CHILD STAR (PART THREE)


THIS IS PART THREE,PART ONE IS HERE 

Aged 14 My parents made me get a job because they thought it was important to learn the value of work. Instead I had learned that the modern work environment was calibrated to maximize people's misery, deprive them of any joy and financially punish them for the privilege. If you wanted to rise to the top of one of these faceless corporations you’d be better off having a full frontal lobotomy and relocating to a mental institution than taking it upon yourself to do the drastic restructuring of one's personality needed to thrive in such a restrictive environment. And for what? You’d never own one of these faceless corporations. If you rose up the ranks at best you could have a job chained to a desk with your face buried in a computer for thirty years at a soulless industrial estate in Chiswick before you knew you were dead.

University did not appeal to me as it was no longer the mind expanding bettering experience it once was, now it was just a glorified GNVQ that came with an unpayable debt and a warped sense of entitlement and self importance that allowed you to apply for a glorified Saturday job stretched out over five days a week for fifty years.

Show biz appealed to me so I was going to start at the ground level in hospital radio. The power of hospital radio as an entertainment platform was waning by the time I rocked up. Why would you listen to an unpaid charity worker playing records out of a cupboard in the Royal Free when you had a whole world of entertainment at your fingertips with the internet? You wouldn’t. I didn’t know at the time but sitting alone in a cupboard in a hospital with a moribund, decrepit close to death audience for company was the perfect metaphor for what my career in show business would become


LIGHTS, CAMERA, FIRED AGAIN
When I was 18 I had done a radio course to better my production skills at a place that was advertising itself as a school but was actually a room in an abandoned building on an industrial estate in Putney, run by a guy called Andrew. It seemed Andrew had modelled himself on the tailor from the Emperor's New Clothes. This incarnation of the school was apparently a step up from it’s previous one which, by all accounts was a cupboard under the stairs in Andrews house. He tried to sell it to the students as “a recreation of an authentic radio studio.” He told me some people would embrace it and others would be like this is not a school, this is a cupboard under the stairs I want my money back. I admired his gumption, why couldn’t a cupboard under the stairs be a world famous radio school.

A couple of years later he had relocated to central London and we crossed paths again. Things were going well, he had rebranded himself as the London Academy Of Radio Film and Television and splashed out with a central London location and proper classroom. He had handed over teaching duties to a guy who directed The Bill. Andrew asked me if I would like to be a camera assistant for the course. I explained I didn't know how to operate a camera. He said you just turn it on and point it. And just like that I was a camera assistant at a film school.

Next Andrew pitched the idea of me being a teacher of a film class. The guy from The Bill was off to shoot some episodes of London’s Burning and he needed someone to cover so as not to leave the people who had booked for the course in the lurch. Aged 19 I was now a film teacher. My qualifications to do this were I could work a camera and I’d seen some films.

Before I started my course The Big Breakfast (The most popular breakfast TV show at the time) got in touch with Andrew about sending a film teacher to represent the school on national TV. No information was given about what I’d be doing. I didn’t want to go but my friends told me it would be great for my profile. It turned out I was to pitch a music video to a band they were manufacturing on the show.Two months ago I was being fired from another meaningless job and now I was a film teacher about to go on national TV

I stayed up all night putting together storyboards for a music video. When I turned up at the studio I was put in a green room with a 60 year old man. I asked him what he was doing on the show, he said “he was pitching a music video.” “Did he teach at a film school too?” No he said “I film weddings” at this point there was a knock at the door. It was the producer who told us that there would be one more contestant coming along but they were running late. “Who was it” I asked? “Michael Jackson's video director.” They replied.

When we went live on air Richard Bacon tore into me on live TV saying I was far too young to teach film to which I retorted “all the greats started young,Maculy Culkin, Shirley Temple.” I had him on the ropes “I’ll do the jokes.” he said as a bead of sweat dripped down his forehead. Spurred on by a wounded Bacon the band voted me out of the competition and I was instructed “to leave The Big Breakfast house.” “go home?” I asked “No we’ll just film you walking down the path.” Drenched in rain The camera lingered on me gormlessly looking through the kitchen window as an accomplished film director got a gig, a chilling, prescient paradigm for what would follow in my next twenty years of show business.

At least I had my film course. I wrote some scripts and created a six week syllabus but my course only lasted three. It was mainly adults who took it and I think they resented being taught by a child who thought he was Martin Scorsese. Richard Bacon was right I was too young to teach a film class . A few months later I bumped into Andrew on the Tube the film school had closed

Had it ever existed at all...?

