I like a comedy gig and a few years a ago, I saw Micky Flanagan at the Reading Concert Hall – I think at the start of what became his Out Out tour. I laughed a lot – nearly fell of my chair at one point and a very good time was had.
We haven’t seen him since – to be honest, I am of the opinion that we saw him at the peak of his powers. But, an email from Reading Arts gave me, a humble member, news of a gig at the Reading Hexagon and the ability to get some tickets on a pre-sale. Mrs LB suggested buying tickets would be a very good idea.
Reminder set for this morning at 10:00, I dutifully refreshed a few times, became part of a queue (I was number 3 – either I was on fire with the timing or demand levels were slightly off Oasis levels.
Shortly, I had the option to pick some seats, I selected the fron of the balcony and let out a little noise of shock as I appeared to have picked top of the range tickets. £65 each plus booking fees (slightly less for me with the power of membership).
I tried to put them back and select cheaper seats. Only to find the worse seats were the same price. Slightly worse, I now had 4 tickets in my basket and no obvious way to delete them.
A quick call to Mrs LB followed. I asked if £60 for 90 minutes of cheeky chappie comedy was really worht that. We had been discussin seeing Mrs Doubtfire, the musical the previous day and £60 for that was casuing a degree of heartburn.
I didn’t press buy. £60 a seat for seeing a bloke tell jokes for 90 mins (if we’re lucky) seems excessive doesn’t it? Forget whether he makes you laugh or not. There no band, no staging, no dancing and a cast of one.
That kind of money should provide 4 or so musicians, a support band and a few roadies. Not a bloke with some jokes.
Or am I just too tight for my own entertainment??
I blame Oasis.
In his recent-ish Sky (or was it Netflix) special he was very average. Lots of references to how much money he has. Suppose it’s standard for a working class bloke made good, but it was nowhere near the level of his Out Out days.
If you love something enough the price is a secondary concern I guess.
I think the cheeky chappy made good routine only really works for a finite amount of time. Then it turns into Loadsamoney without the intended satire. He’s always left me cold on the telly but he was brilliant at the beginning of Out Out.
I get the comment about love and price. Loving a comedian is somewhat incomprehensible to me whereas loving a band, makes sense. But £65 for a stand up on a Thursday night in Reading???
I’ve just spent the week at Cambridge university, in the company of some Physicists from Reading.
Someone asked us “what’s the best thing about Reading?” We all, simultaneously, replied “the M4”. How we laughed!
Careful on that M4 – it goes to Slough…
The Reading Concert Hall is a great though. And……no, just the Concert Hall.
Is that the one in the Hexagon? I last saw my tall chum supporting Richard Thompson there c. 1995, the Stranglers just before Hugh left c. 1990, snooker c. 1987.
No – other side of town.
Click here to be impressed anything like this can exist in Reading:
https://www.readingtownhall.co.uk/venue-hire/our-spaces/concert-hall
I saw your tall chum at South Street Arts Centre in Reading a few years back (not as nice as the concert hall but nicer than the Hexagon). Hafdis Huld supported. It was a very brilliant show complete with the most excellent Elvis Costello cheese anecdote.
Oh yeah. I think I went to a record fair in there c. 1990, definitely somewhere down near Forbury gardens.
We went to Offspring the Elder’s graduation ceremony last week, in Lincoln cathedral (it is quite nice in there). We had to walk past my favourite record shop to get there, which put me on edge. It got me thinking back to mine, which was held in the Great Hall on London Road, a venue I knew well having done the sound/lights/bar at various Drama Soc events.
https://www.reading.ac.uk/VirtualTour/london-road-campus/tour/?indexstart=0
Anyhow, I remembered buying my copy of Blondie’s Autoamerican from a little s/h record shop down by the old bus depot. I think it was razed to make way for the Oracle shopping centre. Yield Hall Place? One for Rij, I expect…
Definitely one for Mr Digit. I remember Quiksilver being a very good record shop in the Butts Centre (now the Broad Street Mall).
It was all Listen Records, at the top of the escalator, in my day. Sparkly bags n’all.
I went down a bit of a worm hole but found it. Pop Records, under the multi-storey car park (next to the bus depot).
https://www.britishrecordshoparchive.org/shops/pop-records/
Listen and Knights were the two record shops I remember in Reading when I was at school there for the first half of the eighties
Knights (upstairs, NSS Newsagent downstairs with the records).
They closed down in early 90s and had a stock room clearout.
Got some really cheap singles, albums and CDs there, plus a couple of Japanese Imports (complete with Obi strip and cellophane sealed – or they were were until I gout home)
Was Knights the place with the nylon carpet and the metal record racks? I always used to generate sparks in there.
Yup – Pop Records under Yield Hall Lane Car Park – a place of entertainment and education. It was the second shop after the ramshackle, no filing system, pile ’em high and have a dig shop out on Kings Road.
