Spirits in the night

Fancy a night in? Arts Council England (ACE) might have inadvertently hit on a way to forget theatre, stay at home and hit the bottle. Its new scheme, ‘A Night Less Ordinary’ (p3), through which theatres are giving away free tickets to unders-26s, shares a similar web domain to a site which aims to get you knocking back cocktails from the comfort of your own sofa. Why? Well, visit ‘http://www.anightlessordinary.org.uk’ for the real thing, but click the ‘.co.uk’ or ‘.com’ address and you’ll find a wholly different experience. There are some similarities – both sites require your date of birth to prove you’re eligible (in one case that you’re young enough, in the other that you’re old enough), and both are clearly aimed at fostering a life-long habit. This gaffe is symptomatic of the haste with which ACE has put the scheme together. We also discover that some venues will only allocate one free ticket at a time. So a group of young people wanting a night out have to ring up individually, with no guarantee of being seated together. Sitting next to someone else’s girlfriend might well be “less ordinary”, but it might not be a madly attractive option, either.

Meanwhile, Colin Tweedy has reprimanded AP for implying that A&B has been massaging the figures (below right). We did no such thing. Our beef is not that the figures are wrong, but that the way they are presented doesn’t tell us what we need to know – in this case that the arts per se were doing a lot less well in the private investment stakes than heritage and museums. This resulted in massaged headlines elsewhere in the media. We see a similar problem of obfuscation this week in Ofcom’s consultation document (p3). The Performance, Music and Special Event camp is up in arms, believing that Ofcom’s alternative plan for radio microphones is full of hot air. In turn, Ofcom appears surprised that what it regards as a perfectly reasonable solution to divvying up the radio spectrum has been rebuffed. Ofcom may think its plans have been clearly communicated, but frankly, it should think again. Now, lead me to that cocktail cabinet…