You’re giving 110%? Don’t get me started! (From Bucks Free Press)

You’re giving 110%? Don’t get me started!

7:00pm Friday 30th September 2011 in Look Who's Talking By Colin Baker

There are several words that I find alarming or that flag up a warning about the user. Some are based on nothing but prejudice and personal history, but others have a sounder basis for my antipathy.

For instance, my resistance to the words ‘nourishing’ and ‘refreshing’ are more about former users of those words and the situations in which they were used than any logical reason for finding them twitch inducing. They both bring memories that are not to do with ‘yummy’ or ‘tasty’ for instance. My knee jerk reaction to actors who pepper their conversations about their ‘craft’ with descriptions of the ‘journey’ is to clench whatever I have about me that is clenchable and hope that no one thinks I am with them. It may be that my approach to playing a part is identical to theirs but I am of the old school perhaps and think we should keep our ‘journey’ to ourselves – not just to preserve some of the mystique that used to exist about the acting profession but to lessen the widespread preconception of actors as self-indulgent narcissists. To hear someone who has just entertained me go on about the emotional investment and agonised creative journey that led to that performance leaves me, and I suspect many more, cold. It also feeds into the notion of acting as self therapy which for a professional is frankly naff.

And don’t get me started on the notion of giving 110 per cent. Yes we know what you think you mean, but it’s meaningless and sloppy!

Coming from a different angle there is the use of ‘targets’ for everything now, irrespective of whether the activity concerned is sensibly susceptible of having a target ascribed to it. Education in particular is awash with ‘targets’ and their abundant offspring SATS and League Tables.

So much time that could be spent teaching or preparing to teach is devoted to formalising what most good teachers have been doing perfectly well for years by making them fill in endless forms and grids with a mind numbing battery of ever changing acronyms attached to them.

Nobody has convinced me yet that the desire to teach better and have students learn better is helped by the ever increasing battery of targets ascribed to each child and each teacher.

I am only grateful that theatres haven’t given ‘louder, funnier and faster’ targets to actors.

I shouldn’t have said that, should I?