Simple ways to get free tickets in London, capital of great expense!

1. If you’re under 26 try Arts Council’s A Night Less Ordinary, contact the venues far in advance though to find out when their free tickets are released. All the major subsidised venues such as Roundhouse, BAC and others are on there.

2. Same again but Barbican and National Theatre have their own free-to-join schemes for under 26 year olds which are ace as they email you when tickets are available and you can get em for some super stuff. Their follow up tickets for a fiver are ace too!

3. Join What’s On Stage’s theatre club for free theatre tickets to the best west end shows all year round. Membership can be pricey but it’s worth it!

4. Time Out’s offers page is amazing for free tickets, add it to your bookmarks and get free tickets to amazing gigs, shows and events. It is updated roughly every Tuesday to coincide with the publication of the magazine…SO GOOD!

5. Evening Standard’s offers and competitions are unbeatable, always good tickets for variety of events.

6. Our favourite weekly mailout Run-Riot has super free tickets every week for the most offbeat and cool events around.

Sometimes the TV just isn’t big enough… sometimes you wish you could be there with Graham Norton, The Scissor Sisters or Alan Titchmarsh (!) Sometimes it’s not enough to watch the Box – you want to be on the Box

Well, my little eager beavers your dreams are about to come true. Our Friends at SRO Audiences love giving away free tickets. They can’t help themselves. They must be mad. Upcoming shows include ‘One night stand with the Scissor Sisters’, ‘One night stand with Jonny Vegas’ and ‘The Beat goes on with Dave Berry’.

Just go along to www.sroaudiences.com and register. Easy!!

I have valiantly been sending letters off to some of the UKs biggest stores in the hope of showing you who coughs up and who chokes down. The letters range from complaints to compliments but what they all have in common is my expectation of free stuff.

So, it pains me to admit that my mission to rob the stores of this great country for all the free stuff I can get is… not going well. Let’s look at who came up with the goods and who failed to deliver:

1. Space NK – eventually got back to me with a shower gel and a letter straight from dullsville.
2. Boots – £20 voucher and a grovelling but uninspired letter
3. Next – a lovely £20 voucher and a forgettable note of apology.
4. Hula Hoops – £2 voucher (hello) and a letter that demonstrated how they simply hadn’t even bothered to read what I wrote to them.
5. Asda – a letter, no frickin’ voucher!
6. KFC – nothing
7. Zara – am I invisible?
8. Topman – last time I shop there.
9. Waterstones – iPad from now on
10. Publishers of the Twilight books – I think I may have scared them.
11. Tesco – Every Little helps my arse.

Finally I think all that is left to do is read the letter I sent to KFC.

Why would they ignore that? You tell me?

Wednesday 28th July 2010.

Dear Sir or Madam,

KFC has been a staple in my diet since my parents and I moved over from Communist Russia in the early eighties. We lived in Blackpool within walking distance of a ‘Kentucky Fried Chicken’ as it was known back then. I used to go along everyday and come back with fried chicken to feed the family.

We did not yet own a Television and my English was limited to ordering food and swearing at the postman (we thought he was breaking in every morning to steal Papas collection of walking sticks). When my English was good enough I joined a school and tasted school dinners. This food tasted more like the food I had in Russia but I still ate it for fear I would be sent to back to a labour camp. I would go home after school and sit with my parents singing songs about the motherland whist eating yet more delicious Fried Chicken. Eventually we got a Television and I truly felt British when we sat down and ate in front of the flickering screen. I liked Noel Edmunds and Jeremy Beadle best of all (I think it was their beards).

KFC was the glue that held us together through those turbulent years. And your handy wipes were what kept us clean until we figured out how to pay the water rates. I wanted to let you know how I sometimes think of the colonel like a kindly Uncle and someone I owe my life to.

Yours Sincerely

Robert Mcaffrey

Robert McCaffrey’s on a Loserville mission, and that mission is to score as much free stuff by writing letters to all the big cheeses at loads of well known brands including NEXT, Hula Hoops and loads more. Follow his amazing adventures on this page which will be updated regularly as well as our Facebook page which you really should join!

Here’s the letter he sent us and scroll down for the letter he sent Hula Hoops!…so funny and super…we love you Rob!

Hello

I am currently on a mission to write to as many big companies as possible securing myself as many freebies as I can get. Some letters are complaints and others are complimentary. I have reproduced my recent letter to Hula Hoops below hoping you might like to feature it on Loserville.

I can post up my letters, their replies along with pictures of the vouchers and then pictures of what I buy with the vouchers. Literally take your readers on a journey – thrilling, eh?

I hope you enjoy…

R

Dear Sir or Madam,

I wanted to write to you to tell you how much a LOVE Hula Hoops. I especially love the BBQ beef flavour and am hungrily salivating just thinking about them. My preferred method of eating them is to stick them on the tip of my fingers and bite them off. Sometimes when I’m particularly hungry I accidentally nip the end of my finger and squeak in pain. But quickly the Hula goodness makes the pain go away.

