(crap ones that is)
Here follows a tale of shite jobs that may astound you. Or probably not.
The end was in sight, there was a light at the end of the tunnel and my three months of unemployment were about to become merely a horrible memory for Much Ado was in sight!!!
About feckin time!
God what a wait. Jesus the pain of working in that crappy call centre every day. I was really pulling me hair out with that shit job, you'd have to do at least 45 hours a week to make any kind of decent money. Every Wednesday I'd give in the hours I wanted for the following week, y'know like signing away me life and then you have to call back on the Friday and find out what you actually got. So I'd put in for 45 hours which meant I'd get £292.50 (a far cry from the west end let me tell ya!!) but of course I'd ring on Friday only to be told that I was only working 16 hours the following week!!! £104!!!! Jesus me rent is feckin £117 a week how the hell could I survive? And then they would just ring you and cancel shifts left right and centre. I earned £50 one week. I was at me wits end. Christ I might be homeless by the time Much Ado arrives. I tried everything to get a new job including sending CVs around all the West End theatres to see if I could get some stage crew work (there was no way I was going back to front of house!), but no one called back. But I got lucky towards the end, well as lucky as you can get with crap jobs. I got a call from my most honourable friend Haruka Kuroda to say that they badly needed someone for the day at the office she was working. What kind of office pray tell?
Market research.
No but hang on, this time it wasn't about Aloe Vera scrub, it was about films. Grand. This was one of the companies who organise and run test screenings for the big movie studios along with lots of other audience research activities. I went in that first day and did a bit at the computer for them and then they started ringing with more work and it was money for jam let me tell ya! All I had to do was go to screenings in different parts of London and hand out all the questionnaires at the end of the movie (which of course I got to watch as well) and then I'd have to go to the office and input all the data from the questionnaires the following day (which is known in that business as coding dontchaknow). It wasn't brain surgery but it was light years better than the fucking call centre! Among other things I got to see a new and very crap Sean Bean horror movie and a very rough cut of the new Herbie film in which they hadn't finished all the special effects yet so it was a bit of a mess. I also got to read what the general population thought of these films. And they'd come up with some weird and wonderful answers on the questionnaires. Me favourite went thus:
Q.3: What was your favourite part of 'Herbie: Fully Loaded'?
A: Lindsay Lohan, man she was looking fine.
Q.4: What was your least favourite part of 'Herbie: Fully Loaded'?
A: When Lindsay Lohan was kissing that bloke, because it wasn't me!
Now while that doesn't seem too mad to read, you might think different if I told you the answers were from an 11 year old boy! My they do grow up quick these days. But seriously it was really great to get out of the soul destroying atmosphere of the call centre and the money was good. The coding and the handing out of leaflets were boring but feck it it wasn't for much longer as Much Ado was on the way. Ah sure hold on though what am I thinking? New job coming up? Surely there's something important to do before I start. Of course!! A trip back to Congress Place for a feed of Bulmers, Blaas and craic! It had to be done, when I start rehearsals on the 16th of May I wouldn't be able to go home until at least the 27th of August. Fuck that! I'll be getting withdrawals. So I prayed to the gods of ryanair.com and got meself a cheapo flight to Caaahhhrrrkkk to bring me home for nearly 2 weeks. Lovely, although I had a serious dose of the Déise one weekend when the ruler of Red Kettle Ben Hennessy and the other good singer from Waterford called Jamie, the chap of the Murphys, came over for the weekend. Now it might have been just a serious session as (Brian) Dots and (Keith) Dunph joined us for some scoops but we were sitting in a pub when Jamie announces that he and his lack (Tish who's sitting beside him) had gotten engaged the night before. Then mayhem broke loose and after muchos champagne and singing songs in Laurence Olivier's old dressing room, the night ended with me and Jamie eile trying to open the lock on the fridge in the bar in their hotel, Brian Dots falling asleep on the night bus home and waking in the arse end of South London (or possibly Kent) and Ben Hen wandering around Bexleyheath at 6 in the morning trying to find his sister in law's. Oh classy we. I won't even go into the following evening's jollity but suffice it to say I nearly got the P45 off me lack!! It was cool though because we were all celebrating something; Dots had just got a gig at the Royal National Theatre, Dunph had just been cast in a film, Ben's wife was about to pop a child, Jamie had the fáinne on the finger and I was off to work with Peter Hall. Go on the Déise boys.
So I relaxed with three weeks to go knowing I was going home which meant that the end of the crap job syndrome was coming even sooner.
Or so I thought.
The week before I was to head Irelandwards I was booked for a few days work with the film research crowd. Grand that'll give me a few shekels to party in Waterford with. Nah. It got cancelled. The big boys in LA rang and cancelled the screening so all me work was gone!! Shit. That is not good at all. No work a week before I go home, no large bottles for me then!!! I hopped on the phone to Turns (the crowd that ruined me life with the call centre job on the first place) and they had some work for the following week. Give me it so, I'm desperate. What is it? Research. Ah right more of that. Well not exactly. It was to knock on peoples doors on behalf of Islington council and ask them two questions about their phone line with regards to digital TV.
