Fair Rate for the Job

The trouble is, when highly skilled people are doing it well, whatever it is, it looks easy.

“HOW much?”

“A hundred pounds an hour or part of an hour.”

“But I only want him to read a few pages.”

“Yes, and because he’s a very good sight-reader, it won’t take long.”

But sometimes they are unconvinced: they get their mate who said they’d do it for a tenner: it takes all morning and the result is terrible.

Then there’s the issue of half days.

“And we need an extra actor in Littlemere-on-the-Marsh for the Fatcat Bank corporate roleplay. That’s out in the countryside ten miles east of Greatmere-on-the-Marsh, you know, fifteen miles north of Manchesterford, but we’ll only need them for the morning. So that’ll be a half day fee plus travel, then?”

“No, I’m afraid we don’t do half days.”

“Why not? We only need him for half a day.”

“Because by the time he’s travelled to Littlemere-on-the-Marsh and done the job, he can’t do anything else to earn money in the afternoon. Because actors aren’t on a salary, they need a full fee for every day they work.”

“Oh, (sighs) well if you insist.”

Then there are television fees. A few actors, it’s true, earn a lot of money from television. But many smaller roles are just one day, for a fee of a few hundred pounds.

“What? Four hundred and fifty pounds, just for one day? I wish I could earn that much!”

But, as an example, that one day’s television is filming on, say, a Wednesday. And the actor was offered a roleplay job where they wanted him on Tuesday and Wednesday that week, but he had to turn it down because of the television job on the Wednesday. And he was also offered four days on a corporate video, stretched over that week and the next week, paying about a thousand pounds, but couldn’t do it because one of those days was – of course! – the Wednesday of the television shoot and he was already under contract for that, and anyway an actor's motto has to be "put television work first" whether he likes it or not, because that is the quickest way to be seen and get more work.

So, in fact, the four hundred and fifty pounds are his wages for a fortnight: and although television companies generally pay pretty quickly, he won’t get the money for ten days or so at the soonest: and that’s only if the agency is like ours, where the money goes straight out to the actor as soon as it’s come in.

But never mind, there’s still that five hundred quid he’s owed from the corporate video he filmed in July – perhaps they’ll pay up soon.

“We’re waiting for the client to pay us,” they told his agent in August.

“Mr. Jones isn’t here at the moment, he’s on holiday, and there’s a pile of cheques to be signed when he gets back,” they told his agent in September.

“The cheque is on the desk, just waiting to be signed,” they told his agent a week ago.

“We didn’t do a cheque run in September,” they told his agent today – in an interesting plot twist - “but it’ll definitely be paid by the end of October.”

There’s a public perception that actors are overpaid, and in one or two cases it may be true. But most actors – and I mean working actors, not the ones who choose to call themselves “unemployed actor” when they never work at all – are forever juggling a lot of small jobs with no job security at all.

And, of course, for “actor” you could equally well substitute “artist” or “musician”.

We get regular phone calls from wannabe actors – they are serious about their craft and terribly committed to it. The only thing is, they just don’t want to give up their job in the bank so is there any acting work they can do at weekends?

It's a big commitment, working in the arts.