The Good Old Days

Decades of safeguarding the nation's theatrical heritage have led to the fulfilment of the dream expressed by the minions of James Purnell during his stint as Minister of Cultchah: the West End is beginning to look more and more like something out of the fifteenth century. Several noted theatres are literal flea-pits, and there are also infestations of rats and mice, which nibble food, clothing, lipstick and floors, leaving faeces and the occasional corpse in payment thereof. "There is no other group of workers in the world expected to go to work night after night in these conditions," lamented one member of Equity, with a certain degree of thespian hyperbole; there are any number of workers in the world who are expected to work in ramshackle conditions with vermin for company, most obviously the noisy rabble in that degraded music-hall, the Palace of Westminster.