Just Some Bloke

Actors are specifically excluded from the relevant law, along with religious leaders, people working at women's refuges and various other occupations (including, controversially, soldiers on the front line).

I do agree with Paul. I'm a similar age and I find that driving home after a long shift can feel a little unsafe at times. Luckily where I work now is a 4 minute walk from home so all good! I guess my feeling is that eventually the law will have to change so everyone is safe all the time. And if this happens it may even be a good thing rather than bad.

I worked at a venue where the local council were happy for us not to need to show the iron every performance, as long as the iron was regularly tested. We tested it by bringing it in every night and taking it out the next day. Extra fire protection overnight and approved testing regime: 2 birds, one stone.

Interesting post Pete. Like you I work between theatres and concert venues and things are different in each. Where I am now, if you asked for 4 crew you would get 2 house crew to advise on rigging, power, lx etc. free of charge plus we would quote the promoter for 4 'local crew' (provided by a crewing company) which would be re-charged. Normally the promoters would sign this off, but occasionally they would push back and ask for the house crew to be included in the list of "crew" so they would only need 2 local crew. We tend to discourage this as our own guys do have their own jobs to do, not least of which is keeping an eye out for safety issues. My current venue is kind half way between a theatre and a mini-arena so we get arena tours coming in saying how diddy the place is as well as theatre tours saying how massive it is! The smaller theatre shows will quite often say they only need the in-house crew, as that's all they are used to, but the rock and rolly type shows like to chuck people at it and ask for up to 20 local crew to de-rig the kit and load the trucks. Your schedule for a day is about right for a lot of the shows we get in, but the bigger ones can easily start at 8 and go on to 1 the next morning. Also, the life of the lampy can easily be a lot lighter than the noise boy who comes in at the beginning of the day to work on his laptop to design the rig, then builds the rig, then sets it up, then helps the monitor guy set up mics and line check, then soundchecks the main band, then soundchecks the support band, then gets half an hour while the audience come in, then does the show, then does the get-out. No long break for sightseeing in the afternoon for them! Your comments on theatre casuals are interesting, as you bring out the fact that someone working at more than one venue could easily be racking up ridiculous numbers of hours too. Again, I wonder how long this can go on? If you're working on the loading gallery above fly floor 10m in the air and drop a weight because you're tired, that could be fatal too.

There's no equivalent of a breathalyser for sleep deprivation. Hard to prove, even subjectively, that it's lack of sleep causing someone's deficiencies and that they're not just as slow/grumpy/inept all the time. Also, unlike drunkenness, it's possible to get through a show on a burst of adrenalin fuelled by caffeine and empty calories. It can make it hard to find anything concrete to complain about, and the problems/accidents are more likely to occur during the out or on the onward journey. Very true. And, of course, the guys driving the tour bus and the trucks all have very tight laws to abide by when it comes to driving hours. Yet the rigger who puts up the trusses has no such laws. To be honest, I'm not sure I could point to a specific occasion when I didn't feel safe at one of these tours. I am also glad that there is always an extra level of defence - me. My job is to check that everything anyone does is safe, and I luckily [not] I get sensible sleep patterns (on the whole!). All the guys (and girls) who pass through are great and do a terrific job. I just know that I wouldn't be allowed to rota my staff to the same hours as them.

It's an interesting point and I have a couple of answers. Firstly, I'd just start by agreeing with your point about not letting people work who are unfit: many years ago we I worked as a Senior Tech in a team, two of whom used to like to smoke a "herbal" cigarette from time to time when off duty. One day, one of these chaps had clearly smoked prior to work and was so confident that he was not able to judge risk appropriately and I felt he was putting the rest of us at risk. I had a word with the Tech Mgr and said that either he needed to be sent home or I would walk for my own safety. The chap was sent home with a reprimand and never did anything like that again. So my credentials are good here and I certainly would act if I thought the outcome would be favourable. However, when you are welcoming tours from named artistes the stakes are a little higher. Not a single one of the tours we take are double crewed and nearly all of them are touring 5-6 days a week. We also take a major sporting event every year and the team that work on that are doing other events before and after, in some cases meaning they are working 8am - 10pm for a month, with maybe just one day off. We also take conferences where crew move from one show to another and are loathe to turn down work if it is offered, so could again be working for a few weeks without a day off. This is the life of a freelancer. You can't turn down work because doing so would mean the boss will find someone else and you have now lost that client forever (or so they fear). It's legal to work 15 hours a day for 2 months without a day off, so anything less than that is sometimes seen as a worry ("I've got 2 days off next month - how am I going to pay the bills?"). It's wrong, but it's understandable. The thing is, when they start on this way of life, the first tour is a nightmare for them and they show the lack of sleep in their work. By the second tour, though, they have got used to it and have learnt to crack on without showing the tiredness. So someone like myself is going to have a hard time proving they are unfit for work. I'm going to be asked "give concrete examples of how they are a liability". There are 2 possible answers: either give specific examples which are unlikely to be found, or say "they haven't had enough sleep so clearly they are not at their best" in which case the entire crew will need to be pulled. I'm going to be really popular then, aren't I! 'Sorry, Michael Ball* will not be appearing tonight as the venue Technical Manager refused to work with his crew and yes we will refund the £75,000 taken at the box office'. My point is that I wouldn't allow this sort of thing with my own crew but as long as freelancers are outside these laws then things will continue to happen and we are powerless to stop it. Although I sometimes do freelance work myself and am glad to be able to work whatever hours the show requires, from the point of view of a receiving Tech Mgr I can see that this can't go on forever. Freelancers are people too and will need to be treated the same as employees for their own safety, surely? I'd love to hear the other side of the argument from those who are doing the kind of jobs referred to above. . P.S. I give Michael Ball merely as an example. Actually his crew were amazing guys and did get sensible days off. Couldn't have been happier with them.

