Slides That Follow Your Voice: Scouse Accent Grant Pitch

Slide 1: A roof and a Tuesday

0:17Thank you for seeing us, and thank you for the ten minutes, which I know is more than most applicants get, and which I intend to use all of, so nobody look at the clock. [chuckles]

0:27My name's Joe, I run the Tannery, which is a one hundred and forty seat theatre in a building that used to be exactly what it sounds like, and I'm here to ask the fund for uh, forty-eight thousand pounds. I'm going to tell you what it's for, what we've already done without it, and why I think it's the cheapest forty-eight thousand pounds you'll spend this year.

Slide 2: The Tannery: a 140-seat theatre

0:47First, what we've done. The Tannery opened in twenty seventeen in a building the council had given up on, with a leaking roof, nine volunteers, and a programme of four shows a year. Last year we put on sixty-one performances. Sixty-three, to be honest, if you count the two in the school hall, which I do. twenty-two of them were made by people under twenty-five who'd never set foot in a theatre before they walked through our door, and twelve, no, fourteen thousand people bought a ticket.

Slide 3: Last year: 14,000 people

1:20Our average ticket is six pounds fifty. We've never once turned somebody away for not being able to pay, and we've got a jar for that, and the jar's never been empty, and I want you to think about what that says about the people on our street. It's a pickle jar. It's got a label a kid wrote in twenty eighteen that says, pay what you can, and underneath, in different handwriting, somebody's added, or more. We never found out who. We never corrected it. You know. Anyway.

Slide 4: On a turnover of 212,000 pounds

1:50We did all of that on a turnover of two hundred and twelve thousand pounds, which, if you've run a building, you know is not much. We did it because thirty-one people give us their evenings, and because the roof, so far, has held.

2:06Second, the money, what the, right, second... Second, what the money's for. It's not for a show. It's for two things, and I'll be exact.

2:16twenty-nine thousand pounds replaces the roof over the auditorium, which is nineteen thirties what's it called, the, uh, felt on timber, which has been patched eight times, and which the surveyor, in April, described as, and I'm quoting, living on borrowed time, which is a strange thing to say about a roof and a worrying thing to hear. No? It's a roof. The joke was the roof. Fine. The remaining nineteen thousand pays one person, part-time, for a year, to run the Tuesday night group for fourteen to eighteen year olds, which is currently run by me, after my actual job, and which is the single most important thing we do.

Slide 5: Two things, exactly

2:58Why that group. Because eleven young people who came through that room in the last three years are now in paid work in theatre, film or events, and not one of them had a family member who'd ever done anything like it.

Slide 6: Why that group

3:12Because a lad called Kieran, who came in at fifteen because it was raining and the door was open, wrote a twenty-minute play last spring that made a room full of adults go very quiet, and then sold out four nights, and is now at drama school on a bursary, and rings me on Sundays, rings me on Sundays. [sighs]

3:32He rang last Sunday to ask whether a character can be in two places at once if the audience agrees to it. I said yes. He said, good, because I've already written it. That's what fifteen quid of electricity of a Tuesday night gets you. I was going to say something else about him. It's gone. He's a good lad.

3:52And because for three miles on that side of the city there's no other door a fifteen-year-old can walk through on a Tuesday and get asked their opinion.

4:02What happens without it. The roof fails, probably this winter, and we close for six months, and we lose the Tuesday group, because you can't run a youth programme in a building with a bucket in the middle of it, and I have tried.

Slide 7: Without it: the roof fails

4:16That's the ask. forty-eight thousand pounds. A roof and a Tuesday. Actually, I'll keep the jar. We need it Thursday. Have a look at it, though. Pass it round. Mind the lid. [laughs] Thank you.