When it shut down (around the same time as Listen Records coincidentally) the Record Basement on Station Hill Road became the place (the small section at the back).
Reading still has The Sound Machine in Harris Arcade carrying the torch of independent music shopping
I’m seeing Dylan Moran tomorrow, fifteen quid + 10% booking fee.
That actually sounds like a bargain.
I’d happily pay that for Dylan Moran. The only comedy show we have booked is Bill Bailey at Theatre Royal Haymarket in January. Our seats up in the nosebleeds were £27 each, but if your pockets are deep enough the prices go up to £95.
With Bill Bailey, you get a pretty good show with music as well as comedy.
My nephew gave me a Mickey Flanagan DVD as part of my Xmas present a couple of years ago. Never watched it as I didn’t like the look of him on the cover. Can’t find it now, so I must have got rid of it, still in it’s wrapper.
Mickey must think he’s Alan Carr, charging those prices.
@Mike-H
At least with Alan Carr you headed home having quit cigarettes
seeing him on Saturday with Nick Helm, Tony Law and Laura Lexx as MC £23 very reasonable i think
No you are not too tight.
I got the same email from Reading Arts. I opened it, said 2 words (the second word being “off”) when I saw the price
I’ve just looked at the Cambridge Corn Exchange listings and their comedy nights (Jack Dee, Harry Hill, etc) vary from 30 to 35 quid. John Bishop was £45.
I have the following lined up:
Ian Stone – Aldershot (£15)
Pierre Novellie – Reading South Street (£16)
Jeff Innocent – Reading South Street (£18.50)
Ricky Gervais – Woking (£27.50)
That’s made me feel better at least….
Our equivalent of South Street would the Junction. Mitch Benn £22, Maisie Adam £24, Count Binface £19.
I once went to see The Big Dish at the Junction. Had some friends who lived nearby. They were really very good. These venues should be cherised.
Ricky Gervais £27.50 is a bargain. I would happily pay double for that.
I was looking to see if there’s a Mickey Flanagan tribute act – it’s apparently a thing now. I couldn’t find one, but there are at least two Peter Kay tributes, One is “the most popular” while this one is “the most authentic”
If they’re doing Peter Kay’s material & they look similar, you’ve probably saved yourself a load of money – and you’ll be repeating the jokes at work the next day.
We saw Eddie Izzard at The Theatre Royal Brighton last year. Leg room was awful, Eddie was ok ish. IIRC, tickets for seats suitable for people with short legs were £40 to £50. Would not recommend.
I like the Theatre Royal but it’s a Victorian theatre, built when people were smaller and a comedian on stage with a hand held radio mic and a bit of lighting is not a lavish production. These turns must be making more money than bands by a long way.
Incidentally, the venue is owned by Ambassador Group and they’ve spent some money on front of house recently, but not so much on back stage. Some of the flying gear is still on traditional hemp ropes. I do a bit of work there and the crew are just lovely.
Ryan Adams at Wolverhampton Civic next week £65 to £75 plus booking fee.
Just him solo on stage, no support. He can fuck right off.
If tickets were £45.00 I would have gone in a heartbeat
the ticket prices putting off rather than than his past actions is a bold take.
His ‘past actions’ were never proven. I suspect he was boorish as most drunks are but he has cleaned up his act.
Everyone deserves a second chance or are you suggesting he is burned at the stake?
I recently read the NYT investigation. 3,217 text messages – many of which were sexually explicit – in a nine-month period with a girl who is 15/ 16 isn’t “boorish”. That’s just one of his “past actions”.
OMD are playing here in Auckland, NZ next year. Now OMD are one of my tippetty-top favourite bands and they seem to still be a very good live act but I am pausing on the ticket buying due to the prices and the whole vibe of the thing.
Knocking on 100 GBP equivalent for a standing GA ticket. It’s being marketed as a bit of a nostalgia party/festival with Tom Bailey (Thompson Twins) and an INXS tribute act and someone I don’t know at all.
The venue is a hall that I last went to when I took my young children to see The Tweenies. It’s not exactly in the heart of town and hosts industry expos most of the time. There’s no sense of occasion by being there or a hotel-like posh conference type experience, it’s simply a bunch of big rooms in the suburbs. It’s not one of those classic rock venues. It’s like Earls Court or Olympia but about a quarter of the size.
The last time they were coming (cancelled by COVID) they were playing at a winery and co-headlining with Simple Minds. Although yer Simps have seen better days, I envisioned the outdoor show happening on a lovely summer evening in beautiful surroundings and possibly being quite special.
This is a different proposition. It’s being promoted as a nostalgia event on Fab FM sandwiched between endless playlists of Bonnie Tyler, Tina Turner and Bryan Adams etc. The audience will definitely be at least 50% fuckwits.
