a few brief
thoughts....
I enjoy the spirited
discussions here. I do put a premium on civility and I do ask that we try to
keep this a fun list and bear in mind that the person you are criticising
trenchantly may be the favourite of many others. The reality is too that you
can’t see the twinkle in the eye, or see the grin on the face, or hear the tone,
in what someone has written. If I was kidding with friends in the pub I might
well say “you must have a sick sense of humour if you think Mr X is funny”. But
if I wrote here about a JAM performer “you’d have to have a sick sense of humour
to find Mr X funny”... well, I can understand why many people wouldn’t catch the
twinkle in the eye.
Just to make it
clear, I am not saying anyone recently has breached the civility standard as I
see it.
Clitheroe Kid, every
time you post – and that’s far too infrequently – you give me a lot to think
about. After spending too much of my time thinking about JAM, that’s a good
thing.
And I do agree with
you that some of the Nick criticism is wrong-headed and even though I am a
producer I do think some of the editing is sloppy. I refer to more than a few
instances in recent years of Nicholas giving the scores twice in a row, with
different scores, ie,. a round being edited out poorly. This is just plain poor
production work.
But... I doubt that
we can really assign much of the criticism of Nick is because of poor editing.
Much of what is edited out is Nicholas’s stumbles. An example, at the end of one
of the recent Edinburgh shows, Nicholas tried four times to get through the
closing credits without a stumble, and failed each time. Eventually Tilusha
Ghelani said they would edit bits together. It made me wonder why they didn’t
just write out what he has to say – again, a production point.
I think that Nicholas
as a chairman is inconsistent in the interests of the show. Here’s an example
again from Edinburgh. Shappi Khoprsandi was speaking, went off briefly on a
tangent and then said “but that’s irrelevant”. Gyles buzzed and said
“self-confessed deviation”. Now Gyles was at the time in the lead, and it was
the first time Shappi had really got going. Nicholas decided it wasn’t
deviation, when of course it was. Had positions been reversed and it was Shappi
challenging Gyles for going off on a tangent, I think Shappi would have won the
point.