THE DEATH OF THE SALESMAN

“When you're lying awake with a dismal headache
And repose is taboo'd by anxiety……
For your brain is on fire, the bed-clothes conspire
Of usual slumber to plunder you:
First your counter-pane goes, and uncovers your toes,
And your sheet slips demurely from under you.”

This was me– the song from Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘Iolanthe’ filled my head plus a ‘new’ line
“and self-loathing corrodes your judgement”

This is unusual for me. My nights are normally full of enjoyable slumber and dreams in which I perform impossible missions with sang froid and daring.... but not on Saturday morning at 3am when I woke cursing, writhing and perspiring.

I was suffering as so many are with a nasty dose of acute brexitis and this was made much worse by an attack of gulliblonia as I suspected I’d been duped the previous day by a fast-talking, persistent salesman on the phone and I’d failed to say “no” or been dismissive to him. When I got out of bed my worst fears were confirmed. My broadband contract with BT was being cancelled and replaced with a cheaper deal with EE (their sister company with whom they’d merged) and I had, suspiciously, only one day‘s cooling-off period.

There are two rules I follow.
i) Never buy anything at the door or on the phone or from any cold call salesman.
ii) And always take your time. “Sign now or the offer goes” is the sales ploy of a desperado.

On this occasion with the lame excuse of not feeling very well I’d failed on both rules. Hence that self-loathing.

So I phoned BT. Mo is in India at one of those call centres and is a star. Brilliant English and a sense of humour. She told me not to worry. BT and EE were the same company and I’d been sold a perfectly reasonable deal. What, she wondered, was my problem? I explained the high pressured sales-spiel and the short cooling-off period irked me and that I knew something was wrong. She giggled when I talked about the sales patter and conceded those “sales guys” were really motivated to hit targets.

“So this deal is OK with a better router and half the price and it includes the BT TV deal as well?” It appeared not. That was the flaw. I told her my wife would be very unhappy if our TV went down whilst I was in the office chortling at cheap super-high-speed broadband. She giggled again and said she was totally with my wife.

So I cancelled the deal.

At the back of my mind I recalled a radio phone-in where a guy changed his mobile-phone provider to save money in response to a cold-call and it went horribly wrong. No reception and a lost/cancelled phone-number which he explained was on all his literature and his fleet of vans.

So if it sounds like a salesman on the phone terminate the call. Always.

“Start-ups Pivots and Pop Ups” by Richard Hall and Rachel Bell is published on October3rd by Kogan Page. The antidote to doubt and gloom. And definitely not a scam.

HURRAY FOR THE VIGOUR OF YOUTH

At the Business of Culture’s 10th birthday party at the Africa Centre on May 16th it was  noted that very few start-up businesses survived let alone thrived for 10 years.

Also, banging a familiar drum, speakers reflected on the importance of the cultural sector:
“Quite simply culture – the arts, in all their forms to the creative industries to tourism - is very big business for the UK economy.  And in the UK we are rather good at creativity.  We have the best art galleries, opera houses, theatres, advertising agencies, specialist film companies, digital creative shops and street theatre in the world.

We must resist our very British reticence in selling these core skills.

Maria Miller our Culture Secretary recently asked our community to: “help reframe the argument: to hammer home the value of culture to our economy…”

Try this Maria.  Quite simply, we are the best at all this – arts – culture – creative industries. This tiny country represents just 1% of the world’s population and probably 15% of the world’s noise in the global conversation about culture. That alone is a reason to invest in (not subsidise) invest in this sector. We are a dynamic revenue earning force. We are a leading global force. We need to act and speak like one and be appreciated by Government.”

Fortunately the perception of the arts and culture as being businesses too is now not unfamiliar.

I was talking to someone about all this who said:-
 “Well maybe but aren’t we looking at this in rather a skewed way?

For sure London may even be the arts centre of the world but that’s small comfort if you are living in Newcastle or Bristol or the suburbs.”

I don’t buy that.

All round the UK some great stuff is happening.

In Brighton the Brighton Festival is just finishing. And I just want to talk about two events at it. Chansons Instrumentales who produced three concerts on Poulenc and Hahn - and the Glyndebourne’s Jerwood Young Artists lunchtime concert.

If one went to no other event this year at the Festival (or quite simply to no other event anywhere until the end of 2013) the talent, freshness, joy and energy we saw and heard in these shows would be enough to keep one’s  spirit nourished.

And it isn’t just a story of the West End of London where there’s a rich vein of emergent indigenous talent. In drama, for instance, it’s finding fulfilment on stages at theatres like the White Bear in Kennington and the Drayton Theatre in South Kensington and on the screen in rousing series like the Borgias and Game of Thrones (winner of the Radio Times Audience Award at this year's Bafta Television Awards) where the majority of actors are British and young.

They say that currently one of the most popular careers for young people is the restaurant business because it’s fast moving, creative and fun.

Watch the space.

I suspect the arts and cultural sector is next and because of rental prices in London expect to see surges in the arts outside the capital too.  Businesses, please pay attention to this – it may be the lowest-cost sponsorship opportunity you’ll ever come across.  So the silver lining in the austerity and unemployment cloud could be an intelligent deployment of funds which turns shiftless despair into music, dance and drama.

Isn’t it so much better being an optimist and admiring the spirit of youth?

Written by Richard Hall and first published on the
Business of Culture site