Aside from all of this, I don’t think the tickets are selling like hotcakes. A breathlessly excited email dropped the other day saying that due to the demand, the band has authorised a “second tier” release of additional tickets – that are a bit cheaper. As we move towards Christmas I’m picking there might be a few more “tiers” to come and I’ll bite at that point.
OMD are a successful act of course and people remember a few Thompson Twins hits but here in NZ they are not the draw card the promoters may think they are. Three nights at a good venue in the city would have been fine.
Our local arts centre is a regular venue for comedians trying out new material, pre national tours.
We have Omid Djalili, Ed Byrne and Harry Hill lined up over the next few months.
£20 a go for a seat in a 200 capacity venue. It’s a god send of a little place.
We have the same thing in Sunny Southend™, a 100-seater room above the Palace theatre. We’ve seen a few tryout gigs for cheap.
I’ve checked him up on t’internet and I honestly have no idea of who he is*. I see tickets are presale at the moment. I’ll check tomorrow when tickets are open to the general public and look for variations in price.
* Shades of “Who are The Beatles?”
By the by, I’ve mentioned this before but the only time I’ve seen Mickey Flanagan in the flesh was at a John Cooper Clarke show at the London Palladium. We stretched our legs in the interval and my other half pointed him out in one of the bars saying, ‘Look! There’s Mickey Flanagan.’ But I didn’t hear at first because at the same time I was saying, ‘Look! There’s Mick Jones.’ (Clash not Foreigner). Just as we each said that Brett Anderson scurried past. So far as I’ve seen from his act that’s the funniest thing Mickey Flanagan has ever done, and he didn’t even realise.
We are seeing Ben Elton in Singapore in December and those are $100 tickets – which works out about £60 in sterling.
Bear in mind that prices in Singapore are always double what they are everywhere else in the world (based on my judgment and no absolute data).
Yes, he is around £30 round our way; the likes of Jack Dee, Frank Skinner and Chris McCausland are in the same ball park.
Since no one else has said it, I suppose it falls to me…
£60 to see Micky flippin’ Flanagan?
He’s ’avin a bleedin’ giraffe
See also 60p.
Well these promoters very rarely get it wrong, and, sure enough, according to the website it is sold out. Market forces, innit? I reckon the gross at The Hexagon will be around £62k after VAT. So that will be around £50k once the venue has had its share. Let’s say hotels travel, marketing, support and tour manager are £5k. So £45 for the promoter to give Mickey his fee and to pay for their chateau in France….
Four local(ish) gigs next week for a total cost of £40.50*. None of them comedians (at least not intentionally). Little bit of petrol and a couple of tube fares on top, plus a few beers probably at three of them.
* Argentinian guitarist Luis Agostino plus band (2nd guitarist, sax, bass, drums), £13, Elephant Inn North Finchley, Sunday 22nd.
Pianist Kezia Abouama and her quartet, £12.50, Vortex Jazz Club Dalston, Tuesday 24th.
Tomorrows Warriors +1 session with Moses Boyd, £10, Top Floor Foyles Bookshop Charing Cross Road, Friday 27th early evening.
Dex & Mercy Funk & Soul, £5 donation appreciated, Elephant Inn North Finchley, Friday 27th late evening.
Last Wednesday I saw Martin Stephenson in his Jumpin Revue tour – he was joined by Rob Heron, Julian Hughes, Sheepcote, Errant Moose (Martins daughter Phoebe Guitar/Vocals and Philippa Bridges violins/vocals). They all had their own sets and then joined together for the finale.
It was 2 and half hours of great fun and a chance to talk with them all in the break.
£17. 50 was a bargain and no idea how they make money as capacity is circa 50 people.
On Wednesday I see Costello at Wolverhampton Civic for £85.00.
As much as I love his music I doubt he will be anywhere near as much fun.
I am beginning to think @Mike_H has it right.
I used to go to a fair number of gigs, these days it’s become comedy. In part that’s because the my local venue – Taunton Brewhouse – attracts plenty of comedians that I have some familiarity with, compared to what’s almost exclusively a succession of tribute acts. I’m also past the point where standing for 2 hours to get a partial view of a band appeals (or is even physically possible) compared to a numbered seat.
A comedy gig ticket will be around £20 to £27 – and for that I’ve seen Mark Watson, Tim Key, Joe Wilkinson, Paul Foot, Gary Delaney. The only duff gig I’ve seen was Jerry Sadowitz but that was £27 as well. I just paid £29 for Julian Clary in Exeter £32 to see Stewart Lee in Leicester Square.
The only tribute band I turned out for was Limehouse Lizzy which was £27. But music is inevitably more expensive to stage. Given comedy acts just require a single mic and (sometimes) a stool, they must be able to charge less and gross more than bands. No PA needed, house lights will be fine. I find venues like the Brewhouse idea in terms of size (350 seats). They aren’t going to attract the comedy “A list” but I’m past the point where I’ll enjoy the bigger venues.