All Eyes On Churchill

While other May Ball committees are competing for ticket sales and working out how to deliver on their ambitious foreign-sounding themes, one team have more pressing issues on their mind.

Tomorrow night the doors will open on Churchill 1960’s themed Springball, the event which kicks off 2010’s lineup of distinctively Cambridge revellery.

Amidst students constructing the bowling alley and delivery men schlepping around boxes containing the event’s 4000 donuts, The Tab popped into Churchill to find out what May Week’s organizers can learn from their Springball counterparts.

Early planning
Jasmine Baker, the event’s co-President, began planning “almost as soon as I finished the last one”. Two May Ball presidents speaking to The Tab have cited last year’s cancelled Newnham June Event as an example of what happens when planning begins too late, or gets off to a bad start, but Baker is confident her preparations have been just right: “I don't think we have really made any major changes last-minute, we were really organised this year so I guess we had time to make the right decisions.”

Committee politics
May ball committees can be notoriously political. Outbursts about the sponsorship team "letting down the whole bloody event" and “does she honesty need to speak that much at meetings” are common currency on most college grounds in the frantic days of mid-June. Baker hopes that she has got the dynamic of her Churchill team about right though: “Committee morale is essential to making everything run smoothly in the last week. As long as everyone is having fun and knows what they are doing and isn't stressed then things get done much easier and faster, and there is no miscommunication”. That all sounds very simple but tomorrow night’s revellers will be the ones to judge how smoothly things have gone for Churchill’s committee.

Realism
 “There is no way we are going to turn Churchill into a fairyland… there is no point in even trying”. Churchill’s organizers seem realistic about the job in hand, and are keen to point out that their chosen 1960s inspired ‘Hard Day’s Night’ theme plays to their strengths. For Baker, “It fits in with Churchill’s aesthetic, Churchill’s sense of fun, basically what Churchill is about.” Is the theme just a convenient cover up for her college’s much-maligned architecture?  “I wouldn’t say cover up, I would say works better with it!”.
 

Churchill Springball in numbers

4,150
The number of champagne glasses ready to be filled

35
The kilograms of chocolate that will service the ball’s 5 fountains

800
The number of guests expected

400
The number of lip-glosses to be given away

34
The number of bands and acts on show tomorrow night

4000
The number of donuts that will soak up the 15,000 alcoholic drinks on offer