Steve Roberts Interview: Dealing with Staff from 1865!
Title
Steve Roberts Interview: Dealing with Staff from 1865!
Date
4 October 2018
Description
Oral history interview with Steve Roberts, Deputy Box Office Manager at the Theatre Royal & Royal Concert Hall and a long-serving member of staff since 1999.
What's the story?
Having previously worked in Nottingham’s lace industry, Steve Roberts first joined the Theatre Royal in 1999 as a Box Office Clerk and where he has since progressed to the role of Deputy Box Office Manager.
This role involves over-seeing all the box office staff, as well putting all the shows onto the computerised ticketing system, in order for staff to sell the tickets.
Throughout his time at the venue Steve has been directly involved in some of the biggest changes in how people purchase their tickets for shows at the Theatre Royal.
In this interview Steve affectionately talks about working with staff who have been at the venue for quite some time and the difference in moving from paper to digital reports:
At the time I came, which was 19 years ago, I thought it was still quite old-fashioned and the people, as a lot of them still are, have worked here absolutely donkey’s years, who have done things the same way from 1865 and I jokingly say to them, you’ve done it since the theatre was built. And then as my job progressed, I became a supervisor and then a manager, it’s sometimes very conflicting that you’re trying to encourage the staff to look at new ways of doing it, but they still want to do it the way they’ve done it for ever, so it is very difficult sometimes, but , touch wood, they seem to be on board, and they seem to be moving with the times because we’ve had various new bosses, various change of management, who’ve come with new ideas, which then they tell me and I have to implement it down to the staff.
We had files and files of paperwork, but now we tend to do a lot by email, of course, and even when I first started in the job I’m doing now, we have to do what we call “sales figures”, which is promoters want to know how many tickets they’ve sold on a weekly basis, which is normally Monday. We used to have to type it all out, how many they’d sold at what price and even fax some of them, but now it’s all on schedules, reports. The computer will schedule it and send it to their lovely emails, so that took a lot of work off us because all Monday morning we were just doing sales figures. Now, we might do the odd one which slips through the net, but that’s far better – computerised summary and no paper.
This role involves over-seeing all the box office staff, as well putting all the shows onto the computerised ticketing system, in order for staff to sell the tickets.
Throughout his time at the venue Steve has been directly involved in some of the biggest changes in how people purchase their tickets for shows at the Theatre Royal.
In this interview Steve affectionately talks about working with staff who have been at the venue for quite some time and the difference in moving from paper to digital reports:
At the time I came, which was 19 years ago, I thought it was still quite old-fashioned and the people, as a lot of them still are, have worked here absolutely donkey’s years, who have done things the same way from 1865 and I jokingly say to them, you’ve done it since the theatre was built. And then as my job progressed, I became a supervisor and then a manager, it’s sometimes very conflicting that you’re trying to encourage the staff to look at new ways of doing it, but they still want to do it the way they’ve done it for ever, so it is very difficult sometimes, but , touch wood, they seem to be on board, and they seem to be moving with the times because we’ve had various new bosses, various change of management, who’ve come with new ideas, which then they tell me and I have to implement it down to the staff.
We had files and files of paperwork, but now we tend to do a lot by email, of course, and even when I first started in the job I’m doing now, we have to do what we call “sales figures”, which is promoters want to know how many tickets they’ve sold on a weekly basis, which is normally Monday. We used to have to type it all out, how many they’d sold at what price and even fax some of them, but now it’s all on schedules, reports. The computer will schedule it and send it to their lovely emails, so that took a lot of work off us because all Monday morning we were just doing sales figures. Now, we might do the odd one which slips through the net, but that’s far better – computerised summary and no paper.
Type
Oral interview
Location of item
Theatre Royal & Royal Concert Hall Nottingham
Rights
Theatre Royal & Royal Concert Hall Nottingham
Contributor
Interviewers: Andrew Breakwell & Julia Holmes
Transcriber: David Chilton
Transcriber: David Chilton