I like Hula Hoops so much I even go to Hula Hoop classes every Monday. At first when I went along I thought it would be people discussing the tasty snack but quickly realised I was wrong. Despite this mistake (and the fact their hula hoops taste plastic and hurt my teeth) I have continued to go along. I can spin the hoop around my waist and throw it in the air and catch it. Stuff that is hard to do with the Hula Hoops you make.

When I first discovered your Hula Hoops I was very little and the hoops would slide all the way down my fingers. Now that I am grown up they don’t fit as well but I still like them. Will you maybe one day make a special grown up size Hula Hoop so people like me can pretend to be little again? I understand if you can’t tell me and have to keep you snack plans a secret from other snack manufacturers. But if you did tell me I promise not to tell them, cross my heart.

I wish I were eating hula hoops now – but I can’t because the vending machine at work is broken. I am not too sad though because it is nearly home time and I have more Hula hoops in the cupboard at home. It only takes me 15 minutes to get home so I wont have to wait to long, unless the train breaks down which happens all the time. I hope the train doesn’t break down.

Finally, I wanted to thank the person who invented Hula Hoops, I hope they are very rich because they should be. Making so many people happy must be a good job. If you ever need anyone to test Hula Hoops or make them (I promise not to eat them all) I am your man.

Yours Sincerely

Robert McCaffrey

We just found this amazing website which gives you a free .co.uk domain name, email and marketing support to UK entrepreneurs. It’s part of Get British Business Online a campaign supported by Google and the UK Government.

Such a good deal for free we wanted to shout about it!

Check it out at the get british business online website

I’m skint, you’re skint, we’re all skint; let’s have a rollicking good summer anyway…by following the cheapskates guide to life below, we want your suggestions please leave your top tips below as a comment!:

1. We’re a bit slow off the draw for these but this weekend both West End Live and Paradise Gardens festival are taking place. West End Live is an outdoor spectacular featuring all the west end shows you normally can’t afford including Wicked, Hair, Legally Blonde and many more. With ticket prices at £95 for best seats, you can’t afford to miss this.
2. Paradise Gardens is a lovely festival in Victoria Park, Mile End. Had some great fun here and it lasts all summer with differing shows and outdoor fun.. oooher vicar ;). Their highlights include…Music on the Paradise Stage from: Jazz at Lincoln Centre Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis, Jazz Jamaica, Soul Jazz Orchestra, Brute Chorus, Movits, UK premiere of ‘Wishful’ a site specific spectacular, Footsbarn Theatre presents ‘Sorry’, Electro Ballroom with: The Correspondents, Arriba La Cumbia, Sensational Street Arts including the London premiere of ‘Gloves On’ from Ragroof Theatre, Heart N Soul presents ‘The Beautiful Octopus Club’, T-Mobile’s Big Dance Countdown and new work by ‘Avant Garde’ and ‘Cindy Claes’ http://www.paradisegardensfestival.org.uk/ Tickets for Footsbarn Theatre’s ‘Sorry’ can be ordered here: https://www.barbican.org.uk/eticketing/performancelist.asp?shoid=18134
3. Futurising, 29-30 June 2010 is London’s free creative careers festival, amazing people to talk to about future careers, training, courses and workshop sessions, so you can give up your shitty admin day job and doing something amazing everyday. http://www.futurising.org Nicholls & Clarke Building, 3-10 Shoreditch High Street, Spitalfields, London E1 6PG
4. Greenwich + Docklands International Festival This year’s Festival invites you to experience the world from a different angle! Our theme is “Earth” and with 10 days of surprising, surreal and spectacular outdoor arts events we hope to encourage you to think about Greenwich and East London in new ways: some performances will offer new perspectives on familiar landscapes and settings, whilst others will delve into our relationship with the Earth, using Greenwich’s role as the home of the Prime Meridian – ‘the centre of time and space’, as inspiration. From large scale spectaculars exploring Newtonian gravity and Darwinian evolution, to more intimate performances inviting us to think about climate change, ideas of “home” and different cultural maps of the world, the Festival has been devised as a journey of discovery, enabling you to experience some extraordinary, world class performances across Greenwich and Tower Hamlets. http://www.festival.org It’s all this week and next…don’t miss Voala in Woolwich this Saturday 26th at 10pm and also the show in Millwall Dock next friday and saturday, we saw the company last year – they are so awesome – naked men on boats and fireworks – what more could you ask for…
5. The Scoop Awesome free festival with free theatre and film. We watched Withnail and I in our picnic blankets last year, was ace! http://www.morelondon.com/scoop.html
6. iTunes Festival Free festival featuring top names in our favourite venue in London the Roundhouse (in Camden). Our favourites for this year are Foreigner + Europe on the 25th July 2010, Mumford and Sons + Laura Marling on the 9th July 2010, Kate Nash on the 6th and Scissor Sisters on 1st. Be sure to register at http://apps.facebook.com/itunesfestival/ and don’t fret if you’re not selected there are tickets available on the door if you get there an hour or two before the show and wait in a queue (bring wine from the Sainsburys opposite the Roundhouse)
7. Create London 6 weeks of great free and cheap events in London this summer http://createlondon.org/2010/