Accessible, that is, except on one evening. Newspapers last weekend carried an advert from an agency called Sports Exclusive. It offered tickets to the Last Night of the Proms. Televised live to 40 million people worldwide, and enjoyed in the Royal Albert Hall by Prommers who, in many cases, will sleep on the pavements to secure the best spots in the arena, the Last Night is the most famous event in the music calendar. Tickets are like gold-dust. The BBC, which runs the Proms, could probably sell out the hall ten times over.
Sports Exclusive seems to recognise that, to judge from its prices. Recession? What recession? Stalls seats (face value £82.50) are offered for £995. But if you want to sit with nine chums in a grand tier box, the show will cost you £14,995. Mind you, that does include “a three-course supper and wine with your own box waitress”. (Gosh, I hope she’s fresh. How long do they keep her in the box?) What sort of people, in the present climate, can splash out the equivalent of a year’s wage for a supermarket worker on ten concert tickets? It’s a fascinating question, but not half as fascinating as the question of where the tickets come from.
Not the BBC, that’s for sure. The Proms brochure details the elaborate procedures by which the BBC tries to ensure that ordinary music-lovers, rather than fat cats, fill the hall at the Last Night. One way is to buy a season ticket and stand in the arena through the whole summer of concerts — all 76 of them. The second is to buy seats for no fewer than five other Proms. Even then you aren’t guaranteed a Last Night ticket, and you can’t return the other tickets if you don’t get one. And the third way is to enter the Last Night ballot, by which 100 tickets are allocated. But thousands of people go in for that.
The answer is that the Albert Hall ain’t what it seems. Its management has projected a cosy image of it as “the nation’s village hall”: a revered arena that happily houses everything from boxing to ballet to the Royal British Legion Festival of Remembrance. But this masks an awkward truth. Many of its boxes and hundreds of seats (perhaps a fifth of its seating capacity) are permanently owned by individuals or companies. When the hall was opened in 1871 its seats were flogged off on 999-year leases called debentures. Some are still owned by the same families; others have been sold on. Last year a grand tier box was put up for sale at £1.2 million. It’s big business. And the reason is obvious. Owners can cash in handsomely on events such as the Last Night by flogging their seats.
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