Crunching numbers at Solt and the BBC
I see that the West End is reporting record box office takings of over £480m last year, but how are these figures arrived at? Unlike Broadway, the West End is notoriously secretive about its financial affairs, and attendance figures (almost 14m last year, it’s claimed) are as likely to be random numbers as rough estimates.
No disrespect to Richard Pulford, the executive director of the Society of London Theatre, Solt, and a really nice guy, but he seems to me to be head of a secret society that has no teeth and too many vested interests in ticket sales and self-promotion to be a reliable, dispassionate arbiter of the way things are.
So we should take these figures with a pinch of Solt, at least until producers and theatre owners publish their weekly returns and audience figures as Broadway does in Variety.
At least we know that London theatre is a going concern. I’ve just spent a few days in Florence, flower of the Renaissance, heartbeat of European art, one of the most beautiful cities in the world, and there’s no theatre going on there at all.
Well, hardly any. I noted a tepidly received revival of Six Characters in Search of an Author with photos of the cast in white suits strung across the stage in a straight line. I saw the building where Tadeusz Kantor, the Polish director, conceived and launched his great signature production Wielopole, wielopole, in 1980 at the invitation of the city and Tuscany. And somebody or other is paying homage to Pina Bausch.
But the Maggio Musicale is silent and the beautiful Goldoni Theatre, which I desperately wanted to see, is closed indefinitely. It’s as though Florence is saying, we’ve done our bit for culture, come to the Uffizi, forget about the theatre.
So we don’t know how lucky we are. And another thing: only one in eight Italians actually reads a newspaper, the lowest percentage of the population in any European country. So there’s very little public discourse on the arts and even the venerable La Repubblica newspaper now publishes tiny reviews with smiley faces of approval, downturned non-grins for the opposite.
At least the great critic Franco Quadri is still in action, but he doesn’t get the space he used to. Florence seems to have less book shops, too, than stationery outlets. They’re mad on notepaper and fancy wrapping. But if they’re not reading all that much, what are they writing about?
Turn on the television, same old story. No drama, and the usual slew of game shows and quiz programmes derived from our X-Factor, Strictly Come Dancing and Who Wants to be a Millionaire? templates.
My absence abroad means I haven’t yet heard the Eurovision Song written by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Diane Warren, but I was alarmed to see that ALW had to save Jade in the Danger Zone. It sounds very much as though he’s written the song with her in mind, but the British public may have other ideas if those simpering twins from Sheffield keep being voted back in.
But how do we know we can trust the results of the viewers’ voting anyway on I’d Do Anything? Are these votes fiddled? Or are they so small in number it would be embarrassing to reveal them?
I’m sorry, but we only have Graham Norton’s word for it that people are voting for anyone at all.
The BBC should give us the numbers, the exact numbers, of the telephone votes for each singer, and then we can believe what they say about the people’s choice. Ditto, Solt. Let’s have the exact figures, the full break-down, before we start boasting of commercial success in the theatre or anywhere else.