Content Provider by Stewart Lee

Author:Stewart Lee [Stewart Lee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571329045
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2016-09-08T16:00:00+00:00

“Secondary ticketing” might be legal, but that doesn’t make it morally right

Observer, 8 February 2015

Look, this isn’t that funny, but it is true, and nothing has changed since it was written.

Culture secretary Sajid Javid has said that ticket touts are “classic entrepreneurs” and their detractors are the “chattering middle classes and champagne socialists, who have no interest in helping the common working man earn a decent living by acting as a middleman”. Fill my flute with Dom Perignon, comrade, as we raise the red flag and toast Vanessa Redgrave. Because £20 tickets for my current tour have been touted to confused online consumers at nearly 400 per cent more than their face value, none of which either I or the theatre see, and this Moët & Chandon Marxist isn’t happy about it.

I am a stand-up comedian. Due to a decade of tri-annual BBC2 exposure, dogged Dantean circuits of provincial comedy venues, conscious manipulation of vulnerable broadsheet opinion formers and undeserved good luck, I am now popular enough to have caught the eye of touts or, as we now dignify them, Secondary Ticketing Agents™. As Eric Cantona said twenty years ago on a celebrity fishing trip with Tom O’Connor: “When seagulls follow the trawler it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea.” Well, I’m pulling my sardines out of the sea and putting them back onto Eric Cantona’s trawler. Or something.

I try to keep my tickets down to around £20 in the big theatres, and avoid ones, such as the Ambassador Theatre Group chain, where I can’t. This is not a huge sacrifice. I will put prices up if I suddenly want a velvet cloak or a bejewelled cock ring. But I am doing fine. In the last twenty-four hours alone I have bought muffins, a second-class single to Colchester, two quality newspapers, a dish of luxury nuts and a garage-punk CD called Back to the Grave 9. I now live beyond my wildest dreams, although admittedly, until recently, my wildest dreams involved one day owning a table.

£20 is about as low as you can go in theatres, which need to make a significant slice from their standard percentage of the take. For your local taxpayer-subsidised theatre, low-tech high-return junk such as stand-up comedy, discredited TV psychics and ABBA tribute acts float more worthwhile artists with identifiable skills – dancers, actors, puppeteers and ex-members of The Stranglers doing acoustic tours. And public subsidies in the arts temples of ballet, classical music and opera are supposed to provide cheaper tickets for everyone, not to create back-door profiteering opportunities for Sajid Javid’s dodgy mates.

My old manager is of the opinion that comedians are only popular for a short time, and that in that time they should try to accrue as much as possible. Being a comedian was a kind of confidence trick, it seemed, that the public would eventually rumble. Then the comedian would be run out of town by an angry mob who had realised that this charlatan’s

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