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Digital EditionNo Re-Entry? Blame Insurance
Roger Crombie is a United Kingdom-based columnist for Risk & Insurance®. He can be reached at [email protected].
Al Stewart is a Scottish-born singer/songwriter and folk-rock musician. He was most popular in the 1960s and 1970s.
Older readers might remember his two main hits, “Year of the Cat” and “Time Passages,” or perhaps own some of his 14 albums. Stewart played at the initial Glastonbury Festival in 1970, was a friend of Yoko’s before she met John Lennon, and shared a London flat with Paul Simon in the 1960s. Stewart will start his Farewell Tour in September, a few days after his 80th birthday.
I’ve never been a huge fan, but some close friends are, and so, a while back, we attended an Al Stewart concert. Upon presenting our tickets at the building’s only entrance, we were told that should one choose to leave the building at any time during the evening, including before the show had started, re-entry to the premises would not be permitted under any circumstances.
Barring re-entry is not a new idea and is widely practiced, but I couldn’t immediately see what risk would be mitigated by thus restricting the freedom of ticketholders.
So I asked the ticket-taker: “Why is re-entry not allowed?” “Security,” she said. “How does no re-entry help security?” I asked. “Dunno,” she replied, and referred me to a rather larger security person standing behind her. “Terrorism,” he said.
Al Stewart was at the time 78 years old; the average age of the audience would have been about the same. “Terrorism: really?” I asked, and was referred to the even larger chief security person standing behind the assistant security person.
“People could go out and get drunk, then come back,” he said. I pointed out that there was an enormous bar upstairs, so they wouldn’t need to. “Er, insurance,” he said. Clearly, no one knew the cause or benefits of the no re-entry rule.
When in doubt, blame insurance. As the audience settled into their seats, security officers sat down at either side of the hall, staring at the audience, backs to the stage. They would remain there throughout, in case someone’s great-grandpa committed a terrorist outrage.
It might be worth noting that the concert hall, in a town noted as a retirement community, confirmed to me later that there had not been serious disruption at any event in the venue’s 90-year existence. The re-entry policy was simply part of a process by which management was taking no chances.
It might be called no-risk management. Nominally adopted in recent years by all and sundry, in much the same way that almost everyone under 40 has tattoos, risk management is a sensible science. The simplest risk management technique, however — banning everything — is now the default.
Morris dancing for example, a harmless 600-year-old British entertainment, is regularly banned by local authorities in case, as one report put it, a spectator is “unwantedly bonked on the head with an inflated pig’s bladder.”
Life is nothing but a giant risk.
Banning audiences altogether at every event, following the logic of the venue’s management, would be the only certain way to avoid danger. Context is all, but in the hands of over-excited management, risk mitigation all too often trumps common sense. &
