Bad interview technique

Perhaps unsurprisingly I didn't get through to the next round of the job I went for two days ago. It was to work as a guide for the ABBA exhibit at the Royal Festival Hall. It wasn't a full-time post and it was only for a few months, so with my expertise and love for the group, I did think I might have been a shoe-in. I await feedback to see what the official issue was. I suspect the woman who interviewed me, who'd told the group beforehand that she had nothing to do with the exhibition itself, took one look at me, thought "why does this old man want to do a job which is meant for pretty young people?" and instantly decided to give me short shrift. This may explain why she blanket circled the number 2 as a score on my form, called me Mr Benjamin and couldn't wait to get rid of me. I think the interview might have got off to a less humiliating start if she'd thought to apologise for calling me by the wrong name, or laughed with me when I bumblingly tried to make light of her blunder. Actually what she did was make me feel ashamed for pointing out her error. "So your surname's not Benjamin?" Her eyes rolled, her voice bristled with boredom. She made me feel utterly insignificant.

When I'm auditioning people, I take great care to write in code or make sure that people can't see what I'm writing about them. Of course, we're all capable of getting it wrong. We all have powerful instincts, and I'm definitely a man who places great emphasis on mine. I have, in the past, almost certainly written-off people because of the way they look and when I was young, I think I would have been a bit confused at the notion of an old git like me wanting to do a part-time, zero hours contract. I'd probably I have thought I was a bit tragic. But there was something about the way she marked me so blatantly and pointedly that implied her actions were company policy. Almost as though someone had said "we've got to rush these bastards through. There's way too many of them, so if they're not right, get them out of the door as quickly as you can. Don't get embarrassed about marking them. We need the scores, and they need the job, so just do it in front of them. It's their own fault if they look down at what you're writing..."

So, if you're reading this and you are about to do a set of interviews, here are some suggestions based on my experience. Feel free to add your own pearls of wisdom. 

1. People's names are really important to them. If someone tells you you've pronounced their name wrong, or used their first name as a surname, be apologetic. If they don't look offended, use the mistake as a way of putting the candidate at his or her ease. Offer candidates a box in their application form which says "how do you like to be known?" This means that those of us who use our middle names, or a nickname, or have a first name which is hard to pronounce, can aid an interviewer considerably. 

 
2. Never de-humanise a person. If you're instinct tells you you need to find young people, re-programme it to say "I need to find energetic, engaging people, regardless of age." 

3. If someone is only giving average answers, give him or her a little steer, so he has a chance to go from a 2 to a 3. 

 
4. Don't ask questions which are only easy to answer after someone has been hired and trained. Asking, for example, what a potential tour guide would do if someone was taken sick in a space/ exhibition he has never seen before is a fairly pointless question. There will be a company protocol which is based on a detailed health and safety assessment of the venue. 

 
5. If asked to score an individual, think about taking a few minutes at the end of the interview to do so, or using a code which he won't understand. 

 
6. Never make an assumption that someone who comes for an interview doesn't "need" the job as much as another person. There are many reasons why, for example, an older person might want or need a post you think they're either over-qualified for or you think would suit a younger person.

7. Smile. If an interview is going badly, it's as much the responsibility of the interviewer to turn things around.

So that's about it from me. I'm rushing up to Northampton...

Fear of stickers

I had a job interview today. It was a curious experience which didn't start altogether well. I arrived at the desk and was immediately freaked out by being asked to wear a sticker with my name on it. I have a slight phobia about stickers. It's not so much that I'm scared of them, more that, for the whole of my life, stickers have made me feel sick. I particularly hate them on fruit or cans of coke and was especially freaked out by them as a child. The irony, of course, is that children in particular, are often offered stickers as rewards. Dentists love handing them out. Charities offer them in return for donations. I hate the way that they curl and then attach themselves to other things. When I'm doing NYMT auditions, they can be useful to know names, but during the dance call they all fall off, get attached to people's hair, or end up stuck to the floor. It turns my stomach.

So, when I was handed a sticker today, I immediately attached it to the book I was holding so that it was out of harm's way. I once met a girl who had a similar problem with buttons. She used to replace all of her buttons with safety pins. Being repulsed by buttons is probably more problematic than my issue with stickers. It's really hard to get away from buttons.

When it came to the actual interview, I was a little disconcerted to be referred to as "Mr Benjamin." The fact that I use my middle name almost invariably causes issues. My first name is actually David, but I don't think anyone other than doctors and dentists have ever called me that. Often, when filling out a form, I feel obliged to be honest and write "David Benjamin." It always causes an element of confusion but it's rare to be called "Mr Benjamin."

