Knowing your audience

Knowing your Audience ©

By Michael Casey

If you ever look at my words http://butcherbakerundertaker.blogspot.co.uk/ is one place you’ll find them and www.michaelgcasey.wordpress.com is another place too, what you’ll discover is my mainly comic view of the world, a few typos too as I tend to write late at night after I’ve laughed at the Press Review on Sky News. I hope I amuse you enough so that you come back, eventually you might even buy my 9 books on Amazon.

It’s strange for me to look at the viewing figures and see where my readers live, or rather where their IP says they live. You can hide and disguise your IP so that you appear in a different country. Who knows President Xi may be a fan of mine, or even Putin and Obama. They ring each other at night and ask did they see my latest story, Pope Francis reads my stuff first of course, I did predict Francis would be the name of the next Pope, IF only I had put money on it, but the Love of money is the root of all evil, a card just fell off the hifi behind me, made me jump. I get the message anyway.

This past week I’ve had viewers/readers from:- Russia, Ukraine, USA, Portugal, France, Belgium, and here in England. So what are they doing, or are they all hackers? Does the humour travel, judging by the map it must do, it has reached Far Flung Places or Palaces, which sounds like one of our Chinese relatives.

It will be interesting to see if the Political Correct Brigade suddenly appear to condemn me for the last sentence. I’ll draw to their attention that my Chinese nickname is Panzi which I was told meant Fat Fat Boy, by my Shanghai wife, now more than a decade and a half later I am told by my Birmingham/Shanghai daughter that it really means PIG.        So who is being more Politically Correct? I hope that puts political correctness to bed.

As I write I don’t think this will appeal to the French or the Russians, I hope the commonality in my stories crosses all frontiers. I won’t quote Shakespeare and be all pretentious about him, I will say Falstaff is probably the character I have most in common with. I did in fact study Henry IV Part One for my Eng Lit O level a long long time ago. I even did a year of Shakespeare at Open Uni. All I’ll say is that the good bits are great and well worth watching on Sky Arts or wherever you find them.

However I will ask why do schools kill Literature by the way they study it. My daughter has started her GCSE English course and I remember how I was taught it 40 years ago. Can they just give the kids 2 weeks to read the set texts on their own, and then watch the video, before they start the line by line Postmortem of the book.

Now you see I’ve got side-tracked, because words are important to me and I just want people to enjoy words, not to see them as Castor Oil that nurse forces you to take, or English Literature forced down your throat. Words should bring joy, and if they don’t then the teaching is wrong. Discuss.

 Now back to you, my audience, even if it’s just one lonely person reading by a torch in the confessional while waiting to confess the next sinner. Francis your secret is safe with me, you are my number one fan in the Vatican, did Benedict forward my email to you when he resigned?

Anyway, you can connect with one person by talking about something they are interested in, as a Concierge+ for 3 years I spoke to 100,000 people all told, so I had plenty of practice at talking and breaking down barriers. When I write I speak about what interests me and hopefully by writing in an entertaining way I can get and keep the audience’s attention.

A singer has his set list, and from his experience knows what works and what does not. Certain songs work better in different cities, and countries. I spent years in a Folk club drinking in the corner, I also migrated to Trad Jazz as well. A feel for music even if  you can’t sing a note means that you can spot a good singer from 100 yards, and a bad snger from 1000 yards. You see stagecraft good, bad and indifferent.

Speaking of music I’d love to go drinking with Putin, imagine me and Putin have a couple of pints of Stella Artois in a back street bar in Birmingham. A singer starts singing at the piano in the corner, Putin is really really enjoying it. So he gets up to dance, I’ve had too much Stella Artois so I get up to dance too, me. Putin and the FSB. The lights come on, we all in a Gay Bar and its Elton John at the piano. Elton comes over with the biggest bottle of Polish Vodka you’ve ever seen in your life. Putin drinks it all, and spends the night dancing while Elton plays Abba songs.

I’ve side-tracked myself again now, but at least any gay readers and any Russian readers might be both amused and asking Santa for my stupid idea to come to pass. That’s the thing with writing, anything is possible. If you know my own story you won’t believe it either, but I assure you it all really happened that way.