Fringe Figures - Total ticket sales at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe have stalled compared to last year, marking the first time since COVID that there has not been a year-on-year increase. There were 2,604,404 tickets sold across the festival in 2025 to 53,942 performances of 3,893 shows from 62 different countries, figures slightly down on the 2024 event, when 2,612,913 tickets were sold to 3,746 shows.
Figures are not broken down by genre, so it is not possible to discern how theatre has performed compared to comedy, for example. Commenting on the 2025 figures, Tony Lankester, chief executive of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society, said: “It is clear that, despite many ongoing challenges facing the Fringe community, it remains the single best platform in the world for artists to showcase their work.”
Revamp - Glasgow's Citizens Theatre has reopened after a seven-year revamp, which was hit by COVID and skyrocketing costs. The theatre, in the city's Gorbals area, closed in June 2018 for a refurbishment which was planned to take three years. The original cost was estimated at £20m but it could end up costing almost double that amount.
A community-led parade officially marked the reopening, with a series of events and behind-the-scenes tours taking place over last weekend. The first production in the main auditorium will be Small Acts of Love, about the town of Lockerbie's response to the Pan Am disaster, which will run from 12 September.
The Citizens Theatre has been a landmark in the Gorbals area of Glasgow since 1945, but the building itself - which is leased from Glasgow City Council - dates back to 1878. The restoration has maintained the theatre's historic auditorium and its Victorian stage equipment, the oldest surviving in the UK, and wrapped it in a brand-new three-storey building.
Telephone Blues - Blues has been rated as the most popular hold music, in a study carried out by the University of York. Academics monitored the reactions of 2,540 people left waiting in a virtual queue in order to explore the psychological effects different types of sounds have on callers. Each listener was exposed to one of 10 audio experiences, with blues coming out on top ahead of heavy metal, country and pop. Music psychologist Dr Mimi O'Neill said the findings revealed that different audio experiences could even influence how long people felt they had been on the phone. "The blues genre is typified by that mellow, chilled-out feeling so you sink into it and wallow in the enjoyment of the experience," she said.
In The Saleroom - Handwritten lyrics and chord charts for one of Fleetwood Mac's earliest hits have sold for £24,700 at auction. The composition sheet for Man of the World was estimated to fetch between £12,000 and £15,000 as part of a film, TV and music memorabilia auction at Ewbank's auction house in Woking, Surrey. It was purchased by a collector from the Middle East, the auctioneers said.
No Show - Liverpool’s Royal Court Theatre has announced that its plans for a building to honour the comedian Ken Dodd will not move forward after the £15m project was unable to secure the required funding. The project’s leaders attributed the decision, which followed an unsuccessful National Lottery Heritage Funding bid last year, to a difficult economic climate for new capital works. In August 2024 Liverpool City Council approved a planning application to erect a four-storey building entitled The Sir Ken Dodd Happiness Centre. It had been intended to exhibit the late comedian’s personal collection of artefacts and joke books, as well as providing performance spaces.
(Jim Evans)