How clueless are the bookers at Nottingham's Royal Concert Hall? They've cancelled Ken Dodd's booking for a show in December 2009, after "a significant number of audience members left before the end" of his show there last December. This, apparently, raised "concerns to our manager on the night as to the quality of some of the performances within the show". Quality? The only problem with a Doddy show is quantity. When I went to see him in Lowestoft, I enjoyed the full 5 hours, secure in the knowledge that I was a 5-minute walk from my bed. Others will have had further to travel and might reluctantly have made an exit before the finale. I'd be very surprised if the people who left the Nottingham show thought that they'd got anything less than excellent value for money, and would have booked up for December 2009 and left early again. I think we're dealing with weasel speak. When anyone says guff like "the management team therefore took the difficult decision to give this long-running and much-loved show a break during 2009" you know they're hiding something. "We can't afford to pay overtime to the usherettes" is probably closer to the truth.