I was going to regale you with a report on last night’s Royal Society public lecture. Professor Robert Mair of Cambridge University gave a talk on the science behind London’s Crossrail project, among other subterranean engineering challenges. Or at least I assume he did. I turned up half an hour before the lecture to join a (mostly male) queue that stretched out of the gates. Turnout was so great that only those who’d arrived ~45 minutes before the talk managed to get in. I was not among them. Just to rub it in, I got home to find that several friends had watched the talk from their own sofas via webcast, which was available live but has not yet appeared in the archive. Curses.
Fair enough, the Royal Society do say on their web site that lectures are on a first come, first served basis. In principle, this seems like a fair and open way to allocate seats. But it results in large numbers of people, many of them elderly, queuing up in the cold only to be turned away. I heard a few disgruntled punters complaining that they’d paid a taxi fare to get there, and I’m a few quid down after making a special journey into town.
I really love the Royal Society and the work they do. I’ve had many pleasant interactions with them, read countless books about their history, visited a play about their foundation…hell, I even have the coffee table. But why can’t the world’s oldest learned society learn how to operate a pre-book ticket system. It works perfectly fine at the Dana Centre and other science venues. They don’t even have a Facebook page where people could indicate their intention to visit (a crude way of judging the total numbers, but an indication nonetheless). I’m not normally one to grumble, but I know this isn’t a one-off occurrence and I’m not the only one who feels this way. Until the Royal Society adopt a basic ticket system, I’ll not bother turning up again.
Here endeth the grumble.
Let’s start the New Royal Society… we could be founder members!
What do you expect from the Royal Society? They are so out of touch I’m amazed any of them have fingers.
Spot on.
Well said Matt. It’s been a problem for a while. Just about every monthly marquee lecture at the RS is oversubscribed. Given that a lot of people can only start queueing after work, some kind of Dana-style booking system would be very welcome.
In the meantime, I’ll be staying at home with the webcasts. A shame, since it’s nice to see a lecture live (and take part in the questions) every now and again.
The British Library has a very good ticketing system – including £0.00 events such as the Talk Science events featured on Nature Network. The Royal Society could borrow that system if the Dana centre are not playing ball. Poor Matt, it wasn’t as if you were queueing for David Tennant even. But in a funny kind of way, I am quite heartened that there are so many people motivated enough to go to a talk on this topic on a cold feb eve, without a ticket, instead of staying in to watch TV, mugging an old granny, or other nefarious activity.
I went home and watched the Brit Awards instead. All this switching between high-brow and low-brow is giving me wrinkles.