Unless you're a hermit-or remarkably wise-you have probably been inveigled into attending awards dinners from time to time. If you haven't attended in person, you'll have seen them on television: Oscars and Oliviers, Bookers and Baftas, Whitbreads and Turners. Naturally, only the galas adorned by stars and celebs get on to the box, but more modest awards dinners flourish in every chandelier-spangled hostelry in Britain-probably in the western world.
Nobody knows how many awards dinners there are each year, but everyone knows that there are more and more of them. At the moment we're in the middle of the season, which now runs almost continuously from September until May. There are awards banquets in London on most evenings along glamorous (glamorous?) Park Lane, at the Dorchester, the Grosvenor House, the Hilton. Outside London such events are mini-replicas of the Park Lane bashes, although the food and wines are usually even less palatable and the comp?res even more embarrassing. But they are more friendly and intimate (if those adjectives aren't oxymoronic when applied to awards dinners).
Awards schemes can be, and are, run by almost anyone who fancies running an award scheme. Every year a host of trade associations, newspapers, local business and sports groups, clubs and societies of all kinds bestow their own hideous doorstops. But most schemes are sponsored by trade magazines. Nowadays any trade magazine worth its salt runs a shindig, from Wine Magazine to Campaign, from Travel Trade Gazette to The Grocer. Publishers have leapt on to the gong-giving bandwagon because it's good for reader relations, good for prestige-above all, good for turning a fast buck. Awards dinners do not, you may be surprised to know, lose money.
If it is lucrative for the organisers, for the comp?res it is like being let loose in a diamond mine. At a big London revelry the comp?re can command anything from ?5,000 to a top whack of ?20,000. This means that the biggest names-Angus Deayton, Rory Bremner or even good old Bob Monkhouse-can notch up ?250,000 a year. Not bad for maybe 15-20 evenings work with little or no rehearsal. Their patter does not vary much. They throw in a few apposite references to the beano concerned, and hope they've remembered it right. (The late Tommy Cooper, it is said, often didn't.) Deayton's awards junket patter includes lots of jokes about how many awards junkets he does. Given his fees, it is hardly surprising that he finds the subject a bit of a laugh.
Out in the sticks the comp?re's fees are much lower, but you'll still be lucky to get much change back out of ?1,000. Maybe that's because comp?ring is harder than it looks. If things get out of hand, audiences (mainly men) can and do get rowdy. Nicely tanked up, the guests quite often aim punches at each other. This may be a belated riposte to some historic grudge (most of those present, remember, are in competition with each other) or an instant riposte to having lost out in the gong-giving. Conference organisers say that one of their principal roles is calming down would-be pugilists, or what they call "managing risk." A crummy comp?re will only exacerbate the problem.
Why is it that awards dinners, like naughty websites, are multiplying so rapidly? We all grumble about attending them. We do not expect to enjoy a delectable meal or be hugely entertained. Yet we go. Some of us have our arms painfully twisted by friends and relatives hoping to garner a garland or two. Some of us hope to garner a garland or two ourselves-and organisers have grown skilful at hinting to us all that we are in with a sporting chance. (This process should be dubbed gong-teasing.)
But the reason for the popularity of awards dinners is that they help us to convince ourselves that the true value of what we do for a living is far greater than that indicated by the banker's draft we receive each month. Awards honour quality, accomplishment, excellence. To win an award is exalted-far more exalted than earning money.
These dinners are also a form of bonding. They bring together the leaders and members of the tribe-people who congregate less often than might be imagined-to pay homage to the tribe's gods: its products. They involve competing and sharing. (In this respect they resemble sport-another activity replete with medals and rosettes.) The razzmatazz imbues the proceedings with ritual significance and glamorises the tribe's daily bread-winning.
But the really neat trick is that, while apparently embracing more ethereal values, the glittering prizes deliver the dosh, too. To the winners the spoils: extra sales, higher salaries, bigger profits. Merit and moolah blissfully entwine. At the end of the 20th century, a perfect partnership. That is why, while everyone mocks and moans about awards, everyone enters for them.
