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Now We Are OneDateline: 17th November, 2002Tomorrow - Monday, 18th November, 2002 - the British Theatre Guide is one year old. What a year it's been! I arrived back, last September, from a visit to Wuppertal in Germany, where we were celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the town twinning with a production of Joseph, to find that the About British Theatre site was no more. There was an email sitting in my inbox telling me that I and 300 others were surplus to requirements. "Right!" I thought. "At least I'll have more spare time." However a deluge of emails from regular visitors persuaded me to set up on my own, and so, at the beginning of October, work started on the BTG and it went live on 18th November. In the first week we had 1,899 page views, most of them duen to the fact that the "beta-testers" and I were checking that everything was working! Last week we had 16,409. In fact, in October we totalled nearly 74,000. By the end of next week, we should reach half a million overall. But we haven't just grown in page views. Philip Fisher became our London reviewer right at the start. Then Catherine Lamm joined us from New York. Now we have three London reviewers - Philip, Jackie Fletcher and Ian Willcox - and another joins us soon. And today Steve Orme joins us as our man in the East Midlands. By last Sunday we had 1,526 pages online: today's update, of course, adds more. But what has been most gratifying has been the response of people in the theatre business. On the Web we have excellent relations with other sites and our email Newsletter (What, not a subscriber? Subscribe now! After all, it's free.) is read by a wide range of professionals: actors, directors, technical staff, producers, administrators, journalists and broadcasters. As our chief London reviewer Philip Fisher says in his article today, we are now accepted by the vast majority of London theatres as serious reviewers and we are expanding our coverage of provincial theatre, with the theatres' enthusiastic agreement. This year we had three reviewers at the Edinburgh Fringe, covering over a hundred shows. Next year we hope to increase those figures. Our readership is international. Whilst the majority are based in the UK, a significant proportion are North America based and we have an increasing readership from Europe, Australia and New Zealand, and the Far East, and that, of course, testifies to the popularity of British theatre throughout the world. We are not going to stand still! We want to increase our reviews coverage by appointing reviewers throughout the UK. We want to develop even wider and deeper news coverage, and we would really like to have better coverage of the amateur theatre scene. And you can help. If you represent a theatre or theate company, whether amateur or professional, please put us on your email press list for news and programme information. If you have a UK theatre-related website which we don't currently list, send us the URL and we'll list it. If you feel that you could contribute reviews to the British Theatre Guide, please go to our Be a Reviewer page and get in touch. Email us at peter@britishtheatreguide.info Articles Indices:
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