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Victoria Nangle observes the daredevil comedians who perform at office Christmas parties – and survive

Something I learned over the Christmas period – apart from the finite capacity I have for eating mince pies – is that I never want to perform for an office Christmas party. Unless I’m asked of course, but even then I’d have to give it some serious thought before agreeing. It’s not that the comics aren’t good - they’re phenomenal in some cases – it’s that the audience aren’t expecting to be amused, even if they have booked an all-round entertainer. Really, they’re expecting to get drunk, snog the MD and photocopy a part of their body only their mother should see on a regular basis.

“The audiences aren’t expecting to be amused”

The comedy put on for the office party’s benefit seems to take them somewhat by surprise. So much so that some are determined to pretend it’s not happening and quite doggedly continue their conversations regardless of the carefully honed material going on around them. The bar is closed, the lights are dimmed, the biggest clue is the comedian on stage talking into a microphone and still the relay race of drinking that took place immediately upon arrival at the venue has taken precedence over the proceedings. Is there really a place for intellectual entertainment demanding concentration at an office party? Should the most asked of our end of year bash be the determination not to stare at the unfeasibly low cut dress Tracey from HR is wearing? Should the photocopier return as the electronic apparatus of choice over the microphone as the central focus for entertainment for the evening?

I hope not. However, having sampled a number of these parties – all in the name of research you understand – over the festive period, it still feels like a gladiatorial arena for comics. The compere knocks the audience into shape, witty repartee goes out the window and the lowest common denominator is pandered to with knob gags to get their attention focused – before the comic brings out the big guns of quality jokes. It’s hard work! Obviously this is not something I feel comfortable with.

It is only the vocal minority though who spoil it for the rest, and sitting in the audience I can see this. For the comics on stage, blinded by the lights, it may seem as if the room is full of people conspiring against them. Really it’s just the cocky half a dozen beered-up lads trying to impress the completely unimpressed group of ladies at the next table.

So I’d prefer to get quite a few more gigs under my belt before I venture into that particular level of hell as a performer. Maybe next year. Then again, maybe the year after would be even better.

Outside In

Interior design and outdoor sculpture will come together in the first retrospective of Bernard Schottlander’s work, since his death in 1999.

Starting life as a welder then turned to furniture design then turned sculptor, Schottlander fled Germany just before the start of the Second World War. He trained in Leeds before setting up as a furniture designer, manufacturing his own designs. These included ashtrays for the National Theatre, furniture and news stands for the London Evening Standard. In 1956 his work was included in the Council of Industrial Design’s ‘Design Review’.

Despite his success, in 1963 Schottlander turned to sculpture, his lifelong passion. Numerous public commissions followed and now his work can be seen all over Britain, from the University of Warwick to London and Milton Keynes.

This exhibition, a collaboration with the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, will explore the overlaps between his sculpture and design, tracing how the elegant interior forms of his furniture and fittings informed his public sculpture.

The display also documents Schottlander’s role in the debate, which raged during the late 1960s – about the appropriate form and settings for public sculptures – and culminated in Peter Stuyvesant’s 1972 City Sculpture Projectto, to which Schottlander contributed.

Indoors and Out: The Sculpture and Design of Bernard Schottlander
University of Brighton Gallery, until 9 Feb | Map

Nicholas Rohl of sushi restaurant Moshi Moshi on sustainable fishing

What inspired an English man to create a Japanese restaurant?
When I was eighteen I went to Tokyo. It was the late eighties, and it was still pretty unusual to see any Westerners in Japan, but by one of those strange coincidences, I was there at the same time as a girl from my school in Lewes, Caroline Bennett. We decided to meet up and we chose a conveyor belt sushi bar to eat in. It wasn’t the first time I had eaten sushi, but I still wasn’t very familiar with it. At any rate, I have this distinct memory of the sushi we ate tasting awful. It nearly put me off eating sushi altogether. Seven years later, we opened the first conveyor belt sushi bar in Europe in Liverpool Street Station, London. Probably because of that experience in Tokyo, we decided that Moshi Moshi should serve really good quality sushi, in spite of it being a conveyor belt sushi bar.

Opening the first conveyor belt sushi bar in Europe must have been quite an experience!
I remember it being really tough. At the time, virtually all Japanese restaurants were owned by the Japanese, and there was a lot of resistance to what we wanted to do. Our Japanese chefs had us over a barrel, taking backhanders from their favoured Japanese suppliers. Everything was artificially expensive, so to try and sell sushi at affordable prices was really hard. The other problem was that our Japanese chefs always seemed to have a drink problem. On one occasion, I was called up at home by a customer to tell me that our Head Chef was lying on the floor in front of the customers, dead drunk, and waving a sushi knife in the air whilst singing the Japanese national anthem. Most of the time, we had to use guerrilla tactics to keep the restaurant open. The main problem was getting working permits because the people at the Home Office didn’t know what sushi was.

How quickly did the business become a success?
Overnight. I remember there being queues from pretty much the first day. We were so busy that we had our chefs sleeping on the kitchen floor because there was no time to go to bed. The reason why we were so successful was that we were the first people in Britain to say, hey, sushi doesn’t need to be so expensive and inaccessible. We believed that everyone should be able to afford and enjoy it – and we were right.

