The Lullaby Of Broadway

Did you watch the new TV show ‘Smash’ at the weekend? This is a lavish and immaculate musical drama produced by Spielberg and costing more than Bloomberg. It is so coldly calculated that if it was an iceberg, Smash would greet the Titanic with a shout of “no, YOU give way”.

The show suggests it will give you and me an insight in to the catiness of New York musical theatre, and if Harry Warren had been alive to watch ‘Smash’ his lyrics may have changed. “Come on along and listen to the great big lie of Broadway” has a certain ring to it don’t you think?

Until this week I had never experienced the audition process, or ‘casting call’ as they term it on the stage. Dozens of hopefuls are invited to come along and do their thing for the director. They are brought on in groups, they then do a few dance steps or sing a few bars, and some seconds later a voice shouts “numbers two, five and thirty can stay, the rest of you thanks for nothing”. It’s so dispiriting it would sap the confidence of a good looking millionaire life coach fending off supermodels in heat.

So how did I come to experience the dreaded casting call when it’s well known I dance like a statue of Long John Silver and have the singing voice of his parrot? Well, this week I was asked to audition for a corporate video job in which I would be interviewing the CEO of one of the world’s largest insurance companies. Now I grant you it’s not up there in the glamour stakes with Hollywood or Broadway - or even Blackpool pier’s summer revue come to that - but we all have to pay our bills and, actually, I quite like this kind of stuff. Don’t tell anyone.

So off I go to a rather run down building in central London for the camera test. When I say “run down” I mean those words in the sense that water was, literally, running down the walls in the basement where the studio was situated. I carefully negotiated my way past these natural waterfalls, broken bricks and an abandoned, soiled, sofa thinking more and more that I was the victim of a practical joke or was about to stumble on a terrorist squat. I’m sure a zombie movie was shot here.
Certainly the building’s caretaker should have been.

Eventually I found Room 101 (it wasn’t actually called that but it will give you an idea of how George Orwell must have visited here at some point to get inspiration for 1984) and I was asked to fill in a form with my height, my waist, my chest and shoe size, etc. I guess if you do this regularly then you know the answers but, as I hadn’t a clue, I left the sheet blank and was then made to stand holding a piece of paper with my name on it while a photo was taken. Think of those mug shots of arrested suspects and you’ll get the picture – so to speak.

I then sat down beside one of the other guys who was also after the job. Now this was difficult because he was quite pleasant and I had to make polite conversation while really hoping he’d be carted off to A&E with a burst appendix or have an accident in his trousers and faint with embarrassment.

And then my turn came. A very nice guy called Matt told me he would pretend to be the CEO and I simply had to follow the instructions I’d received in an email. Problem was that I’d had no email and so didn’t have a clue what was supposed to happen.

We made a great team. I was dreadful, poor Matt was bad at pretending he understood financial stuff, and the camera operator, who had seen dozens of people like me do this all day, looked like he was praying for an earthquake. Four minutes later I was again out in the corridors, navigating past the discarded sofa and puddles, and back out on the street.

How did I feel? Well, I thought about it and just laughed out loud. They had all been very nice but it confirmed to me that what I do is just not a proper job. Nor is dancing on stage or appearing in a television show. We set ourselves up for humiliation so there’s no point in crying about it. Better to laugh and, when people ask what your job is, say something like “I don’t work, I inherited.” Seems to work for the Royals.

This week then I’m off to the job centre to find something slightly less humiliating. Perhaps a sanitary waste inspector, or maybe a circus clown. Or I could ask if they have any jobs working with Spielberg. I bet the waterfalls on his walls are meant to there.