Event Organisers Update October 2020 ISSUE 191 - an independent information source published by the Society of Event Organisers (SEO).
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Event Organisers UpdateThe newsletter for organisers of events. |
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NEWSA GLORIOUS NOOSE Sadly, despite encouragements to exploit the perceived loophole from London restaurants in the Corbin and King group, and Veeraswamy, organising a business lunch on this basis, and deeming it reasonably necessary for work purposes could well turn out to be a glorious noose for those who attend to stick their necks in. According to an article on the subject in the Financial Times the lawyers Lewis Silkin say that potential business lunch organisers need to ask themselves the logical question that should always be asked and that is "What business are you transacting over lunch that couldn't be done by other means?" After all, in the first few months of the pandemic all businesses had to get used to boring Zoom meetings rather than slap-up meals so what's changed? Apparently, our government has been careless in drawing up the letter of the law on this one, but the spirit and objective always remains and that is to cut the rate of infections, hospitalisations and deaths by minimising socialising. And those who don't can look forward to fines of £100, doubling for each further offence to a maximum of £6,400, which could make attending seven free illegal business lunches in a row, and getting caught each time, a very expensive proposition at a total of £12,700, or nearly £2,000 per lunch. Lastly, according to Lewis Silkin the term "reasonably necessary" is one that lawyers could argue about in court "at great length" And at great cost, of course.
GREEDY CANCELLATION Bijou Wedding Venues own five country house style venues around the UK, including Botleys Mansion in Surrey, Cain Manor in Hants, Notley Abbey in Bucks and The Harper in Norfolk. One customer has reported that the company, whose chief executive is Sam Cutmore-Scott, had cancelled his May 2020 wedding at Cain Manor and insisted that he pay an 80% cancellation fee of £13,600. Since he had already paid a deposit of £13,000 Cutmore-Scott's firm has held onto that and insisted he pay another £600. They also advised him to claim the money back from his insurance company, something that was not possible when the insurers, UK General Insurance, rejected their claim on the basis that the cancellation was due to "government regulation or act." The CMA investigation motivated Cutmore-Scott to cut his cancellation fee from a greedy and exploitative 80% to a rather fairer 30%, but consumer lawyer Dean Dunham opines that the CMA had ultimately "let consumers down" in allowing Cutmore-Scott to include such charges as "cleaning the venue" which is part of the fixed costs of doing business, and goes against the CMA's own guidance. Weddings and private events, holiday accommodation and nurseries and childcare providers are three sectors where the CMA has seen increasing numbers of complaints in relation to cancellations and refunds. In our view those organising events of any kind should remember the name Cutmore-Scott and be careful.
COVID ILLEGALITIES o Four students at Nottingham Trent University were fined £10,000 each for involvement in a house party. They had told the police that everyone had left, but more than 30 people were found hiding in a kitchen, bedrooms and basement at the house in Lenton. The students reportedly accused the police of "spoiling our fun" and that they "should be having the time of our lives" at university. o Twelve members of a local football team in Northumbria, that the police have declined to name, have been fined £200 each for drinking together at the Wetherspoons Wouldhave pub in South Shields. Pub staff were suspicious when the twelve men took off their jackets and were wearing the same football strip, and called the police. o A bride is facing a £10,000 fine after police found more than 200 people attending her wedding in an Old Kent Road, London venue, and no-one making any attempt to socially distance. o Police in Greater Manchester have halted at least six illegal weddings in recent weeks. o The management of the Greyhound pub in Erdington, Birmingham have been fined £1,000 for allowing a wedding party of more than 60 people to continue after midnight. o The male organiser of a christening party in Wolverhampton has been fined after police raided the event and found more than 40 guests enjoying food and drink, and live entertainment in a hired marquee. Reportedly the police were told by the organiser that he "didn't believe in" the virus.
GLOSS OFF FOREIGN TRAVEL Domestic travel was more positive with 34% of respondents planning to go, although this was also down around a third from the figure recorded for July 3rd.
BREDBURY HALL FOR SALE The 148 room three-star hotel in the Goyt Valley has a 16th century barn that has been converted into a nightclub, but has been closed since March 2020. Of the 93 staff, 91 have now been made redundant.
