【21】 What did Rosie and Mike realise about the two theatres?

Tutor: Good morning everyone. Well I think we can start straightaway by getting Rosie and Mike to do their presentation. Would you like to start, Rosie?
Rosie: Yes, well, um, we’ve done a survey on local entertainment. Basically, we tried to find out how students feel about the entertainment in the town and how much they use it.
Mike: Yes, so we’ve called our project ’Out and About’ ...
Tutor: Yes, that’s a good title! ’Out and About’.
Rosie: We wanted to find out how well students use the entertainment facilities in town ... whether they get to see the latest plays, films ... that kind of thing.
Tutor: Now, we have our own facilities on campus of course ...
Rosie: Oh, yes, we deliberately omitted those as we really wanted to examine outside entertainment in the town as opposed to on the university campus.
Mike: Actually there were a lot of areas to choose from but in the end we limited ourselves to looking at three general categories: cinema, theatre and music.
Tutor: Right.
Rosie: OK. Well, er... first of all cinema. In the town, there are three main places where you can see films. There’s the new multi-screen cinema complex, the old Park cinema, and a late-night Odeon.
Mike: So if you look at this chart ... in terms of audience size, the multi-screen complex accounts for 75% of all cinema seats, the Park Cinema, accounts for 20% of seats and the late-night Odeon has just 5% of seats.
Rosie: As you probably know, the complex and the Park show all the latest films, while the late-night cinema tends to show cult films. So, when we interviewed the students, we thought the complex would be the most popular choice of cinema...but surprisingly it was the late-night Odeon.
Mike: Yeah, and most students said that if they wanted to see a new film, they waited for it to show at the Park because the complex is more expensive and further out of town so you have to pay more to get there as well.
Tutor: Yes, and that adds to the cost, of course, and detracts from the popularity, evidently.
Rosie: Well, next, we looked at theatres. The results here were interesting because, as you know, there’s a theatre on campus, which is popular. But there’s also the Stage Theatre in town, which is very old and architecturally quite beautiful. And there’s the large, modern theatre, the Ashtop, that has recently been built.
Tutor: So you just looked at the two theatres in town?
Mike: Yes. But the thing about the theatres is that there’s a whole variety of seat prices. Also, the types of performance vary ... so students tend to buy seats at both and like using both for different reasons and if they want cheap seats at the Ashtop, they can just sit further from the front.
Rosie: What we did find that was very interesting is that there are periods during the year when students seem to go to the theatre and periods when they go to the cinema and we really think that’s to do with budget. If you look at this graph, you can see that um, there’s a peak around November/December when they go to the theatre more and then a period in April/May when neither is particularly popular and then theatreer viewing seems to trail off virtually while the cinema becomes quite popular in June/July.
Tutor: Mmm. I think you’re probably right about your conclusions ...
Mike: Well, lastly we looked at music. And this time we were really investigating the sort of small music clubs that offer things like folk or specialise in local bands.
Tutor: So not musicals as such ...
Mike: That’s right.
Rosie: We looked at three small music venues and we examined the quality of the entertainment and the venue and gave a ranking for these: a cross meaning that the quality was poor, a tick meaning it was OK and two ticks for excellent. First of all, The Blues Club, which obviously specialises in blues music. This was a pretty small place and the seating was minimal so we didn’t give that a very good rating.
Mike: No! We don’t recommend that one really.
Rosie: Then The Sansue which plays a lot of South American music was a big place, very lively, good performers so two ticks for that one. The Pier Hotel is a folk venue ... a good place for local and up-and-coming folk artists to play. Not the best of venues as it’s in a basement and a bit dark, but the quality of the entertainment was reasonable and the lighting was very warm, so we felt it deserved an average rating. Finally, there’s the Baldrock Caf’s which features big rock bands and is pretty popular with students and we enjoyed ourselves there as well, so top marks for that one.
Tutor: And then did you get any information from the students as to which of the clubs they preferred?