Marketing Officer
Leeds Grand Theatre

Kirsty L

00:00:01 My name’s Kirsty L, and I’m the Marketing Officer at Leeds Grand Theatre. We’re involved in promoting all the productions that come to the theatre. We get ballet, dance, drama, musicals. And my job is everything from putting the posters up, arranging interviews for any of the stars when they come. Anything that can be done to publicise the show.

00:00:21 At school I was one of those kids who was considered a bit of a swot really. I did enjoy school, and I did get on well with the teachers. I really enjoyed English, that was always my favourite subject. I really enjoyed my Geography field trips that I did at GCSE, that was great fun, and I’ve got very close friends who I sort of like slept in one-man tents with, and sort of walked through rivers with, and that kind of thing. One thing I did say I always wanted to be when I was at school, was I wanted to be a journalist. And that was sort of an angle I would have liked to gone into. And kind of I do the opposite side now, I spend a lot of time talking to journalists. I did A-Levels at school, I did my degree in Public Relations at Leeds Metropolitan. I did actually pass the entrance exam to Oxford, and I would have gone down there to do English, had I got through the interview stage. But when I got to the interview they said I was intellectually immature, because I’d not read the complete works of Shakespeare.

00:01:15 And I do wonder if I had have gone and done that sort of English Literature course, I might well have gone into more of an academic field, and that would have been quite a different me I think, I’d have ended up living away from family and friends, and probably having – probably a much better paid career, but probably more stressful. The course I did was very practically based, and we did what was called an adoption scheme, where you’d work for a company one day a week. And I worked at Harrogate Theatre for two years. I used to do press nights with them, I used to do marketing. So basically everything I do now, I did as a student at Harrogate Theatre, one day a week. It meant that I kind of – I knew how it worked, I knew what was involved. So when I came here for interview I could say yup, I’ve done campaigns, I’ve helped interview people, so they were quite sort of pleased to take me on. And this was my first job. I applied for millions of jobs because it was very difficult to get a job at that time. And I got the job, and basically I’ve never left.

00:02:08 Whenever you’re kind of having a bad day, and you’re feeling a bit like you’ve been, you know, kind of just on the computer all day and you’re going a bit mad, you can come into the auditorium, look around, and it hits you again that actually this is a beautiful place to work. You can go down and listen to the opera rehearsing, or you can have a sneaky look at while they’re changing the set – sit in one of the boxes and see what’s going on. And the whole atmosphere and energy fills you. And it’s that actual live theatre that make you remember why you work here.

00:02:38 I’d say that the moments that I’ve had here which have really meant something to me, which have made me cry, which have made me laugh, which have made me feel really enthused, are things when we’ve really involved the community. We had an open day where we basically invited anybody and everybody to come and basically look at every inch of the building. There were ladies who were like 97 years old, telling us how they met their first husband, like sat on the back row of the stalls, and they were crying at remembering, you know, the productions they’d seen. I think anyone who’s ever had a connection with the theatre came on that open day, and talked to us about what they’d done and their memories. And that makes you realise it’s a real piece of living history, and that makes you really proud of the theatre, and also you really want it to continue and you want it to be successful. You want to have a full auditorium of people laughing and crying and enjoying the production. And that’s what makes it feel really worthwhile.

00:03:34 ENDS