AliceFraser
patreon
Blast From The Past
🕑 Added 2019-07-28 08:21:31 +0000 UTCIt’s been an intense and interesting week. I remember talking earlier this year to my close people and saying that professionally this year feels easier. Like “suddenly weights have been taken off my ankles”.
The Patreon (thanks to you lovely subscribers) has got to the point where I don’t have to say yes to scary gigs in the middle of nowhere, but instead could focus on work that feels fulfilling. It’s part of the work in the comedy industry to take a four or six hour bus to somewhere and back in the middle of the night to make the money work so you can clear £20 or £50 or £0 doing comedy to people at a lineup show. This is worth doing to chip incrementally away at your rent or “for exposure” or “for progression” (which is like pre-exposure - the gamble that the person who books the gig will come and watch, enjoy your set, and book you for a longer and slightly better paid spot at some indeterminate later date). And you humbly ask for these spots because it helps you slowly slowly build up value in the industry until people want you more than you need them.
The alternative is to build your own thing (Thank you, you lovely humans !) and then the dynamic switches from a buyer’s market to a seller’s market.
So from the beginning of this year it’s suddenly felt like I have more weight to swing around - that people want me specifically and not just someone at “my level” to “fill twenty minutes”.
This is mainly due to podcasting: Tea With Alice to start, and your support here on Patreon, to which I attribute being allowed to do The Bugle and The Alice Fraser Trilogy, and from those, the Audible Documentaries and my new BBC Radio 4 series Stranger Than Sci-Fi.
It also is directly linked to the call I got last week that means I’ll be filming a special at the Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne (keep an eye out here and on twitter for ticket availability if you live there, remembering that I’ll give you an extra ticket/2 for 1 for being a Patron). I’m not sure if I’m allowed to announce who it’s for yet, but you’ll be the first to know, and as a hint, it was someone I had on Tea With Alice who put me forward for it, and had the clout with that platform to have them take me seriously.
Anyway I have to decide which of my shows I want to have lots of people in the world suddenly have access to, and I’m tossing up between a polished and revised version of Savage, Mythos which will be coming out of Edinburgh at a lean mean fighting weight or some sort of best-of-Alice-Fraser jokes jokes jokes mashup show.
In the end I’m leaning towards Savage as it’s the desert island show. If you said I’d only be allowed to do one show forever from now on, i would choose that one. On a personal level it meant a lot to me, and on a professional level, I think it is a good introduction to what I do and why. Every show I’ve written since has been in a sense an answer to something in Savage.
Anyway, all this to say I’m doing invoices in a field in York right now and feeling bloody grateful to all of you.
Let me know your thoughts, as ever,
Xxx
A
Comments
It’ll be fun though!
Some how I always feel guilty about officially asking people for the money we agreed they’d give me for the work I’ve already done.
Mike
I’m sorry we’re such a pain in the ass.
Getting my 10 letters of recommendation together slowly!
Thankyou!!
Well done and well deserved!
Mike
Any progress on making it to the US? I live in Des Moines (which I know is probably not first on your list) but it would be cool if you could make it to Chicago or maybe Kansas City! Sending all the good vibes.
Either will lead people to the same place. Your ground work has done the rest.
I know! It’s counterintuitive because it should be a positive experience of organising money for your hard work, but it’s so oddly stressful.
Man I hate doing invoices.
Such an odd economy. Had a discussion with a man the other day who truly believes unpaid internships don’t create or cultivate inequality. Infuriating.
10 September!
Great to see the projects you've put so much into coming together!
Free gigs and internships are a huge problem in lots of industries. The worst thing in tech are the Kaggle type models. Often you have dozens of teams working for free on a problem that will benefit a large corporation without any compensation. There are interesting non-commercial projects on their such as scanning old captains logbooks to track global warming and so on, but too much is exploitative. Huge amounts of effort go into Grad student being able to claim they are 3/102 on challenge x to benefit MegaCorp. The worst one I've seen is Numerai which is a hedge fund that wants people to create models for them (on anonymous data) to help them in return for various low-value credits. If any models work they will make them a killing from it! Hackathons can be as bad: I've seen ones where 100 teams have been working for 24/3 days on a business problem and all intellectual property rights are retained by JP Morgan or whoever is backing it. There are some good ones but startup incubators and accelerators can often be similar where lots of rights and equity are given up for very little. Alice is one the right track with "build your own thing"!
Filming at the Malthouse?!? Brilliant! I’ll be there with bells on. Or without bells on as that would be annoying & I’m loud enough as it is.
Free gigs, or even worse #paytospeak, are common in the IT world too. It’s great to be able to say “no” and focus on helping people.
