One thing that the Nation's Best Am Dram editing has annoyed me with is the constant references to Regent Rep being "the best resourced group in the competition". Just not true.
We hire a rehearsal room. Most groups do. Whether it is a room in the theatre (the studio) or at a local school, we hire the space. And in fact, often times when we are booked in at the theatre, because we are "in-house", we are bumped from the studio due to another group who want it, and are made to rehearse in the nursery room downstairs which is tiny, low-ceilinged and crammed with stuff, leaving an effective acting area of ten feet wide, eight feet deep and about eight feet tall.
We don't have racks of old costumes we can revisit, reuse or amend: we hire our costumes as we need them, as most groups do.
We build our own sets using the volunteered skills and time of members and associates of the group.
We source our own props, just like every group does.
There is no distinction made on the show between the theatre (which sells around 90,000 tickets a year across all productions, professional and amateur, cinema and stage), and the theatre company (which performs two productions a year, usually selling 200-250 seats on the best nights and around 100-150 on a decent one - in an auditorium holding 450 - which is the main reason Regent Rep are forced to do Allo Allo and Dad's Army just to get bums on seats, rather than the literary fare we were created on - the likes of Jamaica Inn, The Crucible, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Cold Comfort Farm, Pride and Prejudice).
Any money we make in profit is taken by the theatre to fund the theatre. Not the theatre company. For the next production we start the whole process again, and if we fail to generate enough income for the theatre, we face the very real threat of being shut down.
There are companies featured in the competition who have, or had at the time of filming and for a long time prior, their own theatre which doubles as the rehearsal space, with offices, meeting rooms, and rooms and rooms of props and set, and wardrobes crammed full of costumes that they own.
We would love to be able to rehearse in the performance space, to have a back catalogue of set and costumes, and the space to build new set indoors and under cover - but we don't. So how can we can be "the best resourced group in the competition"?
NBAD is on the whole doing a great service for amateur theatre, but there is a degree of viewer manipulation in evidence (obviously, it is a TV show). So, for the record: Regent Rep are based at the Regent Centre, but it is not the Regent Centre. The show is guilty of a wilful confusion of the two identities. You might very well think that this is in order to generate in the viewers' minds a sense of a well-known Biblical battle between opposing heightist camps, but I'm afraid I couldn't possibly comment...

Author: Gareth Richards

Prompted by feedback on social media I thought I would put some thoughts down here on responses to the show that I have seen so far. I didn't post this on the relevant sites as it's all a bit long, and my random mental blurtings won't mean much anyway but for my own sake...

There were some things that I found not great about the whole process, and other things that I found to be amazingly rewarding.

From the point of view of the finished programme, which is really the point of the whole discussion; in fairness I think the producers have, pretty much, made an affectionate look rather than an exploitative one, for which we should all be grateful – it could very easily have gone the other way and ended up damaging every amateur company by tarring them all with some sort of horrible Acorn Antiques-handled brush. So in that sense I think that the producers have shown (so far at least) a sense of responsibility to the wider fraternity, and that they haven’t approached the subject with a hatchet job in mind, which is a huge relief. 
 
As regards the choice of finalists (the final 20 or final 8): you know what, there very probably was an element of “what will make good TV” in their selection. Why this should be a surprise to anyone, it being a TV show and all, I don’t really know. That said, within the constraints of a TV  show, with all that that might imply, there does seem to be a genuine regard for the companies and the efforts taken by their members – whether or not one agrees with their inclusion as a finalist; whether or not one feels that “we wouldn’t have done it like that” or “we would have done it better”. For a TV show to take amateur theatre seriously on its own merits and not take the piss out of the whole edifice…that’s kind of the most important thing, really, isn’t it?
 
Because, as for it not being representative of the entire phalanx of amateur theatre companies across the country…well, of course it’s not. The Amateur Stage moderator is right, the choice of plays performed all comes down to staging productions that are out of copyright – with most copyright fees for broadcast media being charged by the number of “eyeballs”, you can see that it would instantly get very expensive indeed to have performed anything that wasn’t out of copyright (especially showing the programme on a more mainstream channel like Sky One with around 10m weekly viewers – even little old Sky Arts 1 has a reach of around 750,000 a week), and musicals (by far the most popular of all amateur productions) are in themselves very expensive to begin with. Thus I think choosing to do only plays was the wisest, most manageable route for the production company.
 
As for the title. Well, I for one hate it - see my post elsewhere here about this. It was originally called Stagestruck, but was changed to Nation’s Best Am Dram – almost certainly for reasons of copyright again. I don’t like it, as apart from calling it “am dram” which I dislike anyway, if you were to win Britain’s Got Talent you would be crowned “Winner”, not “Most Talented Brit”. So it is a wee bit divisive, but then it is a competition, I suppose. We’re stuck with it now, regardless.
 
Some are complaining that it’s on Sky and not everyone gets Sky. True enough. But at least someone decided to make it, and that it was Sky Arts, who more than any other channel have a remit to support the arts, and not deride them. God alone knows what would have happened had ITV got a hold of it.
 
