ENTERTAINMENT NEWS

TUPNews recently took in some stand-up comedy at the Round Table pub in Covent Garden. I went with members of my book club. In a tiny, antique room at the top of the pub, a crowd of no more than twenty packed in to watch five low-rung comedians.

The tension in the air was palpable from the start. Stand-up takes more guts than any other type of performance – you simply cannot hide from not being funny. The audience also shares in the fear of failure: what could be more excruciating than watching a failing comic at such close quarters?

This was, in fact, what we got right from the offing. The compere was a sympathetic yet visibly drunk girl who hashed through ten minutes of poorly-improvised banter, to limited nervous laughter. My colleagues cringed; I found it electrifying. Such a crucible! My friend Al had expressed some anxiety beforehand: he had been cajoled into audience participation at a previous comedy show with embarrassing results, and feared a repeat. Sure enough, he was picked out right away by the compere for some what’s-your-name-and-what-do-you-do. “Mark, maths teacher” was a sturdy forward defensive, but did not prevent him from being appointed applause captain for our side of the room. I delighted in his stoic discomfort.

The first comic upped the ante even further, dispensing with his routine and making an apparently cocaine-fuelled attempt to base his entire set on free-flowing audience interaction. The results were miserable – long silences, baiting of tourists, a total inability to convert what scraps he was offered into anything resembling comic bronze, let alone gold. By the end, some audience members were openly begging the guy to tell a joke. It was awful, and utterly compelling.

Thankfully the rest of the comics actually had routines, and the standard steadily improved across the night (although the last two were polished to the point of being somewhat bland). It was not until the final comic was well into his act, however, that the knot in my stomach began to unwind. We walked out into the night breeze sighing with relief, as if leaving a tricky yet well-handled examination.

I don't know if I'll be back in a hurry, but there was a low, furtive thrill about the whole affair that has stuck in my mind, even if few of the jokes have.

BUSINESS NEWS

TUPNews recently interviewed the CEO of a major energy trading firm. Based in London, it is the trading arm of a wider French electricity supplier, at which the CEO spent most of his career. Here are excerpts:

How do British and French business cultures differ?

The UK is more pragmatic and business-oriented, while the French are more conceptual. The French like to build a conceptual framework in which the business is to be understood. The UK approach is more efficient, but sometimes it would be worth stepping back and understanding the environment.

Also the relationship with profit and money is more simple in the UK. In France, there is the sense that if you are profitable, it is a shame.

What advice would you give your successor?

In France, there is a tendency for a newly-appointed CEO to say, what came before was rubbish, I will show you how to be successful. It’s engineer culture - engineers like to start from scratch. But that doesn’t work. You have to look at the existing strengths and weaknesses, and figure out what you can do to bolster the strengths and improve the weaknesses. It’s a more commercial approach, and, from what I can see, more common in the UK.

What is the best business advice you’ve ever received?

One of our former chairmen came to give a commencement address in the early 1990s for graduates from engineering school. His advice to engineers was to listen to what people want.

He told the story of being a young civil servant in charge of the barges in Paris during the May 1968 unrest. The barges did not strike during May, so he wasn’t as busy as his colleagues. But at the end of the month, the barges decided to strike, simply because they felt it was their turn. But when he went to discuss the situation with the barge workers, he discovered that they didn’t have any demands – they were just angry about losing business during the other strikes.

He went away and considered the problem, and then came back to the barge workers claiming that the government had developed a plan to make half of them redundant. The barge workers now had a motive to strike, and continued to do so in earnest. A few days later, he went back to the barge workers and said that the lay-off plan had been scrapped. The barge workers claimed victory and went back to work.