Mystery as show's ads are stripped from venue

Published on Friday 8 August 2008 10:27

ORGANISERS of a popular Fringe event were left puzzled when they arrived to find their venue had been stripped of all its advertising.

Someone turned up to the InvAsian Festival venue on Nicolson Street in the early hours of Wednesday morning and removed six eight-foot high banners and a series of posters advertising the multicultural event.

The event's organisers had decked out the Royal College of Surgeons building in flags to inform festival-goers what was on and when, and were stunned to find the signs had been ripped down.

They are determined, however, to press ahead with the event and have already started plastering the area in banners again.

PR manager for the event Martin Hunt said: "It's completely ridiculous. We could not believe it when we got there to find nothing, you would quite simply not know there was anything going on there whatsoever.

"We asked people nearby and no-one knew anything until a woman from the coffee shop across the road came over to say she had seen council workers turn up to take them down.

"They had all been put up properly and the college had no problem with them being there."

A council spokeswoman, however, today said it was not responsible for the banners being taken down.

She added that the venue would have been contacted either before or immediately after if it had decided to take enforcement action and remove the signs.

The InvAsian Festival, which goes ahead every night in the Quincentenary Hall at the college, will still continue its events.

The venue can fit 200 people into its hourly shows and moves are already in place to have more posters and banners made so the shows can be advertised.

Festival director Kevin Williams said getting posters and flags remade from an English-based company would cost up to 1500, but felt he had to pay it to get the crowds in.

"We had it looking great," he said. "But now you would walk past and not even know there was a show on in here. All the advertising was completely in keeping with the spirit of the Fringe. Now we have to start again in getting word out about this, it's a real blow but we'll get on with it."

He added: "This has had an immediate effect because it was a fairly new venue and I estimate we were down about 50 per cent on what we should have been. We've had people come in since who said they could not find the venue on Wednesday. They walked up and down the street looking for us and then went somewhere else.

"The outside looks very sad and I'm just very confused by it all."