Manford’s Box Office Rant

Manford’s Facebook outburst centred on his Sept. 23-24 shows at Oxford’s New Theatre, one of a string of UK venues run by the couple’s Ambassador Theatre Group.

ATG paid £90 million for Live Nation’s UK theatres in 2011. The company is regularly honoured by theatre business publication The Stage , topping the paper’s “most influential people in UK theatre” list for the last three years. “Right I’ve just rang the staff at Oxford New Theatre and if you go in to the actual box office the tickets are the regular price of £22.50 (although ATG still manage to put a £1 restoration fee on top of that! cheeky fuckers!),” he wrote on his Facebook page.

A week before the Oxford shows, Manford had used his Facebook page to complain about ATG after a fan told him the company was “charging a whopping £9 booking fee on top of my ticket price of £22.50 (a price I already took £2.50 off from the last tour’s £25 because of rip off booking.”

“Anyway, sorry for ranting but it’s just so annoying when we (me and you) are all working so hard for our money and then some companies who have a 100 percent monopoly are ripping us off!”

It wasn’t possible to get comment from ATG at press time.