[Sloper]

Early warning, its snowing heavily in the hope valley at the moment.

[Paul B]

I expected this to be flooded with comments today?

It was really good to see some of that old training footage of Ben and Jerry, Cofe any chance of a Vimeo upload after the tour is complete?

[cofe]

It was really good to see some of that old training footage of Ben and Jerry, Cofe any chance of a Vimeo upload after the tour is complete?

Can't see why not. Good idea. Perhaps worth editing it down a bit, but don't want to spoil it for anyone while he's still touring.

Thought it went well last night - certainly more inspiring and lively than other stuff.

[SteveM]

A good night out indeed - probably most improved by being forewarned about the ambient temp in the Works for lecture nights! I thought that the videos were a good laugh - have you invited Ben to any of the talks?  Been saving the book but I'm all ready to read the ghost writer's handiwork now...

[Dolly]

I thought the videos were the best bits by a long way TBH

[dave]

A good night out indeed - probably most improved by being forewarned about the ambient temp in the Works for lecture nights!

I was forewarned that it was "pretty toasty" down the works.

[Jaspersharpe]

I thought the videos were the best bits by a long way TBH

Is this a veiled way of saying that it wasn't very good apart from the videos? 

I didn't go so am interested. Surprised there isn't more gushing on this thread!

[slackline]

[Dolly]

Is this a veiled way of saying that it wasn't very good apart from the videos?  Undecided

I thought it was OK TBH, its just that the videos showed  more humour/something a little different that made them more interesting.

[Jaspersharpe]

Dodgy characters hanging around near the toilets with wood?

[Fiend]

I didn't go so am interested. Surprised there isn't more gushing on this thread!

It was good but not amazing. Kinda standard top climber talk with some pretty cool / funny video clips.

[Andy Harris]

Yesterday I had a bit of a rant about this but fortunately I forgot to post it so I can now rant a little more calmly.

My 1st point was the works being a poor choice for such talks. It's a great climbing venue, has plenty of space etc and the principle of having climbing slide shows in climbing walls is fine. But it it is far to cold to pay to sit down for 1-2h and freeze your knackers off. I was nithering with thermals & a duvet and to be honest it's been the same at every slide show in said venue.

To pay £10 to freeze your knackers off is ludicrous. Imagine if you went to the cinema and payed £5 to see Tom Cruise and were freezing cold. I'd want my money back. The venues of old (Byron, Lescar, Uni etc etc) were  better principally because you didn't have to risk hypothermia. I think Mr Henson needs to seriously consider venue choice when asking people to spend so much money on what are often mediocre presentations. If you're cold you can't perform at your best and i think this did ot do Jerry any favours. If we'd all have been warm & comfy sat in a  pub or similar both the speakers & the audience would have enjoyed things a lot more. 
This is not a personal rant against the work as I think it's a fantastic venue with great staff who deliver climbing facilities at the highest standards. What they can't do is make it warm as fundamentally it's a big shed with a  wafer thin roof.

As for the talk I enjoyed it but I have to say it wasn't great as previous efforts by Jerry (Ape Index 2001, Sheff poly 1993). Part of this is trying to cram 25 years of greatness into  1-2h. It felt a bit bitty, jumping from one thing to the next principally relying on the video footage which was great but in my view no better than good photos & stories. Some of these guys trying to make a living from talking really should employ some professional help to make there shows both visually & verbally good.

Finally and with no reference to Jerry many top climbers are essentially boring and don't make good speakers, but when doing a lecture tour of ..... venues are I would guess taking a good cut with 100-220 people/venue should make the effort to improve what they're doing. As Yoda might have said " A good sportsman a good talker does not necessarily make"


that's enough i need to get back to preparing my own presentation!

[Jaspersharpe]

I think Mr Henson needs to seriously consider venue choice when asking people to spend so much money on what are often mediocre presentations.

 



  ( ^^^ )

 

[The Sausage]

I agree with Andy. Fundamentally the Works is not an 'intimate' enough venue for these things. I remember presenting some slides at an Ape Index, it started off quite intimidating, but with some feedback and banter from the audience it became much easier. At Jerry's lecture it wasn't really possible for that to happen, and I imagine with a bit of banter/heckling he would have been able to relax and open up. As he said, he loves an audience.

