I’m Jacob South-Klein, 16, from Reading.

My school*, now that GCSEs are a thing of the not-quite-distant-enough past, suggested that I do a week’s work experience during the summer. Rather than making coffee
in a stuffy local office, buried in papers and men in tweed suits, the opportunity arose for me to spend the week at Paddington Arts – and I am so, so grateful that it did. My time here has been brilliant.

As a Drama student, having studied it at GCSE level for the last 2 years, and choosing to take Theatre Studies at A-Level for the next 2 years (blimey), the thought of working in a theatre immediately appealed to my thespian side. I travelled up** to London on the Friday before I started to meet Steve Shaw, the director, and have a nose round. After leaving an hour or so later, with a slightly scary grin plastered across my face that must have traumatised several pedestrians, I was raring to get started after the weekend.

Fast-forward to Monday morning, once I’d successfully wrestled myself out of bed and down to my local station for 9.20am, I pulled into Reading Station – the jewel in the British crown – just before 10.00am.

This, as I promptly discovered, was to be where the adventure would begin.

In-between 10 and 11am, I handily managed to miss not only 2 trains into Paddington in quick succession, BUT ALSO, 4 (yes, four) tubes to Westbourne Park. But how, I hear you cry. Being from Reading, and being largely ignorant to the ins and outs of the London Underground system, out of sheer indecision as to whether I needed an Eastbound
or Westbound train, I stepped on and off four tubes in sequence. But I digress.

By nothing less than a miracle, I arrived at Paddington Arts for bang-on 11am, which meant that I was on time on my first day. First impressions and all that. When the foundations for Ye Olde London Town were laid down ‘back in the day’, it’s nice to know that the architects were considerate enough to place Westbourne Park tube station and Paddington Arts within a 2-minute walk of each other.

Shaking Steve’s*** hand, he told me of what I’d be getting up to over the week’s course: amongst other things, I would be helping Alex the lighting technician get ready for the Annual Show, by rigging lighting, holding ladders, taping wires, blacking-out windows (more on that later; trust me, it’s an interesting and worthwhile anecdote), manning the
lighting desk for the show itself, and being useful in whatever way possible. In addition to this, I would be helping Sophie, the Editor of Youth Arts Online, to set up the social media for Youth Arts Online itself, and then to mercilessly hunt down young, creative people willing to be interviewed and featured on the site.

At this point in my (seemingly never-ending) report, it would make sense to mention exactly WHAT Youth Arts Online is. The site, henceforth referred to as YAO, is ‘a free digital platform and social network for young creatives of all talents’. Effectively, it’s a bit like a Facebook/Blogger crossover with a decidedly artistic flavour, aimed at 16-26 year olds, and it became my best friend for the week.****

Monday was largely spent setting up lighting equipment in the main hall. As the hours trickled by under the tutelage of Alex, I gradually began to learn some tricks of the lighting trade: come Monday evening, I was muttering the words gel, gobo, fresnel, parcan, follow spot, chase, fader, and dimmer, in my sleep. For the last two years of doing Drama at school, I’d taken the technical side of the subject for granted and let the tech team do their ‘stuff’, without giving much thought as to what goes on behind the scenes (pun not intended). So being able to get hands-on with the lighting was a breath of fresh air for me, and I learnt a tremendous amount by doing so.

But learning about lighting aside, I also learnt something else on Monday, something I couldn’t ignore at any point during my time here: and that was how brilliantly genuine and decent all the people are at Paddington Arts. I’m not saying this lightly, or for the sake of being cheesy of cliché, I say it sincerely. Every single person I met, either through bumping into them on the stairs, working up on the balcony during the show, or chatting to them in the newsroom, would go out of their way to be generous and kind. I lost track of the number of times I was offered a bowl of cherries by Zippy, the number of times Eldora called me Bradley, the number of handshakes I got from Shaun, the laughs, the smiles…I could sit here and go on all day, but if you haven’t already, you would fall asleep. On Wednesday night, during the interval of the first show, Steve ran downstairs and pilfered bags of Salt and Vinegar crisps for Matt and I. As we walked back up to the balcony, he turned to us and said ‘Now don’t say I never give you anything!’.

But never once did I say, or think this, because during our time at Paddington Arts, we’ve been treated so well it almost makes me feel guilty. I always felt valued in some way, and that means a lot to a 16 year old. Even during moments of stress (and there were moments of stress, ‘that’s showbiz’), everyone knuckled down, pulled through,
and went back to smiling and laughing again because that’s what they do here. It’s a credit to their professionalism and dedication to their job, but also to their camaraderie and goodwill towards each other, and I think you’ll agree that’s the way it should be.