For arena-scale comedy, most of the punters are watching the IMAG screens. You'd almost be better off with the DVD at home. Personally I would lose the word "almost" from that sentence!

What's stopping him from wearing plugs when he's working? I appreciate he may need to take them out for certain tasks, but surely it must be possible to significantly reduce the overall exposure? I understand that he prefers to tune guitars without ear plugs and that there is a lot of re-tuning required for the main band he goes out with.

I've been following with great interest this thread elsewhere in this forum. I've also been working, for the last 3 years or so, in a venue that takes more and bigger 'Rock and Roll' tours than I've worked before (being, at heart, very much a theatre bod) and I've been thinking about how H&S seems to be treated in opera houses (where it's taken very seriously, especially after the ROH ruling) and ATG venues, for instance, as opposed to how it's treated on some of the tours we see coming to us (SJM, Live Nation etc.). On these tours the crew will work up to 17 hours a day (8am - 1am) then start again 7 hours later and do this 5 or 6 days a week. We'd never allow that sort of thing in our venue for H&S reasons: people just won't be safe on that little rest. At my venue, if we have only a couple of those kind of shows a week then I may put house crew on for the full 17 hours, knowing that they have the day off on the following day. But if I had more than 2 per week then I would always split the days up into 2 shifts so everyone gets a decent break. Yet the people coming in have had no such break. Equally, when we get orchestral musicians in the building they will often have acoustic screens in place to protect other players from the trumpeters or percussionists, but backline techs (guitar techs especially) have no such protection and are exposed to loud sounds constantly every day of the week. I am friendly with a chap who is a guitar tech with a rock band and, in his 30s, already has tinnitus. He's planning on working in the same job for many more years to come. The reason they can get away with this is that these people are freelancers. We were just discussing, in the office, that the promoters might look at their finances and say "these crew we keep using are costing us a fortune on freelance rate - why don't we just employ them ourselves and then move them around from one tour to another?". And, yes, that would appear to be a lot cheaper for them. The reason seems to be that if they were no longer freelancers they wouldn't be able to work so many hours or expose themselves to such high levels of sound, or various other H&S requirements for employed staff. If the tour employed their crew direct, they would have to monitor their sound level exposure and pay for individual, fitted ear plugs. They would also have to double the number of crew so that, instead of working 16 hours a day, they would each work 8 hours a day. Twice the crew means 2 tour buses so the costs go back up again. I wonder how long this can go on. Allowing freelancers to do as many hours as they like and damage their hearing as much as they like has got to come to an end some time, surely? Maybe it will take another court case for that to happen? Your thoughts, fellow Blue-Roomers?

I heard on the grapevine (and, I admit that this may not be gospel) that a decision was made at the first venue not to put all the boxes up in the rig and that this decision turned out to be disastrous. Reading the links above, it seems that even at the second venue there were still intelligibility issues, which makes it sound like they just weren't touring enough boxes to do the venues they were playing. It may not be the fault of the FOH engineer, but of the person who spec'd the system in the first place. Or, of course, of the person who said how much money they were willing to pay on the PA hire. I can't imagine that the girls did the gigs on Mates Rates, so after they have been paid there may not be much left in the kitty.

Just to point out that playing quieter as a solo musician is hard enough, as a trumpet stab at ff sounds amazing, but a trumpet stab at mf really is NOT the same but at a quieter level. Equally try asking a singer to 'belt' quieter - it ain't going to happen! Reducing the volume as one player out of 40 is much harder, though. If you are playing the solo line and the accompanying instruments are playing too loud, then your choice is a) play quieter and not be heard properly, ruining the music or b) play at the right balance relative to everyone else without achieving the aim of less volume. Which one should you choose as a professional musician? Even when the musicians understand why you're asking them to play quieter, they still may not do so in order to protect the integrity of the music itself.

http://www.plasa.org/technical/icoper.asp EDIT - 1/2024 - this link is dead - try this one. ESTA document Free download.

Take a look at the earlier post by Matt Cowles who used to be a service engineer with Martin (when they had such people in the UK - now they don't). I can assure you that if Matt says you need to re-install the software then that means that re-installing the software is what Martin themselves would do. Have a look at the manual to see how it is done.

One other point on a related matter - if I get a CV in my tray with no covering letter then it goes straght in the bin. If you can't be bothered to write a covering letter then why should I be bothered to read your CV? We have a lot of different jobs at our theatre (e.g. technician, FOH, box office, marketing, admin etc.) and you need to at least give me a clue as to which one you're interested in! P.S. ... oh, and letters beginning "I am interested in a job in your company" go further down the pile than letters beginning "I would love the opportunity to work at the Hazlitt Theatre, having attended shows there on many occasions". Seems obvious to me but apparently not so obvious to many people who write in!

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