[TobyD]

The Jerry talk was the first lecture i have been to at the works - and i thought it was a terrible venue - essentially i agree with the points already made. Ten quid to be freezing your ass off and it be really hard to see any of the slides / video is taking the piss a bit. I'd also like to add that the Works is a fantastic climbing venue, it's just not the place for having slide shows really.
As far as the show was, i thought it was far from the best or most polished i have ever seen in many ways, but I still found it incredibly inspiring and it certainly made me want to read Revelations even more. The level of psyche required to spend month after month living and training at Stoney, then go and repeat many of the world's hardest routes and win comps is up there with any of the more impressive sporting feats i can think of really.

[MattH]

Hi Andy,
Without being too  presumptious I think you mean Heason not Henson? Funnily enough I didn;t actually have anything to do with Jerry's lecture at the Works on Sunday - it was organised directly between The Works and Vertebrate. I did lend them my projector and screen.

I agree that the Works is not a perfect lecture venue. That said, neither was the Bryncliffe (too impersonal) or the Lescar (usually too full and too hot, and now the beer is too expensive!). Granted it was cold on Sunday night - I believe it was -17degrees in Aviemore, the coldest it's been in this country for some 20 years, so give us a break! I was down there last night and people were milling around in T-shirts. Such is life. At least it wasn't snowing so hard people couldn't get there!

Had you gone down to the local cinema to see Tom Cruise (in person regailing you with tales of his lifes achievments) you would have been paying a whole lot more than £5 for the priviledge! I don't think that £10 to watch Jerry, one of the biggest living climbing legends on the planet is too much to ask.

Makes me chuckle that standards are so high now that a slick audiovisual presentation featuring never before seen video, music, awesome slides and the man himself commenting on it all isn't good enough! Also bear in mind it was his first lecture in 8 years so it's likely to get more polished with each one he does.

C'mon man, chill out.

p.s. if anybody knows of a better venue in Sheffield do speak up. It needs to have cheap beer, hold upwards of 200 people (comfortably), a decent in-house sound system, and preferably be warm.

[north_country_boy]

C'mon man, chill out.

Nice choice of Phrase.

On a serious note, i agree with Andy's comments too, but understand that an alternative venue might not be available....or is it? There must surely be somewhere more suitable....

[dave]

I was down there last night and people were milling around in T-shirts. Such is life.

were they just sat motionless for 2 hours though? i think not. no-one is saying the works is too cold for climbing, they're saying its too cold for lectures.

I am a little confused why matt heason has been dragged into this though, as he says its nowt to do with him. I did love your work on Labyrinth though, those puppets were dope.

Why not just have events like this in one of the uni lecture theaters if you need large numbers? dan honeyman did this a few years ago for the Consumed premier, it was good. I'm sure everyone can hang fire from quaffing ales for the duration of the lecture.

I'd rather have them in "dry" venues like this than either sitting getting frostbite at the works or crammed into the back room of the lescar like a nazi cattletruck. after the couple of heason lectures i went to I stopped going for that very reason. sitting on the floor with my knees round my face listening to kenton kool bang on about some shit or other for 15 hours wasn't fun.

[Dolly]

slick audiovisual presentation

In all honesty it could never be called that could it ?
Seriously, if anyone of us poor souls who ever have to do a powerpoint presentation at work was to deliver something like that we would never be able to call it "slick"
I don't want to denigrate anyone's efforts in putting the event on, or the fun of the night, but shouldn't we be careful to not to let Jerry's (rightful) status as a legend and our desire to have fun as part of the climbing community colour our judgement ?

[T_B]

Memorial Hall at the back of the City Hall?  Or The Showroom 

Personally, I didn't go to the Works lecture precisely for the reasons given above, so I wonder how many other folk decided to give it a miss.

Matt - I agree that the Lescar back room is not the best venue in the world, but I wouldn't assume that climbers are all tight. There's plenty of them in the Lescar on a Friday night paying £2.75 a pint. If they're prepared to pay £10 to sit in the Works, maybe they'd stump up £15 to see a big name such as Jerry at the City Hall?  Andy Kirkpatrick certainly pulls it off.