He told me anything was possible and he was going to work on inventing a time machine. And to be fair i haven’t seen him since so maybe he did it. I wouldn’t put it past him.


SHAVED FROM WORKING
The job of my dreams had come a couple of years too early, so it was back to the drawing board for me. In the last six years all the jobs I'd had had been for soulless corporations where you were just a cog in a machine remotely controlled by a series of protocols and procedures out of a head office in Basingstoke. Completely dispensable, just filling in until the next desperate soul who’d had all their dreams crushed walked in the door.It was time to look local and independent.

A stone's throw away from my house was Europe's oldest purpose built cinema. The Phoenix was an anomaly in the modern world; it could not be further away from a commercial success. It showed obscure films and it’s core audience were pensioners, male ones, who were less arthouse film connoisseurs and more serial masturbators coming to knock one out to the obligatory flesh in an obscure foreign movie.

Minus the pervs It was the perfect job for someone who didn’t want to work. A throwback to the golden age of casual work before HR and management consultants slush funded profits to pay their salaries to implement pointless infrastructure and red tape. In it’s 100 year history only one person had been fired and that was for doing heroin in the toilets so i felt confident i’d keep this one. As a film obsessive with an independent spirit who hated working I’d finally found my perfect job and it was two minutes walk from my house, sorry my parents house as they were so fond of telling me.

It went well for the first few months, Customers were rarer than Sumatran Rhinoceros and doing work was frankly frowned upon by management. Then one day the devil rode in on a shiny red mountain bike here to bring order to chaos. To implement her vision of an arthouse aesthetic with a corporate twist. Just when I thought I’d found the last bastion of independent free thought in the workplace the toxic cloud of corporate accountability smothered The Phoenix choking out all the allure of working there.

The new ideas were not well received by the band of workers who’d signed up for a job with no responsibility, pressure or targets. This was a team of people who were less looking to climb the corporate ladder of the arthouse cinema industry and more looking for a job where they weren’t told off for reading a book during a shift. The problem with The Phoenix was not it’s lack of corporate structures and procedures; the problem with the phoenix was that it was showing obscure foreign films in East Finchley, an area of London that is about as culturally relevant as the black and white minstrel show. But all ten of our customers a week were going to get a corporate anodyne experience to rub one out to whether they liked it or not.

Uniforms were bought in at great expense, appearance guidelines too. Complicated ordering systems for a concession that sold three items - tea, coffee and popcorn. Vicky would stand on the balcony taking in the empty vista of her haunted, empty odeon as if the ghostly spectre of a once heaving audience floated through the foyer not three confused pensioners asking an usher why there was someone masturbating during Amelie.

But there was one major obstacle to her hostile takeover. Me. Two tribes pitched against each other, the modernists with their bureaucratic chains and forced labor against me the traditionalist with my policy of creative autonomy and going home for a couple of hours to watch TV during my shift. The battle was bloody. I tried to rally the troops but this was very much a team averse to confrontation and without stomach for a mutiny. I was given every warning they had in the armoury and I was one away from being fired. They’d been saving this last one up.

One of the policies of the new regime was that you could either be clean shaven or have a beard. Nothing in between. Strictly no stubble. It might have been a trap set against me or it might have been a projection of the shame the manager who implemented it felt about her own hirsutism it was hard to tell but I was going to shave when I wanted not when capitalism told me. So when I was told to have a shave I would say "I was growing a beard" and then shave at my leisure. This went on time after time until one day I was hauled into the office and fired. And the reason stated in my file “Harry says he is growing a beard but beard never materialises.”

Vicky the assistant manager, had won the battle but I won the war. I tried to explain how I was trying to protect the integrity of this 100 year old arts institution but that fell on deaf ears so I put the managers prized shiny red mountain bike in Loot for £20 with the cinemas phone number. They listened when they were unable to take booking for two days due to people enquiring about buying the bike. I was banned from the cinema for life and a letter was issued to staff entitled “Procedure For If Harry Enters The Building”. Step One “ask him to leave.” Step Seven “call the police.”

It was time to take a sabbatical.

People talk about the career ladder well my experience of having a job was walking under it not climbing up it. Some would say I was unlucky to be fired others would say my employer was unlucky to hire me. Let's call it a draw. From fourteen to twenty I had fifteen jobs in total and I got fired from every single one, without fail. A habit I haven’t shaken to this day. My parents still think I’m working at the Golf Shop, so don’t tell them about this piece.

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If you read things backwards, part one of this piece is here and part two is here

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