Tax-dodger Jimmy Carr is one of a handful of headline acts who will be performing at the Fairfield Halls next year. Provided, of course, that the much-delayed refurbishment project is finished in time.
Star attraction: Jimmy Carr
The Fairfield Halls management had promised a special announcement in the new year of the “spectacular” line up of acts and shows that they have booked for once the venue re-opens. But details of some performances have begun to leach out piecemeal.
Carr’s “Terribly Funny” year-long national tour has announced its dates, and they include Croydon’s Fairfield Halls on November 26.
Tickets – priced at nearly £30 – are already on sale via Ticketmaster and the website of the Fairfield Halls’ new management company, BHLive.
This, though, contradicts what the venue manager, Neil Chandler, told the borough’s elected councillors at a Town Hall scrutiny committee meeting earlier this month. There, Chandler said that the first announcements of performances at the Halls would be made next month, when the Fairfield’s own website is re-launched on January 19.
At the same meeting, Chandler also instructed councillors to stop asking awkward and embarrassing questions about the delays in re-opening the Fairfield Halls, since it might damage his business’s ticket sales.
How Carr’s Croydon tour date appears on his website, with a handy sales link to BHLive, but not to the Fairfield Halls, because their site has not yet been launched
BHLive was appointed last year as venue managers by the Halls owners, Croydon Council.
The Fairfield Halls, which includes a Concert Hall, the Ashcroft Theatre and the Arnhem Gallery, closed in June 2016 for what was supposed to be a two-year, £30million refurbishment and modernisation.
Joker: Rob Beckett is another comic who has a Fairfield date
But the project, paid for by Croydon Council and overseen by their house-builders Brick by Brick, has been plagued by delays and cost over-runs, and is now not expected to re-open until September 2019 – 15 months late.
Other dates at the Fairfield Halls which can be booked already, before BHLive have the venue’s own dedicated website up and running, include a double dose of comic Russell Cane (November 20 and 30, tickets priced at a more reasonable £20 and £23.45).
South Londoner Rob Beckett (Nov 15, £23) is booked to do a turn, and a more esoteric attraction, a talk by TV adventurer Simon Reeve (Oct 27, £25), is also bookable now.
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Lets hope Viagogo aren’t selling them too. Reduce the chances of getting your money back even more.
I know there’s a lot of council incompetence surrounding the Fairfield’s development but before it’s closure it was a significant building because of its excellent acoustics – it attracted some of the best classical orchestras and performers of the day. I’m looking forward to it happening again. Jimmy Carr ? – this is worrying and demonstrates the crass level the Councilis pitching the hall at.
The acoustics – indeed, the Concert Hall generally – is virtually untouched by the refurbishment works.
Jimmy Carr? It’s a step up, at least, from the days of Roy “Chubby” Brown, but the council doesn’t have much, if any, say in the programme (it never really did), as that is now BHLive’s job.