[Jaspersharpe]

 

[tommytwotone]

slick audiovisual presentation

In all honesty it could never be called that could it ?
Seriously, if anyone of us poor souls who ever have to do a powerpoint presentation at work was to deliver something like that we would never be able to call it "slick"

Right - this is my third attempt at writing something constructive so here goes.

While I don't feel as strongly as Dolly, though I did feel that the (and I hate this phrase) 'presentation skills' element of the lecture was lacking a bit. I was surprised, firstly as isn't just a one-off gig and secondly as my (admittedly aged) memory of the Ape Index lecture Jerry gave a few years back was so good.

I know how frustrating it is to see someone whinging without being specific, so have tried to break my feedback down into logical categories.

Structure of presentation

I didn't really get a feel for what Jerry was going to talk about at the start - he launched straight into it without telling us what he was going to present on.

I'd always been taught that the 'tell 'em what you're going to tell 'em, then tell 'em, then tell 'em you've told 'em' approach was presenation skillz 101.

Also, it seemed to come to a bit of an abrupt finish, and I'm not sure if I was alone in thinking 'right, is that it then?' - people were leaving as Graeme was trying to do the raffle.

I know Grimer did a great intro, how about getting him to close the show too? Have you still got that 'You Bet' footage?  

Pace of presentation

It seemed a bit rushed, like Jerry wasn't really up for it - I'm sure it's really nerve-wracking doing these shows, but I got the feeling he was racing through it at times, and on occasions was taken a bit by surprise at what was coming next on the slideshow. I'm assuming he'd been through it before / done a 'dry run'?

Content of presentation

I thought the balance of visual / spoken word was a bit off - coming back to the Powerpoint example, there were couple of bits that seemed like the equivalent of reading through the slides. The stuff that makes an excellent climbing slideshow seems to the stories behind the images on show, I'd certainly liked to have heard a bit more about some of the stuff that was skimmed over.

Quite a bit of it was stuff that had already been in the Ape Index lecture a few years back - this must be tricky as there would be folk there who weren't there, but could the, say, Hampi stuff have been substituted with 10 mins on the story about, say, Master's Edge from Jerry's point of view?

Anyway, hoping that comes across as constructive rather than mindless nit-picking...

[slackline]

I thought the balance of visual / spoken word was a bit off - coming back to the Powerpoint example, there were couple of bits that seemed like the equivalent of reading through the slides. The stuff that makes an excellent climbing slideshow seems to the stories behind the images on show, I'd certainly liked to have heard a bit more about some of the stuff that was skimmed over.

The foibles of PowerPoint (or more accurately those who use it) are succintly summarised by Edward Tufte in his essay The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint : Pitching out Corrupts Within.

[MattH]

Not sure why I got dragge in either ;-)
Am a sucker for these discussions I suppose.
I wasn't able to go on Sunday so was only going on what I heard fro friends who were there that it wa a decent presentation. Spoke to Jerry this morning and he said that he did indeed rush things a little as it was so cold - let's not lose sight of the fact that it was one of the coldest nights of the year and in recent times.

I've always steered away from the likes of the uni lecture halls as I would far rather a decent atmosphere than a comfy seat. I would like to think that most climbers are the same? Showroom is indeed a good venue, but it comes at a cost. Having organised plenty of lectures that should draw big crowds, but don't deliver on the night (I remember watching Leo at a Berghaus lecture in one of the lecture halls a few years back with about 15 other people!) it's a big gamble...

Always value this feedback as I am sure do the Works.

MattH

[GraemeA]

One point to remember for choice of venue is hire costs. We normally go 50/50 profit/loss share with Matt ie no fixed fee. Some of the 'smaller' lectures (eg Gaz Parry or Dave Pickford) would not be viable with a fixed fee for venue hire. Even Dave Graham would have had marginal viability if we had charged a decent fixed fee.

And yes I know we make a bit on the raffle and the cafe but this pretty small amounts eg for the raffle on Sunday we made about £3.00 (minus VAT) despite selling 50 raffle tickets. And that's before Mr Vertebrate's bar bill is taken into account  

Anyway Andy must be getting soft in his old age, I was perfectly warm in my thermal base layer, 2 fleeces, a duvet, hat and long johns