In pursuit of the great white sharks of London
To many in the US, ticket touts ( also known as scalpers) are the pariahs of the entertainment and hospitality industry. Want to see Adele in concert at Wembley or Andy Murray play at Wimbledon? You’ll be lucky mate – unless, of course, you’re prepared to hand over a bucketload of cash.
You’ll see touts on the pavement most nights in London, wherever, in fact, there are too many people trying to acquire too few seats.
They are the great white sharks of Theatreland, cruising back and forth along the pavement, usually dressed in a replica football shirt, shorts and trainers, and wearing a look of lobotomised boredom on their faces.
“Anyone need tickets?” is their mantra, intoned every few seconds in an endless robotic loop to nobody in particular.
They can afford to wait. It’s still 20 minutes until curtain up and sooner or later some desperate punter will turn up – often a tourist desperate to spend their last night in London seeing a mustsee star or show.
When the tout spots a victim, their expression changes to that of a shark spotting a wounded seal in the shallows.
“Need tickets?” they’ll murmur. “How many?”
Within seconds, the tout has a selection of the best seats fanned out in the palm of his hand. The result? You depart with your dream ticket and they leave with a lot of your money.
Nowadays, even touting has gone virtual and it’s possible to acquire a seat to any major event by applying to secondary online ticketing websites.
But what is an exercise in black marketeering to some and a healthy biproduct of a flourishing economy to others, has now tipped over into something less larky, with the news that some websites have been selling seats for the smash hit West End show Harry Potter and The Cursed Child (face value Dh675) at vastly inflated prices.
Indeed, Dh40,175 is the price one Hogwarts addict paid recently to attend a performance (Dh31,360 for the seat and nearly Dh9,000 in commission).
This example is the worst of many such reported excesses, but several well-known websites are regularly reselling seats for huge sums, such is the clamour to see the latest incarnation of the Harry Potter phenomenon.
If anyone in business or commerce charged such inflated sums for a product valued at less than Dh700 they could expect to be thrown into prison for fraud. Yet, while the reselling of tickets is a practice generally condemned by the entertainment industry, it is not illegal.
Nevertheless, Sonia Friedman and Colin Callender, the producers of the Harry Potter stage show, have had enough and have taken the commendable step of refusing admission to anyone presenting tickets purchased through secondary online websites.
Any unfortunate individual prevented from entering the auditorium is given an official “refusal of entry” letter, to be returned to the offending website, along with a demand that the resale ticket cost be refunded to the purchaser.
A spokesman for the show attacked those trying to make venal profits from the need of desperate theatregoers, citing such practices as “an industry-wide plague that must be taken seriously”.
On average one punter per day has been turned away on this basis since the production opened in June. There is some hope in the business that the UK government may soon introduce legislation to outlaw the abuse of ticket reselling, but with so many other, more serious issues competing for its attention – Brexit, the health service and the economy to name but three – nobody in Theatreland is predicting it’ll happen any time soon. In the meantime, whether Harry Potter alone can break the commercial stranglehold of the ticket tout is yet to be seen.
If he can, he really will deserve to be called a true magician.