The other disconcerting thing about the interview was that the woman asking me questions was blatantly giving me marks out of three every time I answered. It was deeply off-putting. I now know that I blanket scored 2 out of 3 for every answer I gave. Middle for diddle. Average all the way. It's not particularly nice to feel like that in an interview. There are surely better ways of getting the best out of people other than crushing them with scores? Perhaps take time to mark the candidate at the end of their interview?

Anyway, perhaps I'm just being a little grand. I may well have had so few job interviews in my time that I don't realise that this is the way that everyone recruits these days.

Pounds of flesh

I woke up this morning with a message from Meriel which informed me that, on this day, forty years ago, ABBA's The Name of the Game climbed to Number One. It stayed at the top of the charts for four weeks, and one of my first childhood memories is watching Top of The Pops and the presenter talking about the song "STILL" being at number one, like it was some sort of astonishing feat, which it really wasn't when we consider it was replaced at the top by Wings' Mull of Kintyre, which stayed there for nine weeks and became the first ever single to sell over 2 million copies. At the time, of course, I was horrified at the injustice of a song as great as The Name of the Game being knocked off the top by something so slushy and mawkish. I'm not sure I'd have used those words to describe the Wings song at the time. I'd probably have simply moaned that it wasn't by ABBA...

I find myself incensed by the increasingly over-the-top reporting of Westminster sex scandals. It strikes me that a lot of people are crowing and a lot more are pretending to be a great deal more outraged than they actually are. I'm afraid I've become utterly bored of people talking about the issue as though it's something which only affects women. Create an independent body which people can go to if they feel victimised. Put checks and systems in place which make it clear how people are expected to behave in the work place and how they'll be punished if they break this code of conduct. Inform the police about people who have genuinely broken the law. Move on...

I'm afraid I'm particularly cynical about the queue of journalists who are presently coming forward to cut of their piece of flesh, particularly ones from the Daily Mail, whose guttersnipe reporters have brutally and systematically attacked minority groups over the years. You live by the sword. You die by it.

Journalists can be incredibly underhand and morally highly dubious in their quest to eke out stories. Quite why any journalist would be having a boozy lunch with an MP is beyond me.

For three years, from the start of 1997 to the end of 1999, I was the partner of a male MP. He was, and still is, a kind, honourable and honest man who cares about people. I was his partner when he was elected to Parliament in the Labour landslide, and his result was THE result of the night. The surprise win opened the two of us up to a huge amount of media scrutiny. I was 22 at the time, and highly vulnerable. No one at the Labour Party press office offered me help or guidance, and it felt as though I'd been dropped into the sea without a life vest.

A week after the election, something I'd written and directed, was performed at the London Pleasance and, during the technical rehearsal, I was besieged by phone calls from press people pretending to be reviewers and theatre correspondents. Within minutes, all the calls turned into dirt-digging missions with the journalists asking me how my relationship was going. I couldn't get them off the phone. One even asked me if there was anything I'd like to tell them before they found it out. It was terrifying and I had no idea how to answer the questions.

We used to go out to political events, and journalists, often female ones, would ply me with alcohol, pretend to be my pal, and get me to open up about my partner, asking me hugely leading questions but couching them with a sense that they were really keen to be my friend and what I was saying was entirely off-the-record. On a couple of occasions, what I said miraculously found its way into print. What those journalists did was really shady and underhand and I was often left feeling entirely abused. I remember a horrid meal once where my partner took that dreaded call from his press office telling him that such and such a paper were threatening to run a story about him, which I'd inadvertently triggered by speaking to a female journalist who'd taken advantage of my naïveté and openness. I felt sick and incredibly upset and guilty. I'd genuinely really liked her and thought she was a new friend.

Vulnerability manifests itself in myriad ways and people from both genders are capable of taking advantage. Men and women are both able to use sex as a tool and we mustn't fall into the trap of chanting "all men bad, all women good" in some sort of Orwellian catastrophe.

When I worked in the corporate sphere, I was more aware of sexual politics than any other time in my career. I saw some dreadful things. Men patronising women in an almost systematic way, but equally, women playing along in a way which often made me feel highly uncomfortable. Straight men in the office would often tell me I had to learn not to treat our female colleagues the way I treated men because, women "needed to be protected." On one occasion I was forced into buying flowers for a bank worker who'd threatened to go to her union because I'd inferred that she was lazy. The fact that I was asked to buy her flowers and, worse still, that she was appeased by them, shocked me beyond words.

So in summing up, I think, regardless of our gender or the role we play in an organisation or institution, we ALL need to take this opportunity to take a good, hard look at the way we behave. Let he who is without sin and all that...

Filming in Liverpool

I'm presently sitting in a Mcdonald's at Stafford services at the end of a long, but hugely rewarding day. We've been in Liverpool with the Edge Hill students on the final day of what's turned out to be an incredibly special project. Today was the day we did the filming.