Ah shite.
All right it wasn't selling door to door or anything too taxing but the doors we had to knock on were in big blocks of council flats. I feared for me life let me tell ya. Feck it just grin and bear it and take the money and run. But fuck me talk about how the other half lives. Now I'm being very unfair in saying that because not all of the residents were knackers, but a lot of them were smelly and obviously out of their box on drugs and still in their pyjamas at 5 in the evening. That said I knocked on the door of some very nice people whose flats looked very nice indeed. They were the flats with the bars on their doors though! I reassured meself that it was ok to do this because no one knows me. Then, on one of the days, I stopped a lady just before she went into her flat and I had already done the questionnaire with her the previous day, but before she went she says to me:
'Were you working at Regent's Park a couple of years ago?'
I'd been recognised. This was a weird thing because I supposed she had seen me in one of the shows at the park, which is cool because I had some nice parts in the Shakespeare's that year, but here I was with a clipboard in me hand playing knockadolly for 8 pound an hour. Not very showbiz (or thinking about the amount of out of work actors its actually VERY showbiz). Well at least it made me look good in front of the other resting actors doing the job with me, so I decided to take it as a good thing that she recognised me and spake thus;
'Yeah that's right, I'm going back there again this summer actually. I'm only doing this inbetween y'know. Did you see Two Gentlemen of Verona or the dream?'
'Oh no I didn't see you in anything, my daughter did her work experience there two years ago and she recognised you that's all.'
Well that brought me down a peg or two. Ha ha. On the last day we don't knock on every door as there's another guy in the same building who's trying to sell phones door to door, so we start getting threatened when we call. Feck that for a laugh! This is exactly the kind of shite job that only actors will do but no one wants to get a slap in the head. So we head off to a cafe and waste a couple of paid hours. And thankfully that's the end of the worst job ever. But that was a funny week as at the start of it the phone went and twas not the agent but the shithead call centre begging me to do some hours that week. Now to hell with them because they had fucked me about so much over the past load of weeks, but I was going back home and the more money I had the more fun it would be so I agreed to do a day for them. And so I went in and did feck all for the day, I really took the piss just sitting there and not calling anyone, it was me last day there ever, I promised meself that. The phone went a second time that week (again not the agent) from the film research company this time asking me would I go to Chester to do exit polls on Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Exit polls are when you hand out questionnaires to audience members before they go in to see a movie which has just opened and you hope they fill them in and you collect them at the end. Easy gig, but chester is oop north of England and the cinema was in a retail park in the middle of nowhere, so I'd have to catch a train on the saturday at 8am get there by 12 meet 4 local plebs who were to help me and stay at the cinema 'til 11.30pm then stay at a hotel, get the train back to London the following morning and sit in the office for the day coding all the answers! Not so easy gig after all. But they were paying me £180 with all food, travel and accomodation paid for ..... I'm your man! While it was a bit like pulling teeth and the 4 plebs were indeed plebs, the hotel was a swish 4-star jobby with a deadly breakfast and at the end of the day the money was grand and much needed.
So I came to the end of a long and arduous 3 months of 'resting', which I might say is a bullshit term. Actors who are out of work are 'unemployed actors'. Simple as. It's the shite time and the search is still on for the perfect inbetween job. I certainly haven't found it yet. It was the longest time I'd been been out of work since the original famine after drama school. Rough time, but that's the business. You end up wishing your life away waiting to start the next gig. Of course for all me giving out the gas thing is in the final week of me prison sentence I actually did 3 different crap jobs. Mad. But it was worth it because the trip home was the business. The same mad craic as usual, with many a morning waking up on a couch in Morley terrace after missing 'The People Beneath the Stairs' and many an evening buckled over laughing at the tall tales of the liar de paoir. Best ever though was visiting the new lap dancing club on the hill of Ballybricken. 'The Thrill on the Hill' has a new meaning thanks to the arrival of Whispers and its eastern European lovelies. The night we went up there the bouncer on the door stopped us and said:
'Now lads before you go in I have to tell ye a few rules.'
Then he pointed at Q.
'Except for you boy, you've heard them enough times already.'
Some unreal, It had only been open about a week and a half and the bouncers knew him already. Good man. Inside it was grand but I just couldn't get it out of me head that I was sitting in a lapdancing club in the Déise! Some buzz. But all good things that have to come to an end indeed do come to an end. As always I hate leaving home, that strange twinge in me stomach as I cross the bridge or pass Ballnaneise. If the work was there I'd stay there. Ah well. This time though it wasn't nearly as bad as the previous couple of times.
I was finally starting rehearsals for Much Ado on the Monday.
It was worth the wait.
