Good Morning,
It’s the morning (Tuesday) of the night before. The Late Lounge opened last night. I wasn’t over nervous when I went in, but by the time the show had finished I was a poor, trembling wreck.
It’s my professional opinion that any time you trust your livelihood to technology it will repay you by jumping up and biting you hard in the bum. Once when I was a student teacher I decided to opt for taking the, decidedly non-academic 5th year Christmas leavers, class. This, to my mind gave me two huge advantages 1) Only half of them turned up 2) I wasn’t going to have to test my limited knowledge of English literature. On the day of my crit lesson the technology I’d decided to impress them with failed spectacularly. All my lesson plan evaporated and a great formless void of 40 minutes had to be filled with me yakking on about nothing in particular – cue my entry in to the business we call show!
How, I hear you say,does this relate to The Late Lounge, Rick? Computers. The BBC have now decided they want computers controlling everything. Anyone who’s ever had to use these dam things know that they always fail. To help the situation I had three nervous looking people in the studio with me. For most of the night it was like any scene you can remember from Apollo 13. – “OK we can’t play Jimmy Cliff but we’ve got a ball point pen, a paper cup and two old scripts, let’s see what we can build.”
Anyway, it all passed with only the two moments of technological disaster. Which isn’t bad, but about the correct ratio for the amount of gigabytes being used. I once looked on in horror at a song writing workshop/performance as Pete from Duke Special entrusted his piano sound to a fragile looking laptop which he was assuming would understand that the next 15 minutes of his life were important to him. His trust was entirely misplaced.
Tonight I’m prepared. I’ve got some CDs in my back pocket and I’m going into town to buy a hard hat. When they tell you the computer does it all for you they are always right, unfortunately the computer doesn’t have to explain itself to the audience. Speak to you tomorrow if I’m still alive.
