Category: Performance

Amazing stuff on stage and me having fun

Ticketing the Edinburgh Fringe

I’ve been going to the Edinburgh Fringe for many years.  It’s the world’s largest arts festival.  This year, 3,893 different shows were performed in over 300 venues around the City.  That led to sales of more than 2.6 million tickets.  In terms of ticket sales, it’s the third largest ticketing operation in the world, beaten only by the Olympics and the World Cup.  Unlike the Olympics and the World Cup, the Edinburgh Fringe takes place every year, so the pressure on the ticketing system is immense.

In many ways, the Fringe, in its current form, only exists because of the ticketing system run by the Edinburgh Fringe Society.  They publish the master programme guide and run EdFringe.com, which provides the single point of information and purchase for most attendees.  It’s a complex job, as it needs to coordinate with other ticketing systems run by larger venues.  Ensuring that the last remaining ticket for any show is not sold multiple times is a complex challenge in such a distributed system.  Which means that it is vital that it works.

The Fringe has come close to disaster in the past.  In 2008, the Fringe Society  introduced a new ticketing system, which failed on the opening day of ticket sales.  It should have been a “never again” lesson, but this year, when I went to book tickets, there was an unpleasant reminder that the lesson may not have been learnt.

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AI reviews at the Edinburgh Fringe

If you’re putting a show on at the Edinburgh Fringe, the thing everyone looks for is a good review.  In the performing arts, the star system starts where the Michelin Guide runs out of steam.  Three stars for a show is just run of the mill.  Four stars means it’s a “must see”, while five stars indicates that you may need to kill to get tickets.  Except it’s all got rather devalued.

Go back thirty years and there were two gold standards – the Scotsman and The Stage.  Each had a team of professional reviewers who awarded stars in their daily reviews.   A few other printed publications like The List joined in, but everything changed when Broadway Baby burst on the scene in 2004 with online reviews.  The Scotsman was outraged and railed against non-professional reviewers, but an increasing number of online review sites appeared.  Audiences were encouraged to comment on Twitter and post reviews on the Edfringe.com website.

The result was that it became a lot easier to get a four or five star review from somewhere – sometimes the Edfringe.com ones even appeared before the show opened.  Productions now plaster their posters and flyers with the stars in large font and the source in diminishingly small font.  What’s important seems to be how many sets of stars you have.  That’s been going on for several years.  What is ruffling feathers this year is the accusation that some reviews are being written by AI. 

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No juggling, no religion.  It’s the Edinburgh Fringe.

The Edinburgh Fringe programme is out and the first task for visitors is to work out what to see.  The Edinburgh Fringe boasts over 3,500 different shows, and expects to sell more than 2.5 million tickets over its three weeks of performances.  That means there’s a decent chunk of data to play with.  You can see (or scrape) all of the shows on the edfringe.com site, or you can pick up a printed programme.  So how do you choose?  It felt that this should be a useful example of seeing how data and AI are being used in the arts community.

It’s almost a year and a half since ChatGPT became public and the world started agonising over the possibility of AI taking over from humans.  This year marks the first real opportunity to see how AI influences the Edinburgh Fringe – the world’s largest arts festival.  Will it be used to write new plays, or to tell audiences what’s hot and what’s not?

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Gilbert and Sullivan meets MasterChef

Just before the Christmas lockdown, we were lucky enough to get out to see a revival of Sasha Regan’s excellent, all-male Pirates of Penzance in the West End, as well as treating ourselves to a meal at one of our favourite local restaurants.  Having been confined to home since then, it started me wondering what would happen if you tried to combine the two experiences?

Here’s the answer…

I obviously need to get out more…

Tom Lehrer Revisited – My Lockdown

Looking back on the past few months, everything I’ve written has been about the effects of Covid-19 and lockdown.  It’s all still best described as a global experiment, where most of our politicians are still guessing. 

It felt that it was probably time to lighten the tone.  I grew up with the songs of the great American satirist, Tom Lehrer, which still feel as fresh as when they were written.  Lockdown seemed to be a good opportunity to revisit and update them, so here’s my offering based on one of his classics – My Home Town.

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Hearing Loss takes the Stage in Edinburgh

The Edinburgh Fringe Festival is the largest in the world, with around 2,500 different performances taking place each day.  It attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors over the course of three weeks, sells almost three million tickets and showcases some of the best performances from around the world.  It also seems to attract the world’s worst sound technicians, who think that volume is the only thing that matters.  So it was refreshing to find a couple of shows this year which highlighted the issues of hearing loss.  Around a quarter of us will experience hearing loss during our lives, so it is important that people become more aware of how to protect their hearing, as well as understanding the consequences of hearing loss and for society to remove the stigma of wearing hearing aids. 

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