For those complaining they were unable to take part due to other commitments, it’s a shame that this is the case, but like any audition for any part anywhere, it does come down to (a) a willingness to enter (and I appreciate that a fear of the programme being exploitative may, reasonably, have hedged people’s bets in the first place and put them off – we certainly thought hard about it), and (b) an ability to make the deadline and/or commit to the schedule. Of course there are groups for whom the timing would have proven impossible to apply for the show, or for whom, had they been selected, would have meant massive clashes with a planned production. It is the nature of the beast that amateur theatre companies are busy a lot of the time. That said, I know of one of the companies in the programme who finished a run of a show the night before then had to travel half the country to perform for the TV programme the very next morning – but they were, luckily, willing and able to manage that juggling act - and the juggling of rehearsals for both too. 
 
Hopefully the programme will show the public that, as Madeline from Crossmichael says on Facebook, there is a huge cross section of people from all walks of life involved in amateur theatre, and that for the vast majority of them, they take it seriously and are passionate about it. Quality varies from company to company, of course, but whatever you think of the finalists individually, none of them are actually bad, nor – most importantly - are they edited in such a way to be portrayed as the sort of company for whose members a production is primarily a way of getting a twice-weekly fix of custard creams and gossip with a chance to dress up at the end…which is a common misconception. 
 
It won’t remove the stigma attached to the term “am dram” but if it shows amateurs in a positive light and maybe makes people think about seeing their local group as a consequence, it can only be a good thing. Even if I personally end up looking like a knob*.

* please no please no please God no

Author: Gareth Richards

Apparently the Sky Arts Stagestruck programme - now changed to be Nation's Best Am Dram, about which more below - will now be being aired in November, rather than September, as we had been originally told. I was beginning to wonder why it had all gone a bit quiet on that front - I suspect there may be a scheduling clash with the RSC Open Stages which, considering 2012 is Bill the Bard's special centenary year, will undoubtedly be getting some telly time. More news as it is received.
Oh, about the title change. It's possibly to do with clashing with the recent "Young, Gifted and Stagestruck" programme, but the choice of "Nations Best Am Dram" as a replacement instead...what a shame. There must have been a better alternative?
Apart from it being a mouthful (even The Only Way Is Essex can be rendered as
the far snappier TOWIE), and apart from the inevitable hashtag "nbad", which is basically the word "bad", the most disappointing thing about "Nations Best Am Dram" is the inclusion of the words "Am Dram" in the title.
"Am Dram" is, for the majority of the population, a pejorative, dismissive term that conjures up images of Mrs Overall in Acorn Antiques - only for real. It is a byword for shonky sets, murder victims making themselves comfortable when they're supposed to be dead, and a safe bet that the evening will include both a Garibaldi biscuit and a prompt or three, but, bless, they tried their best. 
But, for all the groups who entered the competition, this sense of "am dram" is exactly the opposite of what they try to achieve. They are amateurs in the true Latin sense, of doing it for the love of it, rather than being paid for their efforts, and thus, although not professionals, and although limited in budgets, they all strive to produce as professional a performance as possible.
I guarantee you, not one amateur theatre company in the country, of whatever level, will willingly put the term "am dram" on their posters - beyond the license rights small print that typically reads "An amateur production in association with...".
Why? Because of the perception and reaction that "am dram" invokes. And here they all are, finalists in Sky Arts' competition to find the very best amateur theatre companies in the land - the "beating heart of theatre in Britain", and they're thinking, "Great, we can publicise our company as being featured on "Stagestruck" on Sky TV: that'll look good on the posters and should help with the declining ticket sales we've been suffering from for years"...only to find that, in order to use the positive aspect of being involved with a prestigious TV show, they have to slap the negative phrase "Am Dram" in great big bold type across everything they do.
Regent Rep had the show's title (with Sky's permission) on our poster for Pride and Prejudice, and as we flyered people, several people took one look at the proferred handbill and replied "Am Dram? No thanks"... One TV show on a subscriber station is not going to undo years and years of accumulated mental imagery around that term, and it does feel a little unsympathetic to use it.
What would I have suggested instead? Perhaps "Upstage, Downstage" if they were feeling nostalgic and tongue in cheek (it does after all, take a look at the real lives behind the painted facade - and would look quite good as a quote source on a poster); "All The World's A Stage" (hashtag: ATWAS) maybe? Or simply, "Merely Players"?
You might think they're crappy names, too. And you'd probably be right, I only thought them up as I typed this - but at least they're, to coin a phrase, "selling the sizzle and not the sausage": a bit less blunt about it. But hey. Que sera, sera.

Author: Gareth Richards

Well, after the embargo was lifted (largely because two companies, who shall remain nameless, ignored it and tweeted their news to all and sundry and so the TV people must have just given in, frankly), we can now officially announce how we got on in the quarter finals.
First though, a bit about the day. All very bizarre. We arrived in Northampton the night before to find the hotel was hosting a Star Trek convention, and Klingons and Star Fleet officers were