Author:
faceless ::
Posted:
Mon Feb 09, 2015 4:18 pm
‘Secondary ticketing’ might be legal, but that doesn’t make it morally right
Stewart Lee
8th Feb 2015
Culture secretary Sajid Javid has said that ticket touts are “classic entrepreneurs” and their detractors are the “chattering middle classes and champagne socialists, who have no interest in helping the common working man earn a decent living by acting as a middleman”. Fill my flute with Dom Perignon, comrade, as we raise the red flag and toast Vanessa Redgrave. Because £20 tickets for my current tour have been touted to confused online consumers at nearly 400% more than their face value, none of which either I or the theatre see, and this Moët & Chandon Marxist isn’t happy about it.
I am a standup comedian. Due to a decade of tri-annual BBC2 exposure, dogged Dantean circuits of provincial comedy venues, conscious manipulation of vulnerable broadsheet opinion formers and undeserved good luck, I am now popular enough to have caught the eye of touts or, as we now dignify them, Secondary Ticketing Agents™. As Eric Cantona said 20 years ago on a celebrity fishing trip with Tom O’Connor: “When seagulls follow the trawler it is...
