Time for another guest columnist piece for your reading pleasure, coz I’m generous like that. This time from @lerouxbotha. Stuff of legend. And so…
Greed… and the art of frying audiences!
So, seeing that Stu let MissGiz do her thang on his front porch (his blog), he agreed to let me do something too… so here goes.
I also work in the television industry as a director, editor, floor-manager and general nice guy. In my opinion, the South African television industry has a lot of qualified people doing different jobs to survive. It’s not like in the US (or anywhere else in the world) where you train as something and for all intensive purposes you are stuck in that profession for the rest of existence, or until hell freezes over. In our beautiful country you have to learn new skills everyday to make enough bucks to rent your overpriced loft apartment in the most dangerous part of Jozi, and drive your bulletproof Hummer through droves of angry striking Metro Bus people just to get to your next freelance job (because, as you know – you can’t only hold one job – you need several!).
This is how the amiable Princess TamTam phoned me one day during the Idols ordeal, and asked me if I could expand my skills (I have several others, which will not be mentioned in this blog – if you wanna know follow me on Twitter @lerouxbotha), to include Warm-Up Artist. Now, the ancient art of warming up an audience comes from the ancient blah-blah-blah-bullshit!
So there I went, dressed to the nines, to the Top 6 Idols performance one fine Friday evening at the Mosaiek, and tried my hand at being an audience Microwave. Stu pushed a bag of freebies in my hands (which included some or other perfume samples x 4, lanyards with lip-ice attached to it x 200 and stick-on tattoos x 5000). Now in my limited and interesting time on this here earth, I have never seen our race go so crazy about free stuff as I did that evening. You hold one of the 5000 stick-on tattoos in the air and you have the power to command hordes! No wonder people go into wars… they get free stuff on the other side! People will do whatever you tell them to, if they can just own a piece of branded string with a lip-gloss attached loosely to the front of it!
You get used to greed though. By the final night of deep-frying the audience and cracking funnies at the blondes (they had a choice either to clap or yell, because they can’t do both at the same time), I was versed in the art of Audience Briefing, and yet another little line on a CV somewhere was added. I also nearly killed a woman in the 23rd row after throwing the perfume sample into the audience in an attempt to “get the middle block to do a Mexican wave”! The power overtook me… it was exhilarating!
Afterwards, at the media function, whilst sipping on a glass of chardonnay, a little girl comes to me and hits me on the back of my leg… “Why didn’t you give me a tattoo?! Asshole!” And she strolled away!
So much for teaching our kids not to be greedy… or materialistic!
