiting to happen.

The internet could also play a part, just as in the dot.com crash. Sites like Twitter and Facebook spread new jokes around the world in seconds. Topical humour saturates our daily lives – trying to come up with original material is getting harder and harder as everyone is surrounded by comedy all of the time. From Youtube clips to text jokes to clever status updates, comedy has become democratized and therefore devalued. Why pay for laughs when you can listen to your mates mucking around on a new podcast?

Within a couple of years this could all come to a head. Rates of laughter will suddenly plummet. There’ll be a run on puns leading to a collapse in the value of observational material and the government will have to step in to prevent the collapse of large scale comedy clubs.

This will in turn lead to massive cutbacks in humour, with only a few wry remarks allowed as we have to pay back a huge chuckle deficit that will leave the next generation of comedians struggling under the massive weight of public frowning. Once famous comedians will be forced back into tiny comedy clubs and thousands of hopeful wannabes will have to find jobs in other devastated sectors such as teaching or banking.

And then with a single one liner it will start all over again.