Did you ever have problems finding the right quality fish?
Not in the early years. The mainstay of sushi is good quality bluefin tuna, and it was readily available in those days. I remember coming into the restaurant and seeing the belt full of toro – the highly prized fatty belly of the tuna. That would be unthinkable today: blue fin is now on the verge of extinction. When Caroline found out about the plight of bluefin, she promptly took it off Moshi Moshi’s menu. That was eight years ago. It represented the beginning of her fight to protect fish species by changing the way restaurants order and supply fish.

So having become aware of declining fish stocks, what did you do?
We phoned the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF) and got involved with a few other individuals who were concerned about the, frankly, alarming situation. The problem from the outset was that the issues were extremely technical and difficult to explain to people. It was so much easier to get people to care about pandas and whales than about cod, although things are at last changing on this front. We ended up sitting on a steering committee set up by the WWF called Invest in Fish to try and find a formula for a sustainable fishing industry. Our conclusion was to create a direct link between restaurants and family run fishing boats.

So is all your fish sourced in this way?
No, but as much as is possible. We talk to our Cornish fisherman, Chris Bean, every day, and basically guarantee a market for his sustainably caught fish. That way he fishes for a specific market – Moshi Moshi – meaning he has to catch less fish than he did before. We’ve also cut out the middleman, so Chris gets more money for the fish he catches. It’s kind of a Fair Trade
arrangement – making it worth his while to catch fish sustainably. This year he’s doubled his turnover by catching the same amount of fish, which is exactly the result we were hoping for! We’re helping each other to catch fish with the least damage done to the marine environment – with the added benefit that fish caught in this way is by far the best quality available.

Have people started to notice what you are doing?
Yes. Two years ago we won the little known, but very prestigious, Green Apple Award for the Environment, which is a UK Government sponsored award given to businesses and individuals who have made a difference to the environment. This year, Moshi Moshi won the RSPCA Business Innovation Award for Animal Welfare.

Are your ethical instincts apparent across the business?
Yes, even our new floor is made of recycled plastic! We’re now looking to make our plates out of recycled materials. And some of our suppliers run their vehicles from the oil we use to make tempura.

And what about the food you serve, other than fish?
It’s now become so common to see the words ‘locally sourced’ on menus that I think the term is in danger of being devalued because many restaurateurs abuse the term. We have genuinely embraced the issue across the whole business so that we don’t just source locally but are actually working with local producers to grow our food. For instance, Moshi Moshi is working with a local smallholder in Lewes to grow our Japanese vegetables for us. We are also about to launch an association called Responsible Fish Restaurants (RFR), to encourage other restaurants to source fish in the same way as we do.

Does it cost you a lot more as a business to operate in this way?
Yes, of course it does – not only because the produce costs more, but also because of the time and effort we dedicate to operating more sustainably – but the payoff is that we know we are doing something good.

Where do you go from here?
We are constantly learning, and we’re continually on the lookout for better ways of doing things. We want to use more parts of every fish we catch so as to reduce the numbers of fish Chris needs to catch for us. We don’t particularly have an ambition to grow as a company, we just want to do what we do in a better way.

Moshi Moshi, Opticon, Bartholomew Square, Brighton
01273 719195
www.moshimoshi.co.uk
Opening Times: Tue–Sun, 12pm–10.30pm | Map

Billie Piper joins an acting dynasty with her New Year’s Eve wedding to Lewis star Laurence Fox

New Year’s Eve saw one of Sussex’s biggest weddings of the year as famous names from the worlds of movies and television turned out for the wedding of Billie Piper and fellow actor Laurence Fox. The pair tied the knot in a 50 minute ceremony at the Parish Church of St Mary’s in Easebourne, just up the road from Midhurst in West Sussex.

Piper, 25, most famous for her role as Rose Tyler in Doctor Who, wore a low-cut ivory wedding dress with a black coat over her shoulders. Attending the nuptials were Doctor Who star David Tennant, Fox’s co-star in TV show Lewis, Kevin Whately, Piper’s ex-husband Chris Evans and Fox’s father and uncle, the actors James and Edward Fox.

Time Lord David Tennant left the Tardis behind for Billie’s big day

Billie was five minutes early for the wedding, which took place about half a mile from the couple’s £750,000 lovenest in nearby Midhurst. Flanked by friends, she made the short walk from the White Horse pub to the church past the throng of photographers and reporters.

Tennant, dressed in a flamboyant burgundy velvet suit and trainers, arrived at the church at the same time as Whately, to cheers from the public lining the road. Fox and Piper met last December when they performed together in a stage production of Christopher Hampton’s Treats.

Hell hath no fury like a Heather scorned

Hove based Heather Mills has now apparently turned her fury towards pint-sized songstress Kylie Minogue, after an apparant flirting display with former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney.

Mills is reportedly furious with Minogue after her estranged husband, McCartney, flirted ‘shamelessly’ with the pop star during the Jools Holland BBC2 New Year’s Eve special. Mills, fighting a bitter divorce with the former Beatle, believes it was a deliberate wind-up directed at her. McCartney later joined Kylie on stage for a duet of his single Dance Tonight, then he lifted her up at the end of the song.

“She’s really mad about the way Paul got close to Kylie,” a friend of Mills said. “She reckons he did it on purpose and feels it was a deliberate public dig at her. She thinks he’s just trying to prove a point, that he has moved on and is comfortable around other women. She was so hurt, she burst into tears.”

Last week it was revealed McCartney had had heart surgery in September, while Mills has appeared erratic and strange in many of her public appearances.

Jo Brooks is director of Brighton-based PR company JBPR Ltd
01273 622555, www.jb-pr.com