It was raining at 7am when I left the Premier Inn: punishing, brutal, freezing cold rain which had turned to hail and snow by the time I'd reached Skem to meet Keith the Cam. Keith and I have been working together for almost ten years, and I adore him. I think we bring out the best in each other. He shot my Hattersley film, which I think is head and shoulders better than anything else I've made. He's been working as a cameraman in news for a long time, so doesn't get enough opportunity to flex his creative muscles. He comes to shoots with a huge amount of energy and an endless supply of ideas, which I adore.

We reached Liverpool in some sort of howling gale and got royally soaked filming cutaway shots of the iconic Liver building.

Speaking of iconic, the first proper shoot of the day was at the Cavern Club. It's not the actual Cavern Club, which was knocked down in the mid 70s for unfathomable reasons, but this version has been rebuilt, brick for brick, a few doors down Matthew Street. It's still a real treat to be there. Adele played a set there just after releasing 19.

We shot our end sequence in the club and the students, whom I've come to adore over the last few days, gave it everything they had. They all looked spectacular in their 60s costumes. A lovely lady from the university's costume department came along to make sure they all looked brilliant. There were beehives, brilliant fake eyelashes and more polyester shirts than you could shake a stick at. Not that I've ever shaken a stick at anything or anyone. What is that phrase all about?

What I wasn't prepared for at the Cavern were the tourists, many of whom were Japanese, none of whom seemed to have any sense of what we were trying to achieve. Several walked straight through the dance floor whilst we were doing our routine. Another came up to me whilst I was delivering a pep talk to the cast, tapped me repeatedly before asking where the loo was!

From Matthew Street, we went to Princes Street, a grimy little lane in Central Liverpool where we filmed the opening sequence. Trying to film something which is set in the 1960s is always going to be a challenge on a next-to-nothing budget. It's not to hard to find a street which looks vaguely right, but modern cars and buses stream past almost constantly. I can't imagine how we'd have coped if we were recording sound as well. We spent much of the day sending people round corners to stop traffic by activating pedestrian crossings.

That said, Keith the Cam just sent a little clip from that particular setup and it looks fabulous.

After lunch, we travelled to the area around Stanley Dock, which is incredibly filmic and interesting on account of it being full of fabulously grotty Victorian buildings which have not yet been gentrified.

We did a lot of cheeky on-street filming, occasionally sending some of the cast further down the road to encourage cars to stop so that we could finish the take without interruption.

A highlight was definitely creating the illusion of smoke with one of the students vaping and blowing the vapours across the front of the lens!

We wrapped at 5pm, an hour earlier than expected, as the temperatures plummeted and the fireworks started to bang and crackle across the city. I have seldom seen a larger moon than the one which rose in the sky as I drove away from Keith's house this evening. The air smelt of dynamite and wood smoke. Everything seemed to be wrapped in a mysterious, timeless haze which felt somewhat appropriate after the day we'd had.

The so-called

Why do all newsreaders call IS "The so-called Islamic State?" Surely if that's what they're called, we just need to call them by their name? I assume it's something to do with them not actually being a legitimate state, but there was an interview on BBC breakfast this morning which turned into a bit of a joke as the two people talking almost fell over themselves saying "the so-called." They were refereeing to something else as a "so-called" something as well, but I had no idea what the word they were using meant and no one felt the need to translate.

We did an afternoon of reccying in Liverpool yesterday. I don't really know how to spell that word. Reccying, not Liverpool. I'm not even sure what reccying is short for... reconnaissance? For those who don't work in telly or film, you reccy locations before going on a shoot to discover exactly which shots you want to use and the perils/ logistics of doing so. Of course, I would normally have a chance to reccy exactly a week before the shoot, which offers the most realistic sense of what the location will actually be like in terms of light, busy-ness of traffic and numbers of people milling around. As it turned out, we reccied in darkness. #guerilla

Just as a little aside, I watch, with horror, the news emerging every day about sex crimes in Parliament and the media. Obviously I have no knowledge whatsoever about the individual cases, but will say that they seem to have been incredibly fast to condemn Kevin Spacey. Netflix has already announced that they won't screen a film he produced and that he can pretty much forget about playing his role in House of Cards. I'm not going to get into the ins and outs of the allegations, but do wonder why a 14-year old lad was at a Hollywood party unchaperoned and why this same person opted to go to the media with his allegations instead of the police. In respect to Parliament, I think it's important that we start to differentiate between sexual morality and actual crimes. If we want to create a code of conduct, we can't retrospectively punish people for breaking it. It is not yet a crime to touch someone's knee. We may yet decide that it needs to become one, but talking about knee-touching in the same breath as rape seems crazy to me. They're simply not the same crime, and it seems incredibly insensitive to victims of violent sex crime if we decide to throw everything in together like this.

It also seems quite a knee-jerk reaction to refuse to screen a film that someone who may or may not have committed a crime has produced. I wonder how the writer, director and actors would feel to hear the news that their hard work has been for nothing. Scratch the surface in this industry and you'll find someone shady working on every film and TV show that exists.

I suppose I just hope for a little less sensationalism and a bit more rationality. There's plainly a problem here which needs to be addressed but I'm just not sure a witch hunt is the best way to wheedle it out.

Any thoughts?

Back ache

Yesterday was a fairly brutal day which started early and finished late. I was recording vocals for the Em video project in the studios at Edge Hill with a wonderfully patient engineer called Gary. The students weren't all what you might call "studio ready." I hope the experience will prove to be a really important learning curve for them. There is a massive difference between thinking you know a piece of music and actually being able to perform it properly. Similarly, there's a massive difference between what you can get away with in live performance and what works in a recording where everything has to be perfect. Sing a note out of tune in a live performance and it's gone in a flash. Sing out of tune on a recording and you're destined to wince every time you hear it. People can find the environment of a recording studio very alienating. The acoustic is dry and all the sound is coming at you through a little pair of headphones.

I was very proud of some of the students whom I thought were brining their A games. Some of the others disappointed me a little if I'm brutally honest. I think some of the lads were coasting and thinking that someone else would take the flack for the work they hadn't done. At this age, young male actors will often get their pick of roles without ever experiencing competition, whereas the girls will have been fighting for roles all their lives. The statistics in this industry are all in a man's favour. There are fewer roles for women and many more women who want to act. At NYMT, the girls have a 1 in 9 chance of getting cast in a show, whilst the boys have a 1 in 9 chance of NOT being cast.

So there were some gruelling moments and by the time I'd left the building at 8.30, I was ready to drop. I realise I have a much shorter attention span as I get older and much less ability to be charismatic when I get tired. I throw in the towel more quickly and am much less likely to try to flog a dead horse. Maybe I'm just being more practical these days.

I have changed rooms in my Premier Inn. I have to say, the staff there are all deeply charming and really very lovely to talk to, and have bent over backwards to help me. My new room has a funny bed-like sofa in it with a long sausage-shaped pillow along the side to lean against. Unfortunately, if you put your weight on the pillow, as I did last night, it disappears into a massive chasm and your back is catapulted into the window. At the same time the sofa, which is on wheels, flies forward. It's really rather dangerous and my back took a massive thump against the window. It was actually rather terrifying. Aside from having quite a sore back as a result, I also suffered a massive adrenaline spike as I flew backwards. It took me a few moments to recover!

Premier sin

I'm presently wandering, somewhat aimlessly, around a 24 hour Tesco store. The lighting is clinical and insanely bright. I don't really know what I'm buying. I'm feeling a little lonely. I feel like someone in an art house film. It's the sort of film where they don't play incidental music to ease the brutality of the shots. I might buy a little pastry. I might not. Very little else will happen in the sequence but I'll act it beautifully. The harsh lighting will make the wrinkles on my forehead look like tram lines. This will make me act better.

I'm somewhere between Ormskirk and Southport. I've been working with the fabulous students at Edge Hill University today. We've been working on a very exciting Em-based project. They're essentially re-recording one of the ensemble album tracks, and we're going to film them, singing and dancing, in full costume, on the streets of Liverpool.

I was up at some ungodly hour this morning, steaming up the M1 and M6 in the car I've borrowed from my parents for the occasion. I stopped at Watford Gap and drank tea surrounded by men in cheap suits. My tea was too expensive but the queue for Macdonald's, where tea is cheaper, was insane.

I reached the students just before lunch. I didn't know where they were rehearsing, but could hear my music drifting down from an upstairs window. It's always surreal when that happens. Clare Chandler was putting a group of lads through their paces when I walked in. I'm not sure the students are hugely fast when it comes to picking up harmonies but they have great energy and life and many are true Scousers which somehow makes the song seem more legitimate!

What seems clear to me is that the university is incredibly lucky to have Claire. She keeps her ear permanently to the ground, is a great supporter of British musical theatre and brings in really interesting practitioners to work with the students.

During the afternoon we did more note-bashing and I'm hoping the cast will go away and do their homework before the studio sessions tomorrow. If they do, we're on course for something fabulous.

I'm staying in a Premier Inn. It's expensive. I don't understand why it's expensive because I'm hardly in a tourist trap. I understood that Premier Inn rooms all had baths. Sadly I've been dumped in the disabled access room which means instead of a bath, I've got some kind of drive-through shower. I'd imagined a long, hot soak. I don't have phone reception either, so I've already missed a call from the film office in Liverpool. There's also an internal door leading to the next door room. I can hear everything they're saying. I'm a little sad. What is this place?