MANCHESTER:  –  Pity poor Pride-goer Shannon Docherty from Dublin.  She booked her “Big Weekend” ticket through Ticketmaster in Ireland.  But on arrival at Manchester’s “gay village” on Saturday, she discovered that her ticket was not an admission ticket, but a “voucher” to exchange for a wristband.

A minor detail, you may think.  But for Shannon, it meant a 90-minute queue to get the all-important wristband.  And she thought she would avoid the queues by purchasing and advance ticket.

“I was never informed by Ticketmaster that what they supplied me was a voucher to exchange for an admission ticket,” she said.  “It would have been good to have been told.”

But her 90-minute wait was nothing compared with the queuing time that faced the 1,000 or so party-goers who ventured to the 12-hour “Poptastic” gig underneath Manchester’s Piccadilly train station.

It took a staggering 30 minutes in a queue to get a drink at the bar.  And if that were bad enough, it took as long to wait for the toilet.

The line for the nine ”Portaloos” stretched almost the length of the building at some stages of the night.

And it was in the queue for the loo that we spoke to Shannon, who by then was fed-up with patiently standing in a slow-moving line.  “For me, Manchester means queuing not rain,” she said.

“Its quite disgusting – nine loos fro this many people,” she added.  “I’m quite sure that the city authorities don’t know about this.”

One of the “attractions” of this Poptastic event was a bouncy castle for adults.  Yes, it was there, but as we found out when we tried to have a go, anyone who had consumed a drink was barred from using it!

Paying £15 for admission s not, on the face of it, exorbitant, even though it was advertised at £10.  But one has to question whether it is value for a night out in a railway station car park underneath Piccadilly Station.  Everything was “makeshift”, like the toilet facilities.

And the place like liked ... well, a car park!

Once inside, you had to have a lot of “Pink Pounds” to buy a drink (after the massive queue).  Welcome to what it probably the world’s most expensive Coke!  A normal can was ordered and a £2 coin tendered.  There was no change  –  only a shrug of the shoulders and the “I don’t set the prices, but it is too much” excuse from the bartender.

If you were disabled, well, don’t even think about it.  Overheard was one disabled man who asked where the disabled toilet was located.  Someone called the “production manager’ told him there weren’t any.  And no, he was unable to give back the admission price.  All he could do was to admit that there should have been disabled toilet facilities, it was an oversight on his part, and there would be such facilities next year.

Discrimination at a gay “club event”?  It appears so, in the case of Poptastic.  But then in the world of the “pink pound”, getting a temporary disabled toilet into a car park does cost “real pounds”, as would hiring double the number of Portaloos to cut the waiting time down to 15 minutes.

There was no one available at Poptastic to comment “on the record”.

Poptastic was the only bar we found that had inflated prices.  All the ones we visited in "The Village" appeared to have normal prices.  And in most establishments there were "special drinks promotions".

 30 August, 2004