DEATH IN VENICE Once von Aschenbach has exchanged loaded glances with Tadzio, whose eyes are sometimes augmented with blue shadow, he is smitten and spends his time watching the boy cavort in the sand and sea from his chair at his beach hut, eventually stalking him around Venice when out with his family. Tadzio's attractive and stately mother is played by the 41 year old Italian actress, Silvana Mangano in a very different role to those she had in 1951 when she was 21, as the sexy dancer turned nun in Anna, or the heroine in Bitter Rice in 1949 for which some critics wrote that the stunning 19 year old "oozed sex from every pore" In flashbacks to von Aschenbach's previous life we view his lovely young wife, played by Marisa Berensen, and Esmerelda, a very pretty prostitute he failed to cavort with at a brothel, played by the 19 year old French actress Carole Andre. Fortunately, Visconti spares us the graphic details of the deeply unpleasant effects of cholera. The disease is caused by poor sanitation, crowded living conditions and ingesting contaminated food and water, and produces extreme loss of body fluids and fatal dehydration in victims. However, von Aschenbach finds that staff at the hotel are playing the situation down, claiming that, despite public notices all over Venice warning about the disease, and the all-pervading smell of powerful disinfectant everywhere it's all malicious rumours spread by foreign newspapers to hurt the lucrative tourist industry in Venice. Finally, von Aschenbach does get an honest travel agent to level with him and he is strongly advised to leave the area and return home, which he decides to do. Sadly, it is not to be. As he relaxes in his chair on the beach the next morning, his last, he sees Tadzio being beaten up in the sand by an older boy, and as he rises to get up and help Tadzio his heart, never his strongest organ, gives up and he slumps dead as the Adagietto playing reaches its crescendo. Death in Venice is based on the novella of the same name by the highly-regarded and influential German novelist Thomas Mann (1875-1965) When Mann's diaries were opened after his death they recorded his struggles with his homosexuality, not least of which was his infatuation with an angelic 10 year old Polish boy who was staying with his parents at the Grand Hotel des Bains when Mann went there for a holiday in the summer of 1911. Mann always maintained his writings were not autobiographical... Dirk Bogarde reveals that some white cream they spread on his face for his death scene began to burn very painfully and was not, according to a reading of the pack, intended to make contact with skin. In 2003, when Bjorn Andresen was 48 he gave an interview to The Guardian in which he stated that he was unhappy with the image that playing Tadzio had given him, and with the subject of adult love for adolescents. The Grand Hotel des Bains, one of the world's great hotels closed in 2016 and is still boarded up, reportedly awaiting being turned into luxury apartments. Following Death in Venice with some similarities was the well-regarded 1997 film Love and Death on Long Island, made 26 years after. This features the obsessive infatuation that a fogeyish British writer, played with dignity by John Hurt, develops for a good-looking American male star of puerile college movies - played with his tongue firmly in his cheek by Jason Priestley - one of which he sees by accident. After Hurt's character travels to Long Island to be with his love interest, it all, perhaps predictably, ends in tears.
