Capital of comedy

Sep 3 2007 by Larry Neild, Liverpool Daily Post

ON WEDNESDAY, a special meeting of the city council will discuss a Labour suggestion that a QC should be hired to conduct an inquiry into the Mathew Street fiasco. Top bods at the town hall are already doing a thorough internal inquiry.

Keen as ever to move things forward (and save money) I have been conducting my own inquiry into what went wrong, and what lessons we can learn. Me and my able assistant – well, the dog, to be perfectly honest – have mulled over the facts as we patrolled the local parks. It certainly gave us paws for thought.

Exclusively, I now present my findings into the biggest PR disaster of the decade, The Great Mathew Street Crash of 07. Should the council wish to pay a consultancy fee for my findings, I am happy to donate all of it to the Lord Mayor’s Charity, so as not to give any impression that, like many others, I can take advantage of our shortcomings by raiding the treasury.

The way the so-called cancellation of the festival was announced did more damage to the city’s image far and wide than the scrapping of the outdoor performance stages.

Our enquiries at the highest level disclosed that three key people were unavailable, and changes in ever-stricter health and safety requirements made it an almost certainty that the nature of the event would have to change.

To lose one top person is unfortunate, two is clumsy, three smacks of stuff that conspiracy theorists revel in.

Behind the scenes, people were probably wondering how to pluck up courage to spill the beans on the unfolding calamity. Like a snowball heading down a hill, the approaching disaster was unavoidable.

What, to my mind, was avoidable was the way the realisation of the disaster was handled. Instead of picking up the telephone and making an SOS call to Max Clifford, the council issued a press release. The first line – Liverpool’s 2007 Mathew Street Festival has been cancelled for health and safety reasons. They might just as well have said, let’s all leave town and will the last person out turn off the light, please.

Not a hint in the two-page release that other events organised separately as part of the annual Bank Holiday Beatles festival would be going ahead. It was the longest cultural suicide note I have ever read.

The story, as expected, made banner headlines. Mathew Street Festival Axed screamed one front page.

Conclusion: Once it was known the street stages were ruled out on safety grounds, the council and its advisors should have held an immediate conference to salvage what was left of the event. No sensational release should have been issued, the officials should have sat on it for 48 hours to ponder a proper response. Then they would have announced a change in the format of the festival, rather than a total "axing". The wrong, negative message was beamed around the world and we paid, and will continue to pay the price. No wonder Liverpool has a reputation as the world capital of comedians and jokers.