The UK’s Biggest Touring Acts This Year? Comics

The biggest selling live tour in Britain this year is not a superannuated rock band but Peter Kay’s 90-date Tour That Doesn’t Tour Tour, which has sold more than 750,000 tickets and includes 35 nights in Manchester alone. The manager of the Manchester Evening News Arena in the city described Kay’s tour as the “the biggest arena tour by anybody, ever, in this country”.

The Viral Justin Bieber Phenomenon

“By now, of course, everybody on the planet should realize that Justin Bieber is the Canadian-born, platinum-selling, swaggering 16-year-old with a baby face and a Beatles-redux hairstyle. And yet Biebermania was concocted – it is the product of a carefully engineered marketing campaign that plucked a downy kid from small-town Ontario and relocated him to a hip-hop hotbed in the Deep South.”

Does Lack Of Funding Stunt The Arts? Maybe Not…

“Our public funding doesn’t limit our initiative, and it doesn’t make us lazy thinkers. A generation of new artists is coming through whose desire to reuse, borrow and recycle is driven as much by being green as by saving money. It’s a truism that in the theatre, constraint is a condition of our creativity but it’s important to stress that our ability to make constraint a virtue isn’t limited to periods of austerity.”