Entertainment

Monday

Sam Leith

My fight with Viagogo

My wife had a brilliant idea for my 12-year-old daughter’s Christmas present: tickets to go and see Sigrid (a pop act, apparently, m’lud) at Wembley. She sent me a link. Quick, quick, I thought: get them while they’re hot. I clicked through and bought three old-fashioned physical tickets. I sucked up the delivery fee because I imagined, sentimentally, my daughter looking back years later on those yellowing stubs and remembering her first ever gig. First mistake: the site I’d clicked on was the resale site Viagogo. I should have checked the venue’s own ticketing site but I was on my phone, I’d clicked on the link my wife had sent

Thursday

Max Décharné

Capital entertainment: how the West End became the playground of London

The West End was always something a little apart. Some years ago, I used to go drinking with a man who had jointly run one of the best Soho live music clubs of the late 1950s and 1960s. He told me that they received a visit in their early days from the Kray brothers demanding protection money, who were summarily told, in his words, ‘to fuck off’. When I expressed surprise at this apparently dangerous response, he explained that while the twins meant a lot in Bethnal Green at that time, ‘up West’ it was a different story. Rohan McWilliam’s history of the West End explores the reasons for the