A few weeks ago I went to the Peacock Theatre in Holborn: the theatre itself is just across a side road from the London School of Economics. On was a troupe called les 7 Doigts de la Main with their latest show Traces (see You Tube for details).
The Peacock is pretty expensive: most seats cost £38, with a few at the back at £28 or so. The show was seventy-five breathtaking and charming minutes and I'm now a complete Heloise Bourgeois fan.
I couldn't help but do the math: £30 an hour. I've had a similar thought when handing over £10 for a ticket to an exhibition at the Tate Modern: it's rare that anyone will spend more that an hour looking at a bunch of paintings. I think I was in the Rothko earlier this year for about eighty minutes one Friday evening, but I've seen people go in and out in thirty minutes: £20 an hour.
At the other end of the scale, you can sit in the Prince Charles cinema just off Leicester Square for £5 and watch a two-hour movie: £2.50 an hour. A rental DVD runs about the same, and a first-run movie in peak time is about £10 for maybe one hundred and ten minutes, around £5 an hour. Mainstream theatre in London's West End runs about £20 per seat hour and a fringe play runs about £12 for ninety minutes or £8 an hour. Oddly enough, tickets for Wagner are double the price of mainstream West End, but the operas are double the length, so per hour Wagner is no more expensive than Benjamin Britten and a damn site easier on the ear. When I cancelled my local gym subscription it was running almost £80 a month and I was making maybe ten visits a month of about an hour each, making about £10 an hour.
It took me about twenty hours to read Proust's Sodom and Gomorrah (and even longer to read The Guermantes Way) and that cost £10-ish, so at 50p an hour ol' Marcel is pretty good value. Computer manuals weigh in around £20-30 for the same length of time (but frankly I read them faster than I read Proust). At the other end of the spectrum, I think the most I ever paid for a meal was about £320 for a two-star Michelin in Rome, which was three hours for two of us, for about £27 an hour.
Go watch Chelsea for ninety minutes and you will hand over between £40 - £65 for a ninety minute match, making £27 an hour at the lower end. If you count the drinks before and after, and add in the waiting around with your mates, I bet it comes out to about £10 an hour. Watching Nottingham Forest may be cheaper, but they don't win as consistently.
Tickets for a Big Name Rock Band can run £100 an hour, but that's just silly. Only high-end hookers, so I've heard, charge that kind of money and get away with it.
So mass entertainment is around £5 / hour. High-culture events are around £10 / hour. Luxury and minority interest runs around £20 - £30 an hour, and after that "big name" events (Pink Floyd concert, EUFA match, Cup Final) run from £50 / hour upwards.
No-one thinks about the price / hour when they cost these things. But see how it works out?
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