ISHIRO HONDA o THE H-MAN (1958) is released as part of a Double Feature pack on November 16 and like Honda's most famous production, Godzilla (1954) reflects Japan's understandable fear of the hydrogen bomb, which creates the giant lizard in the first film and the deadly blue-green slime creatures, dubbed the H-man (for "hydrogen man") in the second. These kill by dissolving human flesh and bone on contact, just leaving their victim's clothes, and can creep under doors as glutinous puddles to attack and consume. The puddles can also re-form in the shape of humans for their attacks, and live in sewers, coming up for their meals. Fire is the only thing that can effectively kill them, so gasoline is pumped into the sewers and set alight for their immolation. This one plays like an entertainingly good film noir, and is an early example of the Japanese "tokunatsu" film, that is a heavy use of special effects. The pack contains both the original Japanese and the English versions, as well as two brand new audio commentaries. o The other feature in the pack is BATTLE IN OUTER SPACE (1959). a fast-paced “tokunatsu" featuring techno-savvy, mind-controlling aliens from the planet Natal setting up a base on Earth's moon and using it to attack us with their flying saucers. Following a series of unexplained disasters on earth, which include a railway bridge levitating off a ravine and a train plunging into it, an ocean liner destroyed by a waterspout in the Panama Canal, severe flooding in Venice and a manned space station blown up, a conference at the Japanese Space Research Center called by world powers to discuss the happenings is attended by a Dr Ahmed, who is under the alien's control. After he fails in his mission to sabotage the heat-ray experiments he is vapourised by his caring controllers, but a tiny transmitter planted on him survives the process and its transmissions lead us to the alien's base on our moon. Cue a massive space battle between Natal's flying saucers and deadly ray guns and our rocket fighter planes and our atomic heat cannons, and lots of blown up scenery representing our cities... The pack includes two audio commentaries and a collector's booklet. o MOTHRA (1961) is, like films starring Godzilla, an example of a Japanese kaiju movie, that is featuring a giant strange beast that wants to destroy mankind, usually as punishment for letting off the bombs that gave it life. However Mothra is different, being a giant female moth that only destroys by accident. Her story starts on the remote Infant Island in the South Seas where she exists as a giant egg, worshipped as a goddess by the natives and guarded by them, as well as tended by two beautiful 12-inch-high fairies, called Shobijin. When Japanese humans invade the island two nasty ones realise that the lovely little fairy beings will make them a lot of money if they take them back to Japan and exhibit them as an exciting curiosity. The audiences that pay to see are entranced by the Shobijin, and in particular by their sweet singing, that nobody realises is actually summoning Mothra to come and save them. Accordingly the egg hatches and Mothra's gigantic caterpillar larva swims across the sea, forms a cocoon and then hatches out into its giant moth stage, all the time impervious to the bullets, explosive rockets and deadly ray guns discharged towards her. The beating of Mothra's massive wings inadvertently causes widespread destruction below her, as she searches Tokyo for her beloved fairies, finally finding them in New York, where they are reunited at an airfield and fly back to their home on Infant Island. Mothra is released on November 16 by Eureka Entertainments as part of their Masters of Cinema series, and the pack includes both the Japanese and English versions of the film, audio commentaries, a reversible poster showing both the Japanese and US artwork, an interview with film critic and author Kim Newman and a 60-page perfect bound collector's booklet with an essay, an interview and an extract from a Honda biography. OLD GRIT'S DIARY Monday Sir Rocco also claims that he will have to make 80 of his 450 UK staff redundant when the furlough scheme ends, and that the government's virus response is turning the UK into "a totalitarian state." Tuesday This follows Parliament's voting not to extend free school meals for under-privileged children, a decision that our government is under pressure to reverse. FOODIE NEWS
NEXT ISSUE Restaurants enthusiastically encouraging organisers to run possibly illegal business lunches at their venues go strangely quiet when asked if they will be covering any fines imposed on the organiser and/or attendees... Dozens of organisers are fined for running risky business lunches that could have been replaced by a safe, but much less fun, virtual meeting... Heavy new fines are introduced for venues that host risky business events... Sam Cutmore-Scott reveals how much profit his firm, Bijou Wedding Venues have made from unfair cancellation charges... Another 50,000 vulnerable people die in the UK as a result of disobedience of restrictions... Matt Hancock calls for Sir Rocco Forte to be sacked... Money for school meals for under-privileged children is taken from MP's salaries... and much, much more… ANNOUNCEMENTSARE YOU COMMUNICATING REGULARLY WITH YOUR TARGET MARKET? Could we do something like this for you? We can handle any size of email list, and, as a small company based in Baldock, Herts, offer a friendly five-star mailing out service for two-star prices. Like a quote for your work? Contact Mark Ely by email at [email protected] , or telephone on 07415865943, and start saving money on your customer communications. Publisher's Note
Event Organisers Update (EOU) is an independent information source published by the Society of Event Organisers (SEO). EOU is FREE and circulated monthly to more than 9,000 selected organisers and others interested in keeping abreast of development in the event industry (includes conferences, incentive travel, training events, etc.) Newsletter distributed by SG7.biz